I have known several people who point out that if it really does require that complicated of an explanation, you might need to re-factor your code and make it less arcane. Of course, not everything can be simplified to the point where it's obvious when you read it, but I've definitely seen a lot of code that could/did benefit from changing it to make it more straight-forward and readable.
Often, identifying a block of code that does one discrete, self-contained task and pulling it out into a function, even if that code is only used once, can make the code far more readable. You're essentially just naming a block of code. I need to work on that myself, since it doesn't come naturally like the urge to eliminate duplicate code does.
You could easily do this with comments, of course, but I prefer self-documenting code to heavily-documented code.
If you don't know what the hell you're doing, you're not going to do it very well. Code that "works by accident" is very fragile and breaks easily and is a triple bitch to maintain, because if you don't know what you wrote, I have to pretty much reverse engineer it from the source code to figure out what you *actually* wrote vs. what you were supposed to write--then I usually end up re-writing it from the original requirements to do what it should have been doing in the first place, because the existing code is such a mess.
This is especially fun when the original requirements were never written down, and nobody knows exactly what they were any more (if anyone ever did). You know what the code is supposed to do at a very high level (most of the time!), but you frequently end up having to figure out whether some corner case in a piece of convoluted code is working correctly, is buggy, or doesn't actually matter either way. The last case is the best, because it often frees you to rewrite the code in a much simpler way. There's nothing quite like reducing a 70-line function down to a one-liner!
Chill out, man. "Have you stopped beating your wife" is often used as a classic example of a loaded question. No one was suggesting that you actually beat your wife; it was a rhetorical device to point out how ridiculous it is for someone to be punished due to mere accusation (though how exactly that relates to loaded questions escapes me at the moment).
Ignore this new Amazon RDS thing; it's not worth the premium if you can set up MySQL yourself. An Extra-Large EC2 instance is only $584/month ($497/month with the just-announced price drop).
Regarding your queries/month calculation, each MySQL query does not necessarily result in disk I/O, especially if your entire database fits in RAM. I would be surprised if you had to spend more than $50/month on this.
I was going to suggest hosting both your web server and MySQL server on EC2, but the bandwidth costs would kill you: $1,700/month for the 10TB you mentioned in another post (assuming it's all outbound). Ouch.
When dealing with physical books it's almost inconceivable that you mishandle the book and accidentally "turn the page".
Really? You've never dropped a book and lost your place? Or been reading a new textbook with a stiff spine and had the pages turn on their own? Or been reading a book outside on a windy day?
When using an e-book reader it's very easy to accidentally push a button and lose your place.
I don't know if existing e-book readers do this, but it should be very easy to implement a place-saving feature. On the iPhone, for example, most apps will save their state when you press the Home button, so you can re-launch the app and pick up exactly where you left off.
E-book readers are $300 or $400 device you have to get to to read electronic books, why do that, when they can buy real physical ones at the bookstore for relatively little expense?
But they won't always be so expensive. What happens when the reader is cheaper than a single new book? (See the Nintendo DS.)
For entertainment purposes, it's almost inconceivable that you read more than one book at once... so what's the benefit in having a device that lets you store multiple books?
Maybe not simultaneously, but I am currently in the middle of three or four books that I'm reading for entertainment or learning. It would be nice to be able to take those with me on trips without having to devote the space for multiple books.
To boot, the DRM-laden electronic books are almost just as expensive as the physical ones, and you can't lend them to friends. To boot, you can't place them on a photocopier and make copies of particularly interesting sections to use in a paper, personal momento, etc. You can do less with the e-books than you can physical ones.
Hence the book piracy.
I think there's a stronger feeling of ownership and control over a printed book. as if the text belongs to you, and reading is a very tactile experience, where you are involved.
It's certainly true that you have a greater sense of ownership with a physical book. But then, you never really owned the text in the first place due to copyright.
You can rip a page if you don't like it, you can doggy ear, or bookmark pages with significance to you.
I've never felt the desire to rip a page out of a book. And don't most e-book readers provide bookmarking functionality superior to doggy-eared pages?
The book is on your shelf, it's more secure that way, you can always get to it whenever you want. Your dead tree book can't fail you, the batteries cannot die. No one really wants to steal it, and it's easily replaced, you can take it in public without fear.
But it can get flooded or burned or torn or peed on or lost... An e-book reader is also susceptible to many of these things, but you can just keep a copy of your books on your PC (which you also back up, right?). And the theft and replacement issues will all but disappear as readers get cheaper.
It's easy to lend to friends.. just hand them the book.
It's even easier to email or IM them a small.rar file or a link (depending on how often you see them in person, I guess).
You get two pages of text side-by-side. Typical e-book readers just provide you one continuous page, so the experience is completely different.
It's different, but is it significantly better? How advantageous is it that you can see two pages at once in a paper book?
I've wanted to implement something like this for a long time, except my version would:
be just comments; it wouldn't style itself a "wiki"
store the comments on Usenet or some other distributed, open system
use optional PGP signatures in place of logins
have an optional, distributed, poster-based moderation system
What I mean by that last point is that you'd have the ability to 'mod up' posters rather than comments, and moreover your moderations would only apply to you. No one else would see your mods, nor would you see anyone else's, except that you would have the option to make your mods recursive: if you moderate Bob at +1, then maybe you would see Bob's +1-modded posters at +0.5, and those posters' +1-modded posters at +0.25, and so on.
Of course, the moderation and PGP signatures would be completely optional, and would be applied in addition to regular spam filtering like that of existing Usenet and email clients.
Additionally, regarding the well known history of Germany there is NO REASON to show, wear or use Nazi symbols other than for a) education (allowed) or b) propaganda for forces against the German democracy (disallowed).
It seems that way, if you ignore reality. ISS distance: 220 miles. Moon distance: 238,000. The difference in fuel needed alone is hardly in the same ballpark.
You realize that gravitational potential energy does not scale linearly with distance, yes? Or as Heinlein put it (roughly): "get to LEO and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System".
It's amazing that no one here has so much as questioned the source for this report. The Bloomberg article doesn't say anything specific about what kind of source they have, except that it involves "communications between the two executives obtained by Bloomberg".
I don't have a good feel for how reliable Bloomberg is on stuff like this, but surely this kind of allegation merits the benefit of the doubt until we get a little more solid info about the source, no?
Personally I think the State boundaries should all be redrawn so that these metro areas are separate States, and don't span State lines (like with Chicago-Milwaukee, the the examples you pointed out).
Having driven between Milwaukee and Chicago several times, I can tell you they are not part of the same "metro area".
Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash? Ever tried to write it down?
It goes without saying, though, that this "phone home" feature will be used to enforce an inevitable lifetime install limit. It also goes without saying that this limit will be arbitrarily small.
Not necessarily. They could allow installing on any number of machines, but disallow more than one copy from connecting to Battle.net at once. Sure, people who only want to play the single-player game could pirate it more easily (unless single-player also requires a bnet connection), but that might be sufficient deterrent for Blizzard's purposes. It's a little premature to assume Blizzard will be using Microsoft-level DRM tactics on SC2.
Kalev's questions came across as ignorant and belligerent, but Stroustrup answered all of them intelligently, thoroughly and patiently. It's good to know that there are men like Stroustrup still working hard on C++, even though I no longer do much work in it.
Why should you be allowed to publish slander and libel all you want, under the guise of the first amendment? It hurts my reputation, it hurts my ability to do business, etc.
Yes, and...? Harm alone is not sufficient reason to make something illegal.
Besides, one could argue that the extent to which libel and slander would become problems in the absence of such laws is more or less the extent to which people would be forced to wise up and not believe every unsubstantiated rumor they hear about a person or company.
I think I should be allowed to protect myself.
And you can certainly do so without using government force to shut people up.
The difficulty of searching for good apps is not a justification for Apple's policies. I have an iPhone, and I quickly learned that to find anything worthwhile, I need to search for reviews and such on the internets first. I suspect most other users, or at least those who download more than a couple of apps, do the same. Given that, the only possible justification for Apple's "selectiveness" has to do with possible Trojans and other malware, which should really be addressed via sandboxing or other technologies. Furthermore, if it were really only about saving users from shovelware and malware, then why wouldn't Apple allow those who know what they're doing to install apps from other sources?
Sure, but name a desktop environment that would work that well on the OLPC's pathetic specs.
Why insist on a desktop environment? Why not a simple, barebones window manager like Window Maker, Fluxbox, or FVWM? They could be made quite easy to use with just a decent default configuration tailored to the OLPC.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean "accusing someone of using it incorrectly".
I think you mean "I am a pretentious git".
I have known several people who point out that if it really does require that complicated of an explanation, you might need to re-factor your code and make it less arcane. Of course, not everything can be simplified to the point where it's obvious when you read it, but I've definitely seen a lot of code that could/did benefit from changing it to make it more straight-forward and readable.
Often, identifying a block of code that does one discrete, self-contained task and pulling it out into a function, even if that code is only used once, can make the code far more readable. You're essentially just naming a block of code. I need to work on that myself, since it doesn't come naturally like the urge to eliminate duplicate code does.
You could easily do this with comments, of course, but I prefer self-documenting code to heavily-documented code.
If you don't know what the hell you're doing, you're not going to do it very well. Code that "works by accident" is very fragile and breaks easily and is a triple bitch to maintain, because if you don't know what you wrote, I have to pretty much reverse engineer it from the source code to figure out what you *actually* wrote vs. what you were supposed to write--then I usually end up re-writing it from the original requirements to do what it should have been doing in the first place, because the existing code is such a mess.
This is especially fun when the original requirements were never written down, and nobody knows exactly what they were any more (if anyone ever did). You know what the code is supposed to do at a very high level (most of the time!), but you frequently end up having to figure out whether some corner case in a piece of convoluted code is working correctly, is buggy, or doesn't actually matter either way. The last case is the best, because it often frees you to rewrite the code in a much simpler way. There's nothing quite like reducing a 70-line function down to a one-liner!
His papal name is Benedict XVI. And why do you say that he seems "evil"? Because of the way he looks?
Chill out, man. "Have you stopped beating your wife" is often used as a classic example of a loaded question. No one was suggesting that you actually beat your wife; it was a rhetorical device to point out how ridiculous it is for someone to be punished due to mere accusation (though how exactly that relates to loaded questions escapes me at the moment).
Ignore this new Amazon RDS thing; it's not worth the premium if you can set up MySQL yourself. An Extra-Large EC2 instance is only $584/month ($497/month with the just-announced price drop).
Regarding your queries/month calculation, each MySQL query does not necessarily result in disk I/O, especially if your entire database fits in RAM. I would be surprised if you had to spend more than $50/month on this.
I was going to suggest hosting both your web server and MySQL server on EC2, but the bandwidth costs would kill you: $1,700/month for the 10TB you mentioned in another post (assuming it's all outbound). Ouch.
Capitalism simply means that the means of production (capital) are privately owned. The issue of copyright is completely orthogonal.
I'd rather redirect from www.example.org to example.org, personally. Or were you saying that the www. prefix provides some benefit to customers?
Encryption, amigo. You should look into it.
When dealing with physical books it's almost inconceivable that you mishandle the book and accidentally "turn the page".
Really? You've never dropped a book and lost your place? Or been reading a new textbook with a stiff spine and had the pages turn on their own? Or been reading a book outside on a windy day?
When using an e-book reader it's very easy to accidentally push a button and lose your place.
I don't know if existing e-book readers do this, but it should be very easy to implement a place-saving feature. On the iPhone, for example, most apps will save their state when you press the Home button, so you can re-launch the app and pick up exactly where you left off.
E-book readers are $300 or $400 device you have to get to to read electronic books, why do that, when they can buy real physical ones at the bookstore for relatively little expense?
But they won't always be so expensive. What happens when the reader is cheaper than a single new book? (See the Nintendo DS.)
For entertainment purposes, it's almost inconceivable that you read more than one book at once... so what's the benefit in having a device that lets you store multiple books?
Maybe not simultaneously, but I am currently in the middle of three or four books that I'm reading for entertainment or learning. It would be nice to be able to take those with me on trips without having to devote the space for multiple books.
To boot, the DRM-laden electronic books are almost just as expensive as the physical ones, and you can't lend them to friends. To boot, you can't place them on a photocopier and make copies of particularly interesting sections to use in a paper, personal momento, etc. You can do less with the e-books than you can physical ones.
Hence the book piracy.
I think there's a stronger feeling of ownership and control over a printed book. as if the text belongs to you, and reading is a very tactile experience, where you are involved.
It's certainly true that you have a greater sense of ownership with a physical book. But then, you never really owned the text in the first place due to copyright.
You can rip a page if you don't like it, you can doggy ear, or bookmark pages with significance to you.
I've never felt the desire to rip a page out of a book. And don't most e-book readers provide bookmarking functionality superior to doggy-eared pages?
The book is on your shelf, it's more secure that way, you can always get to it whenever you want. Your dead tree book can't fail you, the batteries cannot die. No one really wants to steal it, and it's easily replaced, you can take it in public without fear.
But it can get flooded or burned or torn or peed on or lost... An e-book reader is also susceptible to many of these things, but you can just keep a copy of your books on your PC (which you also back up, right?). And the theft and replacement issues will all but disappear as readers get cheaper.
It's easy to lend to friends.. just hand them the book.
It's even easier to email or IM them a small .rar file or a link (depending on how often you see them in person, I guess).
You get two pages of text side-by-side. Typical e-book readers just provide you one continuous page, so the experience is completely different.
It's different, but is it significantly better? How advantageous is it that you can see two pages at once in a paper book?
What I mean by that last point is that you'd have the ability to 'mod up' posters rather than comments, and moreover your moderations would only apply to you. No one else would see your mods, nor would you see anyone else's, except that you would have the option to make your mods recursive: if you moderate Bob at +1, then maybe you would see Bob's +1-modded posters at +0.5, and those posters' +1-modded posters at +0.25, and so on.
Of course, the moderation and PGP signatures would be completely optional, and would be applied in addition to regular spam filtering like that of existing Usenet and email clients.
Additionally, regarding the well known history of Germany there is NO REASON to show, wear or use Nazi symbols other than for a) education (allowed) or b) propaganda for forces against the German democracy (disallowed).
So which is Wolfenstein?
Nice try, but your backpedalling can't drown out the sound of the WHOOSH that just went over your head.
It seems that way, if you ignore reality. ISS distance: 220 miles. Moon distance: 238,000. The difference in fuel needed alone is hardly in the same ballpark.
You realize that gravitational potential energy does not scale linearly with distance, yes? Or as Heinlein put it (roughly): "get to LEO and you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System".
It's amazing that no one here has so much as questioned the source for this report. The Bloomberg article doesn't say anything specific about what kind of source they have, except that it involves "communications between the two executives obtained by Bloomberg".
I don't have a good feel for how reliable Bloomberg is on stuff like this, but surely this kind of allegation merits the benefit of the doubt until we get a little more solid info about the source, no?
Personally I think the State boundaries should all be redrawn so that these metro areas are separate States, and don't span State lines (like with Chicago-Milwaukee, the the examples you pointed out).
Having driven between Milwaukee and Chicago several times, I can tell you they are not part of the same "metro area".
Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash? Ever tried to write it down?
No.
It goes without saying, though, that this "phone home" feature will be used to enforce an inevitable lifetime install limit. It also goes without saying that this limit will be arbitrarily small.
Not necessarily. They could allow installing on any number of machines, but disallow more than one copy from connecting to Battle.net at once. Sure, people who only want to play the single-player game could pirate it more easily (unless single-player also requires a bnet connection), but that might be sufficient deterrent for Blizzard's purposes. It's a little premature to assume Blizzard will be using Microsoft-level DRM tactics on SC2.
Are you sure you're not talking about Battlestar Galactica?
If the government puts a huge tax on something like sugar, corporations which make sugar will need to "eat" some of the tax.
...and then many of them will go out of business, which shifts the supply curve left/up, which increases the market price.
Kalev's questions came across as ignorant and belligerent, but Stroustrup answered all of them intelligently, thoroughly and patiently. It's good to know that there are men like Stroustrup still working hard on C++, even though I no longer do much work in it.
Why should you be allowed to publish slander and libel all you want, under the guise of the first amendment? It hurts my reputation, it hurts my ability to do business, etc.
Yes, and...? Harm alone is not sufficient reason to make something illegal.
Besides, one could argue that the extent to which libel and slander would become problems in the absence of such laws is more or less the extent to which people would be forced to wise up and not believe every unsubstantiated rumor they hear about a person or company.
I think I should be allowed to protect myself.
And you can certainly do so without using government force to shut people up.
The difficulty of searching for good apps is not a justification for Apple's policies. I have an iPhone, and I quickly learned that to find anything worthwhile, I need to search for reviews and such on the internets first. I suspect most other users, or at least those who download more than a couple of apps, do the same. Given that, the only possible justification for Apple's "selectiveness" has to do with possible Trojans and other malware, which should really be addressed via sandboxing or other technologies. Furthermore, if it were really only about saving users from shovelware and malware, then why wouldn't Apple allow those who know what they're doing to install apps from other sources?
Sure, but name a desktop environment that would work that well on the OLPC's pathetic specs.
Why insist on a desktop environment? Why not a simple, barebones window manager like Window Maker, Fluxbox, or FVWM? They could be made quite easy to use with just a decent default configuration tailored to the OLPC.
PS. Actually the object they calibrated for isn't really a tree-trunk, so you're okay this time.
Why a fork?
I think you might have missed something when you did your search-and-replace...