YOUR Taxpayer dollars. Can society sue people who file such frivolous lawsuits to force them to pay for the court's time and legal costs of defending against such silliness? Because I already have to pay for enough silly shit without adding stuff like this to the list.
Sure, but you can happily accept all cookies and drop them when your browser exits. It's quite easy to configure your browser to do this, and those web sites won't be able to tell the difference. If you're getting a third-party cookie from an advertiser who doesn't require a login, you'll look like a completely different person as far as they're concerned. Getting rid of persistent data from flash may be a little more tricky depending on which browser you use, but that's just that much more reason not to ever browse any web sites that require the use of flash.
I'm pretty sure any design review board given a choice between you using a singleton and a global would tell you to stop being a bad programmer and come up with a better solution. You can always get away without having to use a singleton. You can almost always get away without having to use a global. You might need one if you write a signal handler, but most professional programmers will go their entire career (or lives) without ever writing a signal handler.
CS is for a certain type of person, but most of the people programming professionally today are not those types of people. Most of the people programming today went into CS for the better-than-average salaries associated with programming. Most of them are not great programmers. Most of them don't seem to even be good programmers. They're put in environments where they're given vague requirements to automate business they don't understand or want to understand. And then we find ourselves in a situation where most of the in-house software out there is absolute crap. And consumer-grade software really isn't that much better.
So really, at the end of the day, introducing more people to it can't really have that much of a negative effect. If just a few of those kids decide to make a career out of it after having been exposed to it in school, it'll have been worthwhile.
In a worst-case scenario it could take a day or two to get imagery back from a satellite. More, if there are clouds. The clever Evil Genius will plan his Fortress of Eviltude to be somewhere where it's always cloudy. Or maybe at one of the poles. Or anywhere on the international date line. I'm told that's an excellent location for a Fortress of Eviltude, as long has half of the fortress is on one side and half the fortress is on the other side. The international date line effectively renders you immune satellite surveillance. Pretty much lets you build your death ray in peace.
Their flashlight app was requesting network and GPS privs? There's obviously a fundamental problem with the Android security model, and I'm just going to go ahead and point my finger at people. First off, people assume that just because it's on the Play store, it's safe to install. Obviously not the case. Second, people obviously don't review the privs their apps request and say something like "Why the fuck does a flashlight app need access to my GPS and network?" And third, lazy developers have no incentive not to request every priv in the model.
I'd heard Cyanogenmod was experimenting with a means to deny specific privs to an application rather than take the all-or-nothing approach of "You have to give me all this shit or you can't install it." That's a feature I'd really like to have for my Android phone.
More Fun To Tip Than Cows
on
R2-D2: Mall Cop
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· Score: 3, Funny
Just put your Guy Fawks mask on and aim for the head!
Ok, so technically learning to program doesn't have the same set of requirements as production programming. Back in the day you were likely to get BASIC and then moved on to Pascal, C, Fortran or (god help you) COBOL. Once you realize that all languages have essentially the same structures, you start to say things like "languages are just syntax. Learn to program in one language and you can pick up any other language very easily." This is not actually completely true, but I'll get to that in a moment. They also didn't tell you much about the environment beyond giving you the "vi cheat sheet" and instructions on how to invoke the compiler. Near as I can tell they don't do a much better job of it today.
Rolling objects into the mix really doesn't change that much. You still need to know structural programming because you're going to need to write your methods and you don't want to write them as spaghetti. You have a whole other set of concepts to master for OOP. You can show people objects, but until they're ready for them, they're not going to understand them. I don't know how many people remember learning to program, but when you're looking at it for the first time, even basic language structure like function parameters (and functions) and variable initialization are confusing.
So yeah, Ruby and Javascript might make OK learning languages, inconsistencies and all. Of all the ones I looked at when I was a wee programmer (And I looked at them ALL,) Logo and Pascal seemed like the most sensible. We did Pascal in my high school (in the '80's) in a programming environment on Apple II machines. They environment was mildly quirky, but didn't take long to pick up. That let us concentrate on the language. Logo offered the most immediate feedback about how your changes affected the behavior of the program. At least for me, immediate feedback was very helpful to the learning process. You can definitely get that with the interpreted languages. The same things that make them reasonable languages to learn programming also make them not-so-great for production projects, at least not without a lot of unit testing that no one ever bothers to write.
Of course, the more you work with different computer languages, the more you start to realize that the statement that "all languages are the same" is not really true. You discover things like the ones mentioned in the presentation I linked to at the beginning of this post, and find yourself having to work around deficiencies in the language. At a basic level all languages are the same and once you learn the control structures you can write simple code in any language very quickly. To actually learn the quirks of a specific language and truly master it, that could take years. I'd go so far as to say that most programmers will go their entire career never having truly mastered a single language. What they give you in school are the tools to achieve that mastery, and I don't feel that anyone even does a good job of doing that.
They've been doing this for years, even before it was tight. At the same time they complain that they can't find qualified people and need more H1B visas. They burn their core devs out with regular 60-80 hour weeks while laying off people who've been around for years and know the company's systems inside and out. Then they bring in unqualified contractors who they expect people to train while continuing to do their own jobs at 100% productivity. The contractors then leave just about the time they're starting to understand how everything works.
But we don't want to unionize because we think we're good at negotiating.
They had an installer on the play store? Well I'd say that would have made things easier last time I installed, but it wasn't really all that difficult last time I installed it. On a Galaxy S3 it was just a matter of grabbing the CM image for the phone, grabbing a recovery image I could flash with odin, flashing the recovery image to the phone, booting to it and installing the CM image from the external SD card. The only tricky part was if the phone was allowed to reboot to the stock image, it'd rewrite the stock recovery without so much as an irritable warning message.
That's just the kind of dick move I'd make, if I had porn browsing habits of the entire USA (Including Congressmen, billionaires and foreign executives.) I'm sure it'd keep the reps in line if it were implied that voting to defund the agency might result in accidental leaking of that diaper/spanking fetish they're so fond of indulging from their smart phone while the house is in session (You know who you are!)
It's not like you even have to be the NSA to gather this information. Just getting a glance over someone's shoulder on C-Span at the right time should be sufficient. We might even find out, if anyone ever watched C-Span.
Really? Because I see a bunch of young-to-middle age guys throwing framework after framework at a problem hoping it will solve it, without ever taking a moment to actually understand the problem they're trying to solve. They end up with a unmaintainable, cumbersome slow mess that requires java VMs in the tens of gigabytes where a little custom code and optimized SQL would run orders of magnitude faster on much smaller hardware. The custom code also wouldn't require server restarts every couple of days due to memory leaks.
I've run across a few useless people over the years who've managed to bring down ridiculous rates despite complete technical incompetence. Near as I can tell they mostly did it by lying on their resumes, bullshitting their way through interviews and leaving the company for a new contract after a few months, before anyone catches on that they really don't know anything about programming. If the company is lucky, these people simply don't contribute anything while they're there. If they DO actually do anything, cleaning up the mess they leave is a monumental task. I once hired on after a programmer who left abruptly about a week before a project was due to be delivered. It was a C project for an inventory extension for a very large client. This programmer had strung the company along for the better part of a year. When I got in there, first thing I noticed was they didn't realize that C strings were null terminated. That's the level of programmer I was picking up after. Despite this, the company was unwilling to scrap the last year's worth of work and wanted me to salvage it. Trying to do that actually took more time than it would have to just throw everything away and design and implement the project from scratch.
Most of those useless people got weeded out when the tech stock bubble collapsed, but I've noticed a new generation of them making their way back, now. Companies are lowering their standards and letting HR do the screening, interviewing and the hiring. HR departments seem to be mostly unable to distinguish between good programmers and bad ones and tend to take the view that one programmer is as good as another and they can be replaced with no impact to the company. My personal observations are that (in general) it takes a year for a new person to become familiar enough with a company's code base and processes to be able to be able to contribute at 100% productivity. One guy who knows your business at 120K is easily worth 3 or 4 contractors at 60K who need to be trained. On average one or two of those contractors will be completely useless and contribute at best nothing of value to your company, 3 or 4 of them will be gone in 6 months just as they're starting to get familiar with how your business works and all of them are going to impact the productivity of your other employees with their training needs.
I run an android call blocker with a whitelist to screen out telemarketers (who are apparently quite happy to ignore the do-not-call registry,) job recruiters and the occasional ransom demand from those guys in Mexico. Since you're on a landline, it's a bit harder. You could plug your phone into a SIP gateway and set up asterisk on some machine that you have on all the time. Then you could set the system up to only ring your SIP phone for numbers on the whitelist.
Normally I dump everyone else to voicemail, but they could still tie up your landline and fill up your voicemail box. If they're robodialing you, you could drop anyone not on a whitelist into a voice menu system that requires a couple of button presses that requires a couple of button presses to get to voice mail, and disconnect them after 10 or 15 seconds if they don't press a button.
It's funny, I just ordered something off Thinkgeek for the first time in years. I wasn't even sure I still had a user ID there, so I entered the password hint request with my E-Mail. The hint, which apparently I'd chosen for myself was "What is your password?" This actually reminded me what my password was at that time. I have no idea how that worked.
Tera's gameplay wasn't too bad but the writing was atrocious and the voice acting was almost as bad. I think I went in a dungeon once in that game. It was an interesting time in the dungeon and the healer kept going on about how he loved healing in the game, but it took us about half an hour to get the party to the door of the dungeon. It made me appreciate how much WoW's friend-and-party system had been refined to get random groups of people into a dungeon with a minimum of fuss. Sure WoW's system still had problems, but if you want people who have a limited time to play to actually see your content, you'd best have mechanisms like that in place.
Other than that, Tera didn't click with me either. Game mechanics that actually required skill to use were very interesting, but the crafting system was pretty boring and I never met anyone I really wanted to quest with. I had pretty much the same problem with SWTOR, except that even the gameplay wasn't that interesting in that game.
True. If you're pissed off that your game is getting dumbed down, Eve might be what you're looking for. One thing you can say for CCP, they've never shown an interest in dumbing the game down. Or adjusting the learning curve. They also actively encourage scamming and will more-or-less laugh at you if you shot someone who was flagged and he proceeded to eviscerate you.
If you stay in the noob corp and hang out in hisec space, you'll basically never get ganked by another player. Unless you do something stupid like mine into a jetcan and then shoot the guy who steals your ore. Noobcorp players can't kill each other in hisec space (Other corps can.) Other corps can't declare war on noobcorp either.
Occasionally one of the noobcorp guys in my noobcorp would get all the people in their game-issued first noobships and make a big incursion into low-sec space. 50 newbies in noobships are not to be taken lightly in that game. They took out a billion isk battleship one night. The guy's corp mate invited the leader to their vent server, where the guy they'd just blown up was actually crying over the ship he'd just lost. That's what you get for thinking you can take on a fleet of newbies solo...
Slashdot Mirror
Now he just needs to whore himself out to Red Bull and he'll be set for life! It's the American dream!
YOUR Taxpayer dollars. Can society sue people who file such frivolous lawsuits to force them to pay for the court's time and legal costs of defending against such silliness? Because I already have to pay for enough silly shit without adding stuff like this to the list.
Pretty sure I came up with the idea in the '80s one time when I was high. I'd have written it down, but I was high.
Sure, but you can happily accept all cookies and drop them when your browser exits. It's quite easy to configure your browser to do this, and those web sites won't be able to tell the difference. If you're getting a third-party cookie from an advertiser who doesn't require a login, you'll look like a completely different person as far as they're concerned. Getting rid of persistent data from flash may be a little more tricky depending on which browser you use, but that's just that much more reason not to ever browse any web sites that require the use of flash.
CS is for a certain type of person, but most of the people programming professionally today are not those types of people. Most of the people programming today went into CS for the better-than-average salaries associated with programming. Most of them are not great programmers. Most of them don't seem to even be good programmers. They're put in environments where they're given vague requirements to automate business they don't understand or want to understand. And then we find ourselves in a situation where most of the in-house software out there is absolute crap. And consumer-grade software really isn't that much better.
So really, at the end of the day, introducing more people to it can't really have that much of a negative effect. If just a few of those kids decide to make a career out of it after having been exposed to it in school, it'll have been worthwhile.
If I'd invented COBOL during the course of my career, I'd have blamed it on a subcontractor.
In a worst-case scenario it could take a day or two to get imagery back from a satellite. More, if there are clouds. The clever Evil Genius will plan his Fortress of Eviltude to be somewhere where it's always cloudy. Or maybe at one of the poles. Or anywhere on the international date line. I'm told that's an excellent location for a Fortress of Eviltude, as long has half of the fortress is on one side and half the fortress is on the other side. The international date line effectively renders you immune satellite surveillance. Pretty much lets you build your death ray in peace.
Encrypted communications channels? Redundant navigation systems? Ability to return home amid heavy signal jamming?
I can finally open that Kentucky Fried Eagle franchise I've been dreaming of!
I'd heard Cyanogenmod was experimenting with a means to deny specific privs to an application rather than take the all-or-nothing approach of "You have to give me all this shit or you can't install it." That's a feature I'd really like to have for my Android phone.
Just put your Guy Fawks mask on and aim for the head!
Ok, so technically learning to program doesn't have the same set of requirements as production programming. Back in the day you were likely to get BASIC and then moved on to Pascal, C, Fortran or (god help you) COBOL. Once you realize that all languages have essentially the same structures, you start to say things like "languages are just syntax. Learn to program in one language and you can pick up any other language very easily." This is not actually completely true, but I'll get to that in a moment. They also didn't tell you much about the environment beyond giving you the "vi cheat sheet" and instructions on how to invoke the compiler. Near as I can tell they don't do a much better job of it today.
Rolling objects into the mix really doesn't change that much. You still need to know structural programming because you're going to need to write your methods and you don't want to write them as spaghetti. You have a whole other set of concepts to master for OOP. You can show people objects, but until they're ready for them, they're not going to understand them. I don't know how many people remember learning to program, but when you're looking at it for the first time, even basic language structure like function parameters (and functions) and variable initialization are confusing.
So yeah, Ruby and Javascript might make OK learning languages, inconsistencies and all. Of all the ones I looked at when I was a wee programmer (And I looked at them ALL,) Logo and Pascal seemed like the most sensible. We did Pascal in my high school (in the '80's) in a programming environment on Apple II machines. They environment was mildly quirky, but didn't take long to pick up. That let us concentrate on the language. Logo offered the most immediate feedback about how your changes affected the behavior of the program. At least for me, immediate feedback was very helpful to the learning process. You can definitely get that with the interpreted languages. The same things that make them reasonable languages to learn programming also make them not-so-great for production projects, at least not without a lot of unit testing that no one ever bothers to write.
Of course, the more you work with different computer languages, the more you start to realize that the statement that "all languages are the same" is not really true. You discover things like the ones mentioned in the presentation I linked to at the beginning of this post, and find yourself having to work around deficiencies in the language. At a basic level all languages are the same and once you learn the control structures you can write simple code in any language very quickly. To actually learn the quirks of a specific language and truly master it, that could take years. I'd go so far as to say that most programmers will go their entire career never having truly mastered a single language. What they give you in school are the tools to achieve that mastery, and I don't feel that anyone even does a good job of doing that.
But we don't want to unionize because we think we're good at negotiating.
They had an installer on the play store? Well I'd say that would have made things easier last time I installed, but it wasn't really all that difficult last time I installed it. On a Galaxy S3 it was just a matter of grabbing the CM image for the phone, grabbing a recovery image I could flash with odin, flashing the recovery image to the phone, booting to it and installing the CM image from the external SD card. The only tricky part was if the phone was allowed to reboot to the stock image, it'd rewrite the stock recovery without so much as an irritable warning message.
It's not like you even have to be the NSA to gather this information. Just getting a glance over someone's shoulder on C-Span at the right time should be sufficient. We might even find out, if anyone ever watched C-Span.
Plus some random exec can't revoke your ability to read your printed book at a moment's notice.
Really? Because I see a bunch of young-to-middle age guys throwing framework after framework at a problem hoping it will solve it, without ever taking a moment to actually understand the problem they're trying to solve. They end up with a unmaintainable, cumbersome slow mess that requires java VMs in the tens of gigabytes where a little custom code and optimized SQL would run orders of magnitude faster on much smaller hardware. The custom code also wouldn't require server restarts every couple of days due to memory leaks.
Can't they just have another beer?
It knows we're talking about it!
Most of those useless people got weeded out when the tech stock bubble collapsed, but I've noticed a new generation of them making their way back, now. Companies are lowering their standards and letting HR do the screening, interviewing and the hiring. HR departments seem to be mostly unable to distinguish between good programmers and bad ones and tend to take the view that one programmer is as good as another and they can be replaced with no impact to the company. My personal observations are that (in general) it takes a year for a new person to become familiar enough with a company's code base and processes to be able to be able to contribute at 100% productivity. One guy who knows your business at 120K is easily worth 3 or 4 contractors at 60K who need to be trained. On average one or two of those contractors will be completely useless and contribute at best nothing of value to your company, 3 or 4 of them will be gone in 6 months just as they're starting to get familiar with how your business works and all of them are going to impact the productivity of your other employees with their training needs.
Normally I dump everyone else to voicemail, but they could still tie up your landline and fill up your voicemail box. If they're robodialing you, you could drop anyone not on a whitelist into a voice menu system that requires a couple of button presses that requires a couple of button presses to get to voice mail, and disconnect them after 10 or 15 seconds if they don't press a button.
It's funny, I just ordered something off Thinkgeek for the first time in years. I wasn't even sure I still had a user ID there, so I entered the password hint request with my E-Mail. The hint, which apparently I'd chosen for myself was "What is your password?" This actually reminded me what my password was at that time. I have no idea how that worked.
Other than that, Tera didn't click with me either. Game mechanics that actually required skill to use were very interesting, but the crafting system was pretty boring and I never met anyone I really wanted to quest with. I had pretty much the same problem with SWTOR, except that even the gameplay wasn't that interesting in that game.
True. If you're pissed off that your game is getting dumbed down, Eve might be what you're looking for. One thing you can say for CCP, they've never shown an interest in dumbing the game down. Or adjusting the learning curve. They also actively encourage scamming and will more-or-less laugh at you if you shot someone who was flagged and he proceeded to eviscerate you.
Occasionally one of the noobcorp guys in my noobcorp would get all the people in their game-issued first noobships and make a big incursion into low-sec space. 50 newbies in noobships are not to be taken lightly in that game. They took out a billion isk battleship one night. The guy's corp mate invited the leader to their vent server, where the guy they'd just blown up was actually crying over the ship he'd just lost. That's what you get for thinking you can take on a fleet of newbies solo...