I'm pretty sure the government doesn't care about your purchase history of... an inflatable love goat and a 55 gallon drum of lube. Nice. Your file still says "Mostly Harmless."
Odd. I thought I'd react with more excitement to decent photos from another world. For some reason there's really not a lot of sense of wonder there. Maybe if that other world were a somewhat more interesting tourist destination...
There is a tendency in corporate culture to drink the kool aid the top is serving. Take SGI. Perfect example. They had no clear strategy a bit over a decade ago and I outright confronted one of their sales reps about it and asked him why I should buy their products when I knew IBM would be around 10 years from now. He gave me some bullshit response that SGI had solid products and platforms and they were out of business less than a year later. If someone in the company had just said "We don't have a clear strategy and are going to get crushed by Sun and IBM if we don't develop one," a couple years earlier, they might have been able to pull it out. They did have some things they actually did better than other companies, they just chose to throw all that away and try to pursue the same course IBM and Sun were. Even Sun couldn't pull THAT shit off.
So maybe Microsoft DOES actually believe, in their isolated corporate culture, that their platform is strong enough to get away with the shit they're trying to pull. Gamers have no loyalty and everyone has already decided to jettison them. Some people are changing consoles, some people are going to PC gaming. Microsoft could save itself a lot of money and just scrap the entire Xbox line right now. If Sony offered an easy path for indie developers, the Xbox developer landscape would be a barren wasteland within a year.
All you have to do to avoid system("rm...") is "man 2 unlink". There's a C API call for every function the OS can perform., It's just a matter of knowing about it or bothering to spend a second googling it. Though google wasn't really an option when some of these things were written. "apropos rm" would probably turn up "man 2 unlink" too, if you knew about apropos.
1) Just because your predecessor was paid to program doesn't mean he craps daisies and unicorns. I have often gone in with the assumption that the guy before me knew what he was doing. Quite often I find I was wrong.
2) Just because the code is awful doesn't mean it has no value -- No matter how bad it is and how difficult it is to read, if it works at all it has probably got years (maybe even decades) of bug fixes and feature requests. Until you have a handle on it, any little change could cause a catastrophic cascade of side-effects.
3) No, we don't need to rewrite it. See 2. A working program now is worth more than all the pie in the sky you can promise a year from now.
4) It takes 6 months to have a reasonably good grasp of any moderately complex in-house application. It could be a year before you get to the point where someone can describe a problem and you immediately have a good idea of where in the code the problem is occurring and what functions to check.
Maintenance programming is as much about detective work as anything else. The only clues you have about the previous programmer are his source files. Once you've read them for a while you can start to tell what he was thinking, when he was confused, when he was in a hurry. Most of the atrocious in-house applications have changed hands several times and each programmer adds their own layer of crap. You can redesign these applications a chunk at a time until nothing remains of the original code if it's really bad, but it's best to save really ambitious projects until you understand the code better. I heartily encourage the wholesale replacement of "system()" calls with better code immediately, though. In several languages I've run across these calls to remove files, when they could have simply called a language library call (Typically "unlink".) If the original programmer used system("rm...") you can pretty much assume that they were a bad programmer and you're in for a lot of "fun" maintaining their code.
I think if I had a bunch of dead humans to process into food, I could make something more appetizing than Soilent Green. Like Greyfox's "pork" jerky. In teriyaki and pepper flavor! And unlike pork, which has had pretty much ALL the delicious fat bred out of it, the local supply of humans should be wonderfully marbled! At least for the next couple of decades anyway. I got the best "pork" jerky anywhere, bitches!
Sure I could outsource production to China, but whenever I eat Chinese, I'm hungry again an hour later! (Dunno who I stole that from, but kudos!)
Socrates had the same dim view of "kids these days" a few thousand years ago.
I don't think you're seeing a gaming problem there. I've seen the same escaping-reality behavior with books and television. If your life isn't particularly rewarding or interesting, you'll seek it out somewhere else. You say he's seeking out a non-valuable sense of achievement, but has anyone ever provided him a particularly valuable one? The endemic problem you think you've identified might have more of a basis with our society as a whole than any particular symptom you've identified. Most people have pretty boring lives. Rather than complain about it, why not actually try to make your nephew's life more interesting?
When choosing your OS, you choose the best tool for the job. So who's worse, the guy who refuses to consider any other operating system, or the guy who installs the one that lets him use his computer for what he wants to do? If you want to play games and identify Linux and OSX as weak at gaming, it'd be kind of silly to install them. I like to run Linux in a work environment, but most places have windows-specific requirements for E-Mail and other applications. You can spend a lot of time trying to work around some of the limitations with wine, or you can just use Windows and install cygwin. Identifying the right tool for your particular job isn't a weakness. And demanding that everyone else use the tool you find to be best for your particular job isn't a strength.
I'm pretty good at spotting wildlife at a park near here and can usually do it before people I'm with do. It'd be interesting to see if it made a difference in more common tasks, though. Like driving in traffic.
It's just because they got caught. We were all screaming about Carnivore back in the 90's and no one listened. The histronics associated with the realization that various TLAs are listening to all communications are disingenuous at best or the result of really, really bad journalists at worst. This story is not a story. It was a story two decades ago.
How are you supposed to bludgeon suspects mercilessly?
Ah, they have to download them onto a computer! Sadly the victim's resisting arrest appears to have badly damaged the camera. We were unable to recover any video from it. NOW I don't see any down sides!
The old "If you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to fear" argument. Except in the same week, it was demonstrated that if you said things the current administration didn't like, the power of an arm of the government would be brought to bear on you. We have a constitution that ostensibly limits the power of government to prevent just such abuses. In an ideal world we have a rule of law, are protected from government retaliation against the opinions we have and no person (including the executive branch) is above the law. In the world actually have, the safeguards against these things have been subverted and the most egregious offenses against law abiding citizens go unpunished.
So, I suppose, the question is, "What are we going to do about it?"
But really, since it's the UN and Captain Obvious, I really can't resist. Ok, for those of you who grew up with the Justice League, you should read the following in the voice of the announcer who always said stuff like "Meanwhile, back at the Justice League..."
Meanwhile, back at the UN, Captain Obvious finally makes an appearance! He has a lot of work to catch up on! First, he needs to stop by the security council and tell them Mahmoud Ahmadinead and Kim Jong Il seem to be big jerks! He might also say something about Syria, but I'm not certain what! He might also swing by the Japanese and tell them that killing whales for food is bad! Thank you, Captain Obvious! After that, he'll make a speech and mention that monitoring the internet seems to chill free speech! His work done, he returns to the Justice League, where everyone thanks him!
Eeh. I feel like I could have done better, but I want to get to sleep sometime tonight.
Blah blah digital dark age blah blah gay sex. Anything worth preserving is still written in books. Do we really need to preserve every byte of information on the internet for posterity? Most of us dildos just aren't that interesting. I'm pretty sure the future will survive just fine if every cat video on youtube doesn't last to be reviewed by future generations. If every movie for the past couple-three decades went up in smoke, anything of value lost? Really? Granted, I like to imagine some future-NPR blathering on about how that all-digital rendition of Snoop Dog's "All my Bitches" in D minor was one of the greatest works of the era, but it probably wouldn't really be all that funny. The world doesn't need to remember you or me or that guy over there. Hell we can't even learn from our history from few decades ago, much less from some guy who got nailed to a cross a couple thousand years ago (Probably not the one you were thinking of.)
Sure I am sometimes saddened at the thought of the video games of my youth being lost forever, but even if they weren't it wouldn't recapture the joy I felt upon encountering them at the time. Do you think you are more important than that? Think of the current year and then start going back a decade at a time and name one person you know of from that time. How long before you run out of people you know personally? Before you run out of people you have even heard of? I bet most people can't even make it a century. Millions of men fought in the world wars, many of their stories are still recorded. How many people bother to look at even one? My grandfather recounted a story of seeing the first automobiles in his town, how many people even think of a time when they didn't exist, or the time when they were new to the world? Precious few I reckon.
If you want to worry about what history will think of THIS time, perhaps you should be a more careful custodian of previous ones.
They'd be completely lost without the modal dialog box, an invention they must hold the patent to because I've never seen it on any other operating system. Tell their programmers they can't use a modal dialog and the Star Trek fight music would cue up immediately. A couple hours later, the entire city of Redmond would be in flames. Software engineers would attempt to construct post-apocalyptic vehicles to roam the barren cityscape but being software engineers they'd all be destroyed in their first encounter with a Nissan Stanza. The few survivors would have to go on to work at Accenture, giving lectures on why you should pay them six digits to come into your organization and convert all your dev teams to Agile.
Coincidentally this was also to be the plot of Titan. Whoops. Sorry. Gave it away.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure the government doesn't care about your purchase history of... an inflatable love goat and a 55 gallon drum of lube. Nice. Your file still says "Mostly Harmless."
Would you like a tasty serving of irony with your patented GM beans?
You mean, this?
Odd. I thought I'd react with more excitement to decent photos from another world. For some reason there's really not a lot of sense of wonder there. Maybe if that other world were a somewhat more interesting tourist destination...
So maybe Microsoft DOES actually believe, in their isolated corporate culture, that their platform is strong enough to get away with the shit they're trying to pull. Gamers have no loyalty and everyone has already decided to jettison them. Some people are changing consoles, some people are going to PC gaming. Microsoft could save itself a lot of money and just scrap the entire Xbox line right now. If Sony offered an easy path for indie developers, the Xbox developer landscape would be a barren wasteland within a year.
I think it was a plot to separate you from $8.
All you have to do to avoid system("rm...") is "man 2 unlink". There's a C API call for every function the OS can perform., It's just a matter of knowing about it or bothering to spend a second googling it. Though google wasn't really an option when some of these things were written. "apropos rm" would probably turn up "man 2 unlink" too, if you knew about apropos.
Enjoy.
Isn't this the start of the plot for "Alien Vs. Predator"?
2) Just because the code is awful doesn't mean it has no value -- No matter how bad it is and how difficult it is to read, if it works at all it has probably got years (maybe even decades) of bug fixes and feature requests. Until you have a handle on it, any little change could cause a catastrophic cascade of side-effects.
3) No, we don't need to rewrite it. See 2. A working program now is worth more than all the pie in the sky you can promise a year from now.
4) It takes 6 months to have a reasonably good grasp of any moderately complex in-house application. It could be a year before you get to the point where someone can describe a problem and you immediately have a good idea of where in the code the problem is occurring and what functions to check.
Maintenance programming is as much about detective work as anything else. The only clues you have about the previous programmer are his source files. Once you've read them for a while you can start to tell what he was thinking, when he was confused, when he was in a hurry. Most of the atrocious in-house applications have changed hands several times and each programmer adds their own layer of crap. You can redesign these applications a chunk at a time until nothing remains of the original code if it's really bad, but it's best to save really ambitious projects until you understand the code better. I heartily encourage the wholesale replacement of "system()" calls with better code immediately, though. In several languages I've run across these calls to remove files, when they could have simply called a language library call (Typically "unlink".) If the original programmer used system("rm...") you can pretty much assume that they were a bad programmer and you're in for a lot of "fun" maintaining their code.
They never promise that, but they all do.
Sure I could outsource production to China, but whenever I eat Chinese, I'm hungry again an hour later! (Dunno who I stole that from, but kudos!)
Interviewer: Pretty much like any other candidate I've interviewed!
It wouldn't be hard... You'd just have to program it to say "What?" and "Where is the the tea?"
I don't think you're seeing a gaming problem there. I've seen the same escaping-reality behavior with books and television. If your life isn't particularly rewarding or interesting, you'll seek it out somewhere else. You say he's seeking out a non-valuable sense of achievement, but has anyone ever provided him a particularly valuable one? The endemic problem you think you've identified might have more of a basis with our society as a whole than any particular symptom you've identified. Most people have pretty boring lives. Rather than complain about it, why not actually try to make your nephew's life more interesting?
When choosing your OS, you choose the best tool for the job. So who's worse, the guy who refuses to consider any other operating system, or the guy who installs the one that lets him use his computer for what he wants to do? If you want to play games and identify Linux and OSX as weak at gaming, it'd be kind of silly to install them. I like to run Linux in a work environment, but most places have windows-specific requirements for E-Mail and other applications. You can spend a lot of time trying to work around some of the limitations with wine, or you can just use Windows and install cygwin. Identifying the right tool for your particular job isn't a weakness. And demanding that everyone else use the tool you find to be best for your particular job isn't a strength.
I'm pretty good at spotting wildlife at a park near here and can usually do it before people I'm with do. It'd be interesting to see if it made a difference in more common tasks, though. Like driving in traffic.
It's just because they got caught. We were all screaming about Carnivore back in the 90's and no one listened. The histronics associated with the realization that various TLAs are listening to all communications are disingenuous at best or the result of really, really bad journalists at worst. This story is not a story. It was a story two decades ago.
Ah, they have to download them onto a computer! Sadly the victim's resisting arrest appears to have badly damaged the camera. We were unable to recover any video from it. NOW I don't see any down sides!
So, I suppose, the question is, "What are we going to do about it?"
And if you're a PERSON who knows something about SPACECRAFT, you, too, will be considered a munition.
Meanwhile, back at the UN, Captain Obvious finally makes an appearance! He has a lot of work to catch up on! First, he needs to stop by the security council and tell them Mahmoud Ahmadinead and Kim Jong Il seem to be big jerks! He might also say something about Syria, but I'm not certain what! He might also swing by the Japanese and tell them that killing whales for food is bad! Thank you, Captain Obvious! After that, he'll make a speech and mention that monitoring the internet seems to chill free speech! His work done, he returns to the Justice League, where everyone thanks him!
Eeh. I feel like I could have done better, but I want to get to sleep sometime tonight.
Because you are doing it wrong.
Sure I am sometimes saddened at the thought of the video games of my youth being lost forever, but even if they weren't it wouldn't recapture the joy I felt upon encountering them at the time. Do you think you are more important than that? Think of the current year and then start going back a decade at a time and name one person you know of from that time. How long before you run out of people you know personally? Before you run out of people you have even heard of? I bet most people can't even make it a century. Millions of men fought in the world wars, many of their stories are still recorded. How many people bother to look at even one? My grandfather recounted a story of seeing the first automobiles in his town, how many people even think of a time when they didn't exist, or the time when they were new to the world? Precious few I reckon.
If you want to worry about what history will think of THIS time, perhaps you should be a more careful custodian of previous ones.
Coincidentally this was also to be the plot of Titan. Whoops. Sorry. Gave it away.
Dictators don't like it when people can communicate.