I can see certain exceptions to this - for instance, games with easter eggs (approved, of course) can add to the charm of a product. An easter in egg in Quicken would be less cool.
Quite simply if you are a professional then deliver what the customer needs. Perhaps gently exceed expectations.
Easter eggs are all good when they are approved by the business for release, but very bad in any other professional scenario.
Sadly I'm beginning to see un-professionalism creeping into the attitude of developers. Perhaps it is because companies stopped mentoring new employees but began expecting individuals to enter the workforce with the necessary skills (i.e. as contractors).
I'm quite disappointed with so many comments here encouraging confusing variable names, and the addition of un-approved functionality.
Seriously, a lot of astute engineering is required for strap designs and dealing with the various loads and conditions that women's clothes must deal with.
Or how about high heels? Stilettos that don't break.. you get the idea, women's clothing is an enigma for most men yet more math is required for that than for men's suits.
The flu can mutate, and does; and once in a while it becomes a pandemic that kills percentages in whole integer digits (1% of the population is still a significant number of deaths).
But regardless I can tell you any pandemic or sickness will probably sweep through London first. Very few, if any, people, from your low class to your high class, actually cover their mouth when they cough. Add to that close proximity of people in public places (crowded tube, buses, walkways) and the international visitors streaming through London's 3 major international airports every day and you have a recipe for biological disaster.
Ah the royal pain that is web-site validation of phone numbers.
I'm having that problem now updating my Australian phone number into a UK banking website.
There are times when one has to carefully think about whether regexp validation is as useful as it may initially appear.
Perhaps a good strategy is using regexps to warn a user when they are trying something that appears stupid, but allow them to continue if they are determined to throw something through that the programmer didn't foresee..
If you want unbiased though you need to go to BBC I think.
Having lived in London recently for a few years I can categorically state that the BBC is heavily left-biased. When any racial attacks occur in London (and they happen more frequently than any Brit would admit) the colour of the perpetrator is rarely, if ever, mentioned if it wasn't white.
I frequently found The Times had more accurate detail about any situation and was far less censored.
Considering the recent American election was largely about race (very few articles fail to point out how historic and significant the skin colour of the president-elect is) the last thing you want is to put much stock in an anti-Caucasian organisation like the BBC.
You may wish to ask yourself "How is that the Democrats managed to raise more money than the bigoted old white guy party?"
Funny how this election was solely about race. Specifically anti-white sentiment. Somehow anyone can denigrate people of Caucasian appearance. But the racism evident in the post above is conclusive proof of the bias of the times.
One may wonder how did Nazi Germany come about? That was a disturbingly racist society, wasn't it? But for many it wasn't a conscious choice, it was just popular opinion at the time and people just went with the flow.
Popular opinion today is that attacking Caucasian people is okay. But no one would dare attack a person of any other race. The western world is sliding into a morally treacherous place.
You might argue that you're thinking for yourself - but that is the point of this whole topic; the news media have a very powerful hold on "popular opinion". Do you really think most people actively wanted to exert anti-white racism, or is it something people slipped into as part of popular culture, of propaganda?
How the poster above got ranked "Informative" I will never know - just replace any instance of the word "white" with "black" above and none of the popularists would have tolerated his post for a second.
Open minded and educated? Only if the media tells us we are!
I'm all for this. A quiet section of the aircraft for singles, a mid section for couples, and the rear for rugby teams and babies.
Actually talking is one thing, but high pitch leakage from headphones turned right up to combat engine noise is much worse. And I couldn't image the annoyance cell phone ring tones and SMS alerts would be.
Screaming babies, of course, should be left in the luggage compartment
It's sad but most screaming babies don't even pay for a ticket as children under a certain age go free. I seriously wonder why any parents really need to travel with a young baby that will serious disturb in the order of one hundred people, particularly on long haul flights. It is an extremely selfish act by the parents involved.
I wonder if certain long haul flights, like Los Angeles to London, could be closed to babies except for one flight per week.
Ear plugs attenuate sound, not eliminate it. When the noise in an aircraft cabin is approximately 90 decibels and ear plugs attenuate in the order of 26 decibels then the resulting sound will be approximately 64 decibels.
Even though the resulting sound transmitted to the ear drums is lower through the ear plugs the composition of the noise is largely the same, that is speech on top of engines.
Ear plugs would not resolve the nuisance and distraction of cell phones.
And laws banning smoking are also something I am against - especially as you say people ignored the voluntary bans, showing that the people were against them...
The problem with smokers is that they don't care about non-smokers. A ban is required because smokers wouldn't otherwise voluntarily consider the well being, comfort, and health of non-smokers. No ban would be required if smokers were able to be considerate.
Most men understand that women don't want to be wolf whistled down the road. One section of society, therefore, restrains themselves for the benefit of another. Smokers, by and large, do not want to restrain themselves.
I'm fully supportive of the ban and would like even more punitive measures to be taken against smokers. Why be merciful with those who have shown no mercy?
If people in Japan do not talk in the train then a foreigner shouldn't either. As a guest you should be on your best behavior...
I'd love somebody to explain that concept to the Nigerians in Rappongi, who seemed to find that randomly assaulting a white guy (me) was somehow acceptable!
Are you sure there's no law? When I was using the Yamanote and Keihin-Toohoku JR lines in Tokyo (in March 2008) the carriages had clear signs stating mobile phones were not to be used in the seated areas (but it was permissible in some entrance ways).
You don't optimise for incredibly rare situations.
What proportion of your time is spent reversing in your car? Of all the miles/kilometres you travel, what percentage?
Is there value in having a reverse gear on a car? One could argue "no" as it is only infrequently used. How about fog lights? Even less frequently used (depending on where you live). Anyone carry a spare tyre in their car? I've personally never needed a spare tyre in all the years I've been driving, yet I still carry one. I've taken the wheel off once, so having the jack has proved useful. There's a fine line between rare and never.
Priorities, as in "that's very far down on most people's list of priorities".
That's fine. To me the ability to back out a bad commit is one of the highest priorities. I like a clean repository. An essential feature I've had to use, on occasion, throughout my development years.
Plus I'm very fond of RCS style diff tracking. Understanding the storage back-end is most helpful.
People have different approaches to version control. Some see it as a means of easily tracking code changes. Others see it as a managed temporary storage area and are not too concerned with the cleanliness of the history. They are valid views although I have formed my own over the course of time.
Oh, whoops, someone just cut-and-paste details of their bank account into some code and committed without realising it.
"Administrator," you say, "can you please make that commit disappear completely out of the repository? I can't have anyone look through the history of that file and see my bank account details!"
Two scenarios: the first, the administrator uses CVS.. he types cvs admin -o 1.3 and revision 1.3 is gone! Phew! The second, the administrator uses SVN.. he says "uh, I'll get back to you on that in a few days.."
Because of this one point of difference I still don't believe SVN is a mature product.
I don't know if you're aware of it, but you've just made an extraordinary claim.
I've also tried to point out that it was a personal opinion. Plenty have written about the SVN vs CVS debate, I'm just offering my opinion based on years of experience.
SVN is more complicated than CVS, and less functional (depending on how you view things).
Many will disagree with me, of course, but I've been developing for years and I've yet to see a compelling reason to move to SVN.
CVS has a simpler back end. Keeping things simple when involving several people is key.
Set up an internal website with little scripts that automate functions, such as setting up a new CVS account, or running CVSweb, or other management type functions.
As your team grows in size having automated tools that generate templates and such will make administration much easier.
Just my thoughts (you'll have to find your own way in this, of course).
I imagine knowing Latin would assist with understanding the roots of (and perhaps learning the languages of) Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Lately I have been asking accountants and financial traders that I meet if they can do long division, after all it is a skill one learns in primary school at around the age of 10 or 11. Very few remember!
So in programming we can get away with not knowing how a red-black tree works, we just use the C++ map template. Is there no validity in learning how a red-black tree works anymore? Possibly, but I think there is. At least really knowing how something works can lead to an appreciation (and better usage) of that tool.
When I was an undergrad in CS four years back, there were girls on my course offering sex in return for completing their programming assignments. I never took one of them up on this offer. To this day I have no idea why....
The word accountable made me think about a parallel I feel between the Accounting profession and the Software Development profession.
In many ways I feel that software development is largely now a commodity, something that will always need to be done, much like every business needs accountancy services (some business employ Accountants directly, some choose to contract out the services).
That's not a bad thing, however - whilst Accountants are perceived to be boring, no one disputes that they are necessary and that their profession is worthwhile. Software Engineering might not be as "nerdy" as it once was, and possibly less exciting than in the early days, but it is still no less worthwhile a career to enter.
Yes a cache would be good, but what is the problem? Mostly, it is keeping unnecessary expensive international bandwidth down.
I keep asking for a simple protocol called "local?" or similar. The idea is that you send a "local?" request to a broadcast address which your ISP would capture, and respond yes/no depending on whether the IP queried was local to your ISP.
P2P services could then utilise this protocol in prioritising which sources (clients) to download from. The idea is that you would prioritise downloads from any client on your local network.
Much simpler than having ISPs actually cache data, and no question of legality either.
I guess, too, clients like uTorrent already have a guess at which country the client is from - perhaps more intelligence could be build in to prefer downloads that appear to be from the same country (though this wouldn't be perfect, it would be a good compromise).
When I visited Tokyo in March I was amazed just how much more advanced the basic mobile phones are in Japan compared to the top level phones available in Western societies.
Almost all Japanese mobiles have large screens, built in dictionaries for translating between English and Japanese, and have cameras that can 1) read in universal square barcodes that represent web addresses and 2) can read text from a distance.
I wonder if the study also takes into account the different ways societies as a whole use their phone - from the tightly networked gang cultures, to the highly individualistic.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see certain exceptions to this - for instance, games with easter eggs (approved, of course) can add to the charm of a product. An easter in egg in Quicken would be less cool.
Quite simply if you are a professional then deliver what the customer needs. Perhaps gently exceed expectations.
Easter eggs are all good when they are approved by the business for release, but very bad in any other professional scenario.
Sadly I'm beginning to see un-professionalism creeping into the attitude of developers. Perhaps it is because companies stopped mentoring new employees but began expecting individuals to enter the workforce with the necessary skills (i.e. as contractors).
I'm quite disappointed with so many comments here encouraging confusing variable names, and the addition of un-approved functionality.
Seriously, a lot of astute engineering is required for strap designs and dealing with the various loads and conditions that women's clothes must deal with.
Or how about high heels? Stilettos that don't break.. you get the idea, women's clothing is an enigma for most men yet more math is required for that than for men's suits.
Evidently a reference to The Stand.
The flu can mutate, and does; and once in a while it becomes a pandemic that kills percentages in whole integer digits (1% of the population is still a significant number of deaths).
But regardless I can tell you any pandemic or sickness will probably sweep through London first. Very few, if any, people, from your low class to your high class, actually cover their mouth when they cough. Add to that close proximity of people in public places (crowded tube, buses, walkways) and the international visitors streaming through London's 3 major international airports every day and you have a recipe for biological disaster.
US phone with or without parentheses
Ah the royal pain that is web-site validation of phone numbers.
I'm having that problem now updating my Australian phone number into a UK banking website.
There are times when one has to carefully think about whether regexp validation is as useful as it may initially appear.
Perhaps a good strategy is using regexps to warn a user when they are trying something that appears stupid, but allow them to continue if they are determined to throw something through that the programmer didn't foresee..
If you want unbiased though you need to go to BBC I think.
Having lived in London recently for a few years I can categorically state that the BBC is heavily left-biased. When any racial attacks occur in London (and they happen more frequently than any Brit would admit) the colour of the perpetrator is rarely, if ever, mentioned if it wasn't white.
I frequently found The Times had more accurate detail about any situation and was far less censored.
Considering the recent American election was largely about race (very few articles fail to point out how historic and significant the skin colour of the president-elect is) the last thing you want is to put much stock in an anti-Caucasian organisation like the BBC.
You may wish to ask yourself "How is that the Democrats managed to raise more money than the bigoted old white guy party?"
Funny how this election was solely about race. Specifically anti-white sentiment. Somehow anyone can denigrate people of Caucasian appearance. But the racism evident in the post above is conclusive proof of the bias of the times.
One may wonder how did Nazi Germany come about? That was a disturbingly racist society, wasn't it? But for many it wasn't a conscious choice, it was just popular opinion at the time and people just went with the flow.
Popular opinion today is that attacking Caucasian people is okay. But no one would dare attack a person of any other race. The western world is sliding into a morally treacherous place.
You might argue that you're thinking for yourself - but that is the point of this whole topic; the news media have a very powerful hold on "popular opinion". Do you really think most people actively wanted to exert anti-white racism, or is it something people slipped into as part of popular culture, of propaganda?
How the poster above got ranked "Informative" I will never know - just replace any instance of the word "white" with "black" above and none of the popularists would have tolerated his post for a second.
Open minded and educated? Only if the media tells us we are!
I loved Tokyo and was so amused by the street smoking ban signs embedded in the pavement that I took a photo!
It seemed to me that older men disregarded the smoking bans but most of the rest of society managed to adhere.
Can we just ban talking too?
I'm all for this. A quiet section of the aircraft for singles, a mid section for couples, and the rear for rugby teams and babies.
Actually talking is one thing, but high pitch leakage from headphones turned right up to combat engine noise is much worse. And I couldn't image the annoyance cell phone ring tones and SMS alerts would be.
Screaming babies, of course, should be left in the luggage compartment
It's sad but most screaming babies don't even pay for a ticket as children under a certain age go free. I seriously wonder why any parents really need to travel with a young baby that will serious disturb in the order of one hundred people, particularly on long haul flights. It is an extremely selfish act by the parents involved.
I wonder if certain long haul flights, like Los Angeles to London, could be closed to babies except for one flight per week.
ear plugs
Ear plugs attenuate sound, not eliminate it. When the noise in an aircraft cabin is approximately 90 decibels and ear plugs attenuate in the order of 26 decibels then the resulting sound will be approximately 64 decibels.
Even though the resulting sound transmitted to the ear drums is lower through the ear plugs the composition of the noise is largely the same, that is speech on top of engines.
Ear plugs would not resolve the nuisance and distraction of cell phones.
And laws banning smoking are also something I am against - especially as you say people ignored the voluntary bans, showing that the people were against them...
The problem with smokers is that they don't care about non-smokers. A ban is required because smokers wouldn't otherwise voluntarily consider the well being, comfort, and health of non-smokers. No ban would be required if smokers were able to be considerate.
Most men understand that women don't want to be wolf whistled down the road. One section of society, therefore, restrains themselves for the benefit of another. Smokers, by and large, do not want to restrain themselves.
I'm fully supportive of the ban and would like even more punitive measures to be taken against smokers. Why be merciful with those who have shown no mercy?
If people in Japan do not talk in the train then a foreigner shouldn't either. As a guest you should be on your best behavior...
I'd love somebody to explain that concept to the Nigerians in Rappongi, who seemed to find that randomly assaulting a white guy (me) was somehow acceptable!
No law needed.
Are you sure there's no law? When I was using the Yamanote and Keihin-Toohoku JR lines in Tokyo (in March 2008) the carriages had clear signs stating mobile phones were not to be used in the seated areas (but it was permissible in some entrance ways).
You gave me an idea. A group of journalists team up and share a connection via wireless.
Brilliant idea! They could even use a cheap Ethernet switch and cat5 cable!
You don't optimise for incredibly rare situations.
What proportion of your time is spent reversing in your car? Of all the miles/kilometres you travel, what percentage?
Is there value in having a reverse gear on a car? One could argue "no" as it is only infrequently used. How about fog lights? Even less frequently used (depending on where you live). Anyone carry a spare tyre in their car? I've personally never needed a spare tyre in all the years I've been driving, yet I still carry one. I've taken the wheel off once, so having the jack has proved useful. There's a fine line between rare and never.
Priorities, as in "that's very far down on most people's list of priorities".
That's fine. To me the ability to back out a bad commit is one of the highest priorities. I like a clean repository. An essential feature I've had to use, on occasion, throughout my development years.
Plus I'm very fond of RCS style diff tracking. Understanding the storage back-end is most helpful.
People have different approaches to version control. Some see it as a means of easily tracking code changes. Others see it as a managed temporary storage area and are not too concerned with the cleanliness of the history. They are valid views although I have formed my own over the course of time.
Oh, whoops, someone just cut-and-paste details of their bank account into some code and committed without realising it.
"Administrator," you say, "can you please make that commit disappear completely out of the repository? I can't have anyone look through the history of that file and see my bank account details!"
Two scenarios: the first, the administrator uses CVS.. he types cvs admin -o 1.3 and revision 1.3 is gone! Phew! The second, the administrator uses SVN.. he says "uh, I'll get back to you on that in a few days.."
Because of this one point of difference I still don't believe SVN is a mature product.
I don't know if you're aware of it, but you've just made an extraordinary claim.
I've also tried to point out that it was a personal opinion. Plenty have written about the SVN vs CVS debate, I'm just offering my opinion based on years of experience.
SVN is more complicated than CVS, and less functional (depending on how you view things).
Many will disagree with me, of course, but I've been developing for years and I've yet to see a compelling reason to move to SVN.
CVS has a simpler back end. Keeping things simple when involving several people is key.
Set up an internal website with little scripts that automate functions, such as setting up a new CVS account, or running CVSweb, or other management type functions.
As your team grows in size having automated tools that generate templates and such will make administration much easier.
Just my thoughts (you'll have to find your own way in this, of course).
I imagine knowing Latin would assist with understanding the roots of (and perhaps learning the languages of) Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Lately I have been asking accountants and financial traders that I meet if they can do long division, after all it is a skill one learns in primary school at around the age of 10 or 11. Very few remember!
So in programming we can get away with not knowing how a red-black tree works, we just use the C++ map template. Is there no validity in learning how a red-black tree works anymore? Possibly, but I think there is. At least really knowing how something works can lead to an appreciation (and better usage) of that tool.
I was going to post a reply but slashdot can't handle unicode :(
Lack of a clean user interface?
The word accountable made me think about a parallel I feel between the Accounting profession and the Software Development profession.
In many ways I feel that software development is largely now a commodity, something that will always need to be done, much like every business needs accountancy services (some business employ Accountants directly, some choose to contract out the services).
That's not a bad thing, however - whilst Accountants are perceived to be boring, no one disputes that they are necessary and that their profession is worthwhile. Software Engineering might not be as "nerdy" as it once was, and possibly less exciting than in the early days, but it is still no less worthwhile a career to enter.
Yes a cache would be good, but what is the problem? Mostly, it is keeping unnecessary expensive international bandwidth down.
I keep asking for a simple protocol called "local?" or similar. The idea is that you send a "local?" request to a broadcast address which your ISP would capture, and respond yes/no depending on whether the IP queried was local to your ISP.
P2P services could then utilise this protocol in prioritising which sources (clients) to download from. The idea is that you would prioritise downloads from any client on your local network.
Much simpler than having ISPs actually cache data, and no question of legality either.
I guess, too, clients like uTorrent already have a guess at which country the client is from - perhaps more intelligence could be build in to prefer downloads that appear to be from the same country (though this wouldn't be perfect, it would be a good compromise).
When I visited Tokyo in March I was amazed just how much more advanced the basic mobile phones are in Japan compared to the top level phones available in Western societies.
Almost all Japanese mobiles have large screens, built in dictionaries for translating between English and Japanese, and have cameras that can 1) read in universal square barcodes that represent web addresses and 2) can read text from a distance.
I wonder if the study also takes into account the different ways societies as a whole use their phone - from the tightly networked gang cultures, to the highly individualistic.