Blocking ads drives down short-term profits a bit. This drives up long-term interest in developing new economic models. We had a number of alternatives, but they got drowned out by corporations pouring advertising dollars into this new intertubes thingy. Old people trying too hard to prove they were cool. Brick and mortar not knowing how to curate digital product lines. Hopefully only a problem for one or two generations.
I take the long view. Beat back the scourge of advertising -- win. Take Facebook and Google down a notch -- win. Apologies to the small players who get hurt a bit in the process, but these ends justify much harsher means.
If this really bothers you, please help find ways to cultivate non-commercial, unbiased places on the Internet. If you disagree, please get off my lawn. And why are you even on/.?;)
UNWIND-PROTECT is very useful, but it is lexically scoped. Objects that need any protection require two entries, one at the allocation/initialization and one in the protection clause. This can be a source of errors (missing protection for a resource allocation) and a major pain with some macro environments. Objects with dynamic extent require careful tracking, just like manual memory management. Languages with automatic garbage collection have found it is extremely hard / costly to guarantee cleanup semantics, exacerbating the situation.
With RAII, C++'s support for dynamic resource extent really is much better. Stack-allocated objects run their destructors on scope exit, much like an implicit, low-cost unwind-protect. The destructor is a convenient place to update unwind semantics at all call sites... Smart pointers (shared, weak, unique, etc.) make it easy to add dynamic tracking discipline to many common data structures.
Rust is one of the few languages that may have an even better story for resource ownership.
"Innovation and Entrepreneurship" by Peter Drucker really makes you think about what your product aspirations should be.
I'm also fond of "Almost Perfect" http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ and "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister and "The 10 Day MBA" by Silbiger
IMO, a successful entrepreneur needs some basic business sense in addition to whatever product the idea might be. Reading some boring books and trying a few low-risk ventures can prep you for the big swing.
It used to be that companies would train workers in times of shortage...
To me, it seems highly possible that this persistent "skills shortage" is the flip side of a persistent "compensation shortage, including training". Much of the narrative I hear on the news is trying to justify exploitative behavior or offload training costs to the government.
Companies are cut-throat for cheap labor, and the software industry is in a race to the bottom. Some people blame FOSS devs for setting the price at 0. I think it is a larger problem.
On the other hand, it is also possible that workers no longer reward investment. If a worker will leave for a better job shortly after receiving training, than a company may see negative ROI for training. Keeping that worker would require better treatment than the competition offers. Training and compensation makes the labor more expensive, presenting a possible competitive disadvantage. In this scenario, businesses crying for government help does make sense.
That said, watching corporate raiders destroy morale in my father's generation makes me believe the unfaithful employee is simply behaving rationally after a hard-won lesson about poor compensation enabled by globalization.
Most organizations have difficult people. Some pairs of people just get on each other's nerves. Often it comes down to circumstances -- did you meet at the beginning of a stressful period? Others who remember the "good old days" may have fond memories that help them through the present. etc.
In order to build a healthy career, you have to learn how to manage these situations productively. People who master the skill get promoted.
Some advice: Don't take it personally. Don't let the problem fester. Don't be overly aggressive. Do your homework. Proceed with caution. Scout out how your peers feel about this individual. Do others have strategies for working with him? Calmly approach the other individual, talk about the issues, and make sure they understand what you perceive as inappropriate actions. Sometimes people lose track and appreciate the wake-up call (especially introverted engineers). If it is intentional, try to find out why -- maybe you can call a truce or forge an alliance. Walking away over one person sounds extreme. Can you find a new project or role that reduces your interaction with this one individual? If you have issues with numerous people than walking might be more appropriate.
I would also recommend the book "Win-Win Negotiating" by Jandt and Gillette.
Is U.S. good can you clearly and logically argue that? You are using collective absolutes (i.e. "good" and "evil") to deny individual differences (i.e. "better" or "worse"). For example, "the US is better than Iran because its citizens have more freedom" is an arguable fact, while "the US is good and Iran is evil" is debatable. When one nation/corporation/individual excels in a number of positive attributes, then they are commonly called "good". Likewise for "evil".
And then which nation is evil Any which deprives humanity of natural rights and freedoms or causes wanton destruction of natural resources. Unfortunately, none are completely "good" or "evil" just as its impossible to experience maximum light or darkness (either condition would result in the physical destruction of the observer due to temperature extremes).
All we can judge on are the individual decisions we see, the same things we use to judge individuals (e.g. civility, bullying, charity,...). A corporation does not exist without its employees. Every hostile action must be planned and carried out by employees. These PEOPLE have a responsibility to consider society when making business decisions. Forgetting this in the blind pursuit of profit results in a condition commonly known as greed. Fourth, seventh outer, eigth, or ninth circle of hell for such people.;)
My $0.02: Google started out as a "good" corporation -- one which existed to fill the needs of others. It is becoming "evil" as it makes backroom deals (e.g. censorship) and moves focus from satisfying needs to generating profit. Call me naive, but I believe that corporations, like individuals, should earn their wealth honorably.
Alright here is how it works. The companies are not human beings they are not "nice" "evil" "good" or "bad". As much as we'd want them to be (and they do go to great lengths to make us think that they have such qualities), because it is just how we humans are, we want those who we do business with to be trustworthy so that is why we anthropomorphize entities that are not human. All a company is, is a money making machine, if it doesn't make money it stop existing. B.S. A corporation is good in the same sense that a nation is good. If the majority of the people comprising it make sound, moral decisions, then it is good. If they make short-sighted, greedy decisions, then it is bad. Unfortunately, good != successful. The rest of your post confuses perception with reality.
One major problem is that the good people within a corporation can be replaced/overwhelmed by bad, and it may be hard for an outsider to tell the difference. Eventually, though, the corruption becomes obvious.
For the 5 minutes it takes to start a torrent, I would be willing to start watching most any of today's movies. For the $10 per person they want me to pay (either at the "theater" or to buy a DVD), I say "take a hike" to over 90% of what they push.
Yes, there is untapped demand. Econ 101 teaches you to choose the price that maximizes profit. Choosing the price that satisfies demand earns you nothing... Hint, solve x=1-1.
In short, someone who downloads probably thinks everyone else pays too much. No amount of legal wrangling (short of coerced consumption) will get them to pay "full rate".
Re:Performance, anyone?
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
I mean, take Lisp and its performance. Compare it to Ruby's. Matz said himself that Ruby started as a kind of Lisp reconsideration. And you call this progress? I'm not sure what you meant by that, but many Common Lisp implementations compile and run equivalent in speed to C/C++.
Lisp contains a superset of the features in Ruby, can be modified to provide the Ruby syntax, and compiles to run faster than Ruby... Why would we want to rewrite a subset of Lisp in Ruby???
Eh, if only it had Unicode support. Why wait? Many Lisps do.
Have the guts to vote for stand up against the Demublicans and start voting for independents/minority parties whenever possible (i.e. they are mentally competent to stand trial). Only vote for a Demublican when it becomes obvious that a schmuck will win unless more people rally to his counterpart.
Living in a state which consistently votes for or against your favorite Demublican flavor makes voting for "the little guy" much easier.
Knowing the general quality of the average programmer, it stands to reason that this code will only be validated to function in the usual case; thus, the 3l33t coder immediately realizes that simp1e substitutions present an initial defense against the naive academic's simple-minded algorithms and the cut-and-past output of their underpaid cheating slaves (which is, to mean, graduate students or even cheaper undergrads), bringing us closer to the more important question for which this test sentence is being written; therefore, we begin the second half of this ramble by introducing the astute and perhaps somewhat peeved reader to the conundrum with which the beast is to be tamed, but not before further wasting precious time on behalf of the experiment, not that any of this would be enough to induce buffer overflow attacks in the aforementioned poorly written code which would probably never even notice the following nop sled that is to be delivered by overflowing one of the many buffers in the parse tree required to decipher the previous drivel -- 0x0000 0x0000 0x0000 0xDEAD.
Dunno. I've played with Chase, CapOne, and a couple others. The "Payment Protector" racket is being *heavily* pushed. My guess is that it (a) generates free money for them and (b) makes it harder for you to declare bankruptcy, thereby (see a). Since this "service" is generally offerred by a third party, I'm guessing they plan to fold up shop if too many people start claiming protection.
We cancelled one credit card (airline visa) after it got infected by Payment Protector after they lied to me over the phone about how it worked. I explicitely asked if I would be charged for all purchases, and they said "only for carrying a balance" -- deceitfully implying that I would not be charged for all purchases. Oh well, counting the sign-up check, it was mostly a wash monetarily - though they lost a customer with prejudice.
Here's hoping someone passes a law requiring credit applications to be signed (a) in person in front of a company representative or (b) in the presence of a notary public. Identity theft would take a sharp downturn if it wasn't so easy to wield "your information".
Even the article admits that a lot of these "issues" are trivial to fix:
By far, the majority of the defects reported were null pointer dereferences (446 defects). A large number of defects resulted from the code not checking for null after memory was allocated.
The code doesn't check for null after a memory allocation? Isn't the C++ standard to throw an exception instead of returning null when an allocation fails?
I haven't dug through the Firefox code, but this smells like a non-issue their checker "finds" in order to tally more "defects".
In addition, there were many cases where the return value of functions designed to return null were not checked prior to dereferencing.
Boy I'm glad I wasn't in your classes. If the students don't *want* to attend, that's their own problem.
I usually didn't attend when a) I was sick b) I already knew the material c) I was not effectively learning from the instructor. Often because it was painfully obvious that the prof didn't bother preparing his lecture or that he had no training in effective public speaking.
Instructors are there *for the students* -- not the other way around.
Graded attendance, cheesy quizzes, and other related techniques simply burn up valuable class time so the instructor can feel "in control" instead of doing their primary job -- passing on information to those who want to learn. Except in the unfortunate case where your department is penalizing you for students not attending (e.g. too many dumb students earning low grades), there should be no need for such policies.
> (come on, you really need someone bagging your groceries when you decide to shop for milk at 3am?)
No, but I would like an adequate number of checkers so I don't have to wait in the 10+ person line for 30 minutes at random times throughout the day.
P.S. Back in the day, that bagger also helped you load groceries into the car. Not anymore. Things are getting worse, not better, as retail stores "lower prices" by cutting workers (read: produce more welfare recipients) and sell lower-quality goods (e.g. Schwinn).
A space station in Earth's orbit experiences less gravity than one would on the moon; this is important for microgravity experiments (such as crystal growth). Also, it is much cheaper (significantly less fuel) to put a space station in a low earth orbit than to reach the moon's orbit. Plus you have the added benefit of avoiding a difficult landing.
As for why lauch another station? My guess is to boost PR and get more funding.
TrollTech's Qt library had a rough start in the dual-licensing arena, but they got things ironed out, and now they have vibrant commercial and GPL software groups. Go browse www.trolltech.com for ideas on how to approach things. Look for other companies doing this as well. If possible, treat your GPL users as first-class-citizens; they may convert to commercial users at their daytime job.
I have no idea what product you are selling, but the key to marketing is to figure out how your future customers get their information. Try to learn their culture and expectations. Posting relevant "[Ad] Cool Commercial/GPL Software Toolkit" articles to a few newsgroups or discussion boards is generally acceptable, while omitting the [Ad] in the subject line might offend some people. If there are GPL versions available, make sure all the major sites (e.g. freshmeat) have useful listings.
Slashdot Mirror
Condolences to those who knew the pilots. Fortunately no victims on the ground.
Its too soon to say what caused this tragedy. Weather? Package? Other?
Whatever it was, the plane appears to have suddenly gone from a mile high to ground impact in about 10 seconds.
https://www.flightradar24.com/...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/2...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
https://www.click2houston.com/...
https://www.flightglobal.com/n...
This is the page you are looking for.
http://www.tcl.tk/
Blocking ads drives down short-term profits a bit. This drives up long-term interest in developing new economic models. We had a number of alternatives, but they got drowned out by corporations pouring advertising dollars into this new intertubes thingy. Old people trying too hard to prove they were cool. Brick and mortar not knowing how to curate digital product lines. Hopefully only a problem for one or two generations.
I take the long view. Beat back the scourge of advertising -- win. Take Facebook and Google down a notch -- win. Apologies to the small players who get hurt a bit in the process, but these ends justify much harsher means.
If this really bothers you, please help find ways to cultivate non-commercial, unbiased places on the Internet. If you disagree, please get off my lawn. And why are you even on /.? ;)
UNWIND-PROTECT is very useful, but it is lexically scoped. Objects that need any protection require two entries, one at the allocation/initialization and one in the protection clause. This can be a source of errors (missing protection for a resource allocation) and a major pain with some macro environments. Objects with dynamic extent require careful tracking, just like manual memory management. Languages with automatic garbage collection have found it is extremely hard / costly to guarantee cleanup semantics, exacerbating the situation.
With RAII, C++'s support for dynamic resource extent really is much better. Stack-allocated objects run their destructors on scope exit, much like an implicit, low-cost unwind-protect. The destructor is a convenient place to update unwind semantics at all call sites... Smart pointers (shared, weak, unique, etc.) make it easy to add dynamic tracking discipline to many common data structures.
Rust is one of the few languages that may have an even better story for resource ownership.
"Innovation and Entrepreneurship" by Peter Drucker really makes you think about what your product aspirations should be.
I'm also fond of "Almost Perfect" http://www.wordplace.com/ap/
and "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister
and "The 10 Day MBA" by Silbiger
IMO, a successful entrepreneur needs some basic business sense in addition to whatever product the idea might be.
Reading some boring books and trying a few low-risk ventures can prep you for the big swing.
Interesting how well-known issues such as use-after-free, heap overflow, type confusion, and uninitialized memory are still common attack vectors.
Seems to support the arguments for efficient, type-safe languages such as Rust.
It used to be that companies would train workers in times of shortage...
To me, it seems highly possible that this persistent "skills shortage" is the flip side of a persistent "compensation shortage, including training". Much of the narrative I hear on the news is trying to justify exploitative behavior or offload training costs to the government.
Companies are cut-throat for cheap labor, and the software industry is in a race to the bottom. Some people blame FOSS devs for setting the price at 0. I think it is a larger problem.
On the other hand, it is also possible that workers no longer reward investment. If a worker will leave for a better job shortly after receiving training, than a company may see negative ROI for training. Keeping that worker would require better treatment than the competition offers. Training and compensation makes the labor more expensive, presenting a possible competitive disadvantage. In this scenario, businesses crying for government help does make sense.
That said, watching corporate raiders destroy morale in my father's generation makes me believe the unfaithful employee is simply behaving rationally after a hard-won lesson about poor compensation enabled by globalization.
Most organizations have difficult people. Some pairs of people just get on each other's nerves. Often it comes down to circumstances -- did you meet at the beginning of a stressful period? Others who remember the "good old days" may have fond memories that help them through the present. etc.
In order to build a healthy career, you have to learn how to manage these situations productively. People who master the skill get promoted.
Some advice: Don't take it personally. Don't let the problem fester. Don't be overly aggressive. Do your homework. Proceed with caution. Scout out how your peers feel about this individual. Do others have strategies for working with him? Calmly approach the other individual, talk about the issues, and make sure they understand what you perceive as inappropriate actions. Sometimes people lose track and appreciate the wake-up call (especially introverted engineers). If it is intentional, try to find out why -- maybe you can call a truce or forge an alliance. Walking away over one person sounds extreme. Can you find a new project or role that reduces your interaction with this one individual? If you have issues with numerous people than walking might be more appropriate.
I would also recommend the book "Win-Win Negotiating" by Jandt and Gillette.
All we can judge on are the individual decisions we see, the same things we use to judge individuals (e.g. civility, bullying, charity,
My $0.02: Google started out as a "good" corporation -- one which existed to fill the needs of others. It is becoming "evil" as it makes backroom deals (e.g. censorship) and moves focus from satisfying needs to generating profit. Call me naive, but I believe that corporations, like individuals, should earn their wealth honorably.
One major problem is that the good people within a corporation can be replaced/overwhelmed by bad, and it may be hard for an outsider to tell the difference. Eventually, though, the corruption becomes obvious.
For the 5 minutes it takes to start a torrent, I would be willing to start watching most any of today's movies. For the $10 per person they want me to pay (either at the "theater" or to buy a DVD), I say "take a hike" to over 90% of what they push.
Yes, there is untapped demand. Econ 101 teaches you to choose the price that maximizes profit. Choosing the price that satisfies demand earns you nothing... Hint, solve x=1-1.
In short, someone who downloads probably thinks everyone else pays too much. No amount of legal wrangling (short of coerced consumption) will get them to pay "full rate".
Eh, if only it had Unicode support. Why wait? Many Lisps do.Lisp contains a superset of the features in Ruby, can be modified to provide the Ruby syntax, and compiles to run faster than Ruby... Why would we want to rewrite a subset of Lisp in Ruby???
no comment
Same system here in Somerville, MA (by Boston).
Here's the source, not a (plagiarising?) blog.7 2/
http://pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices/releases/2006110
Have the guts to vote for stand up against the Demublicans and start voting for independents/minority parties whenever possible (i.e. they are mentally competent to stand trial). Only vote for a Demublican when it becomes obvious that a schmuck will win unless more people rally to his counterpart.
Living in a state which consistently votes for or against your favorite Demublican flavor makes voting for "the little guy" much easier.
Knowing the general quality of the average programmer, it stands to reason that this code will only be validated to function in the usual case; thus, the 3l33t coder immediately realizes that simp1e substitutions present an initial defense against the naive academic's simple-minded algorithms and the cut-and-past output of their underpaid cheating slaves (which is, to mean, graduate students or even cheaper undergrads), bringing us closer to the more important question for which this test sentence is being written; therefore, we begin the second half of this ramble by introducing the astute and perhaps somewhat peeved reader to the conundrum with which the beast is to be tamed, but not before further wasting precious time on behalf of the experiment, not that any of this would be enough to induce buffer overflow attacks in the aforementioned poorly written code which would probably never even notice the following nop sled that is to be delivered by overflowing one of the many buffers in the parse tree required to decipher the previous drivel -- 0x0000 0x0000 0x0000 0xDEAD.
Dunno. I've played with Chase, CapOne, and a couple others. The "Payment Protector" racket is being *heavily* pushed. My guess is that it (a) generates free money for them and (b) makes it harder for you to declare bankruptcy, thereby (see a). Since this "service" is generally offerred by a third party, I'm guessing they plan to fold up shop if too many people start claiming protection.
We cancelled one credit card (airline visa) after it got infected by Payment Protector after they lied to me over the phone about how it worked. I explicitely asked if I would be charged for all purchases, and they said "only for carrying a balance" -- deceitfully implying that I would not be charged for all purchases. Oh well, counting the sign-up check, it was mostly a wash monetarily - though they lost a customer with prejudice.
Here's hoping someone passes a law requiring credit applications to be signed (a) in person in front of a company representative or (b) in the presence of a notary public. Identity theft would take a sharp downturn if it wasn't so easy to wield "your information".
The code doesn't check for null after a memory allocation? Isn't the C++ standard to throw an exception instead of returning null when an allocation fails?
I haven't dug through the Firefox code, but this smells like a non-issue their checker "finds" in order to tally more "defects".
These sound like real bugs.
Boy I'm glad I wasn't in your classes. If the students don't *want* to attend, that's their own problem.
I usually didn't attend when
a) I was sick
b) I already knew the material
c) I was not effectively learning from the instructor. Often because it was painfully obvious that the prof didn't bother preparing his lecture or that he had no training in effective public speaking.
Instructors are there *for the students* -- not the other way around.
Graded attendance, cheesy quizzes, and other related techniques simply burn up valuable class time so the instructor can feel "in control" instead of doing their primary job -- passing on information to those who want to learn. Except in the unfortunate case where your department is penalizing you for students not attending (e.g. too many dumb students earning low grades), there should be no need for such policies.
You're running firefox *without* adblock? You're missing half the fun. It can block scripts as well as images...
Was that trollbait? These funerals are for WWII, Korean, and Vietnam vets. Funerals for active duty soldiers are less than 1% of the total.
> (come on, you really need someone bagging your groceries when you decide to shop for milk at 3am?)
No, but I would like an adequate number of checkers so I don't have to wait in the 10+ person line for 30 minutes at random times throughout the day.
P.S. Back in the day, that bagger also helped you load groceries into the car. Not anymore. Things are getting worse, not better, as retail stores "lower prices" by cutting workers (read: produce more welfare recipients) and sell lower-quality goods (e.g. Schwinn).
A space station in Earth's orbit experiences less gravity than one would on the moon; this is important for microgravity experiments (such as crystal growth). Also, it is much cheaper (significantly less fuel) to put a space station in a low earth orbit than to reach the moon's orbit. Plus you have the added benefit of avoiding a difficult landing.
As for why lauch another station? My guess is to boost PR and get more funding.
TrollTech's Qt library had a rough start in the dual-licensing arena, but they got things ironed out, and now they have vibrant commercial and GPL software groups. Go browse www.trolltech.com for ideas on how to approach things. Look for other companies doing this as well. If possible, treat your GPL users as first-class-citizens; they may convert to commercial users at their daytime job.
I have no idea what product you are selling, but the key to marketing is to figure out how your future customers get their information. Try to learn their culture and expectations. Posting relevant "[Ad] Cool Commercial/GPL Software Toolkit" articles to a few newsgroups or discussion boards is generally acceptable, while omitting the [Ad] in the subject line might offend some people. If there are GPL versions available, make sure all the major sites (e.g. freshmeat) have useful listings.
Good luck.