> My refrigerator alone draws 6.5 amps at 110 volts.
You must have one hell of a refrigerator! According to those energy usage sheets you see pasted on them on stores, an average refrigerator uses about $160 a year of electricity, this comes down to about 6 kwh a day. It is entirely possible to get a more efficient one than that. You could also wrap it in insulation, but that should not be necessary. There are plenty of people in the desert who live off 5kw worth of solar cells without any deprivation, so there is no reason why you can not do the same with an live, if intermittent, power source.
Why do you think that it will crash into YOUR back yard? After all, some of us have friends at NASA, and all that money for "unintentional" trajectory errors will surely outperform your uneducated guess.
A deep cycle battery will cost you about $70/kwh. Figure out how much of a reserve you need, hook them up to an inverter, and you won't even notice when the power goes down.
> Why are the popular bloggers popular if other bloggers are thinking these ideas up first?
Everyone here should know that popularity is inversely proportionate to intelligence. Only intelligent people like other intelligent people. The idiots are just resentful.
In case you are too spoiled by the flashy graphics of today's games to know this for yourself: omega is a rogue-like text-mode monster-slashing spell-casting countryside-trodding quest-seeking game from the end of the last century. It is, arguably, the best of its kind. Where nethack or moria concentrate on monster slashing, omega instead has a much better storyline and interesting quests. Much humor can be found throughout the game, and the character generation sequence is worth reading for its entertainment value alone. The snippet of code about ghosts is from that part of the game. You can download omega from http://www.alcyone.com/max/projects/omega/. Try it, you won't regret it.
print1 ("Do you believe in ghosts? [yn] "); if (ynq1 () == 'y') {
powpts += 2;
print2 ("I do! I do! I do believe in ghosts!");
morewait ();
clearmsg (); }
> In many cases she will leave with a large part of > your money, and may also get support payments for > years afterwords.
Let me enlighten you, grasshopper: there is such a thing called the "prenuptual agreement", which can prevent things like that. It is advisable to talk to your future wife about money, custody of children, support payments, and other such things before you actually need to talk about them, since after the divorce you will likely not get along too well and any such debates would not go well. It is much better to have the discussion while you still love each other and are capable of making rational decisions untainted by negative emotions.
> There is always someone in the world who can do > something that you did, better, and that's what > OSS is, doesn't that guy get it?
Funny, I always thought it was the other way around - you can always do a better job writing the program than whoever wrote it, and that's what OSS is. That's why most OSS projects get started anyway. That's why we have forks and rewrites and upgrades and people who say "what moron wrote this? I bet I could do better than that." Thinking that everyone except you is a good programmer might end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, and for that very reason I would strongly suggest you reconsider your motivations. It's all right to work on OSS if you think you can do a better job, but it is an abomination to do a rotten job, dump it on SourceForge and expect other people to clean it up.
I wonder if there are any openings at NASA for a "Radiation testing dummy. An exciting opportunity in space research available on the space station. The perks include travel in space, room (well, it really depends on what you call "outside") and board on delicious standard space rations. The ideal candidate would have some spacefaring experience, but training can be provided. Must not be overweight or overheight; must be a team player and have good communication skills. Send a resume and three character references to jobs@nasa.gov"
Because debugging should be avoided.
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 1
> beginning programmers spend more time debugging code than they do writing code, > so why isn't that activity stressed?
Because you should know what your code is doing. If you can not figure out which piece of code is failing you either have a bad design, where the division of labour is inadequate, or an inadequate error reporting mechanism. When I have a bug and I find the cause, I always try to figure out how the error reporting could be improved. Throw those exceptions, put in those asserts, and print clarification messages for errors whenever you can (probably with an #ifndef NDEBUG around the last). The goal is to be able to diagnose any bug simply by looking at the error message, which I can already do in most cases thanks to the aforementioned practices.
I just can't get out of my mind that ludicrous ending where the aging Sen.Jellison dramatically gets up and sends his minions to "give our children the lightning!" Their idea of good government did not appeal much to me either.
Everybody knows that if you want to stop a killer asteroid, all you have to do is change the gravitational constant of the universe for a few seconds. Trivial, really... Ow, my back!
You might not be able to recover from every possible thing that might ever go wrong, but there is no excuse for not checking for a file creation error. If there is only one error you check for, it should be that. And there is no excuse for dying after not being able to create a file either. You should simply report the error and return to idle.
Read "Anthem" by Ayn Rand to find out exactly what would happen if more people in the world were motivated by altruism rather than the almighty dollar.
He would need to invent transparent chocolate first, and if that can not be a billion dollar business, then transparent aluminum most certainly will be.
Surely, with such detailed instructions, any self respecting nerd can grow his own diamond. With proper dopant control you can get the color to exactly match her eyes, beating by many leagues the jock who is stuck having to purchase an overpriced hunk of colorless rock.
Slashdot Mirror
> but how many children are now going to be able to
> bypass the disclaimer pages on porn sites because
> of deep linking?
How many children want to read a disclaimer page anyway? Or agree that they are not old enough to do something?
> My refrigerator alone draws 6.5 amps at 110 volts.
You must have one hell of a refrigerator! According to those energy usage sheets you see pasted on them on stores, an average refrigerator uses about $160 a year of electricity, this comes down to about 6 kwh a day. It is entirely possible to get a more efficient one than that. You could also wrap it in insulation, but that should not be necessary. There are plenty of people in the desert who live off 5kw worth of solar cells without any deprivation, so there is no reason why you can not do the same with an live, if intermittent, power source.
Especially if you want it shipped to your space station. Then your shipping costs really skyrocket.
Why do you think that it will crash into YOUR back yard? After all, some of us have friends at NASA, and all that money for "unintentional" trajectory errors will surely outperform your uneducated guess.
A deep cycle battery will cost you about $70/kwh. Figure out how much of a reserve you need, hook them up to an inverter, and you won't even notice when the power goes down.
> Why are the popular bloggers popular if other bloggers are thinking these ideas up first?
Everyone here should know that popularity is inversely proportionate to intelligence. Only intelligent people like other intelligent people. The idiots are just resentful.
t's what Open Source is all about: "sharing" other people's ideas and making sure they remain "shared".
In case you are too spoiled by the flashy graphics of today's games to know this for yourself:
omega is a rogue-like text-mode monster-slashing spell-casting countryside-trodding quest-seeking game from the end of the last century. It is, arguably, the best of its kind. Where nethack or moria concentrate on monster slashing, omega instead has a much better storyline and interesting quests. Much humor can be found throughout the game, and the character generation sequence is worth reading for its entertainment value alone. The snippet of code about ghosts is from that part of the game. You can download omega from http://www.alcyone.com/max/projects/omega/. Try it, you won't regret it.
And he had Iraq's weapons of mass destruction with him.
> In many cases she will leave with a large part of
> your money, and may also get support payments for > years afterwords.
Let me enlighten you, grasshopper: there is such a thing called the "prenuptual agreement", which can prevent things like that. It is advisable to talk to your future wife about money, custody of children, support payments, and other such things before you actually need to talk about them, since after the divorce you will likely not get along too well and any such debates would not go well. It is much better to have the discussion while you still love each other and are capable of making rational decisions untainted by negative emotions.
> There is always someone in the world who can do
> something that you did, better, and that's what
> OSS is, doesn't that guy get it?
Funny, I always thought it was the other way around - you can always do a better job writing the program than whoever wrote it, and that's what OSS is. That's why most OSS projects get started anyway. That's why we have forks and rewrites and upgrades and people who say "what moron wrote this? I bet I could do better than that." Thinking that everyone except you is a good programmer might end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, and for that very reason I would strongly suggest you reconsider your motivations. It's all right to work on OSS if you think you can do a better job, but it is an abomination to do a rotten job, dump it on SourceForge and expect other people to clean it up.
> if that girl suddenly starts liking me because
> of my "big-load-o-cash"(tm), I probably wont like
> her anymore.
I think that if you are reading slashdot, you probably can not afford to be so picky.
I wonder if there are any openings at NASA for a "Radiation testing dummy. An exciting opportunity in space research available on the space station. The perks include travel in space, room (well, it really depends on what you call "outside") and board on delicious standard space rations. The ideal candidate would have some spacefaring experience, but training can be provided. Must not be overweight or overheight; must be a team player and have good communication skills. Send a resume and three character references to jobs@nasa.gov"
> beginning programmers spend more time debugging code than they do writing code,
> so why isn't that activity stressed?
Because you should know what your code is doing. If you can not figure out which piece of code is failing you either have a bad design, where the division of labour is inadequate, or an inadequate error reporting mechanism. When I have a bug and I find the cause, I always try to figure out how the error reporting could be improved. Throw those exceptions, put in those asserts, and print clarification messages for errors whenever you can (probably with an #ifndef NDEBUG around the last). The goal is to be able to diagnose any bug simply by looking at the error message, which I can already do in most cases thanks to the aforementioned practices.
I just can't get out of my mind that ludicrous ending where the aging Sen.Jellison dramatically gets up and sends his minions to "give our children the lightning!" Their idea of good government did not appeal much to me either.
Everybody knows that if you want to stop a killer asteroid, all you have to do is change the gravitational constant of the universe for a few seconds. Trivial, really... Ow, my back!
The hard part about working with MADMEN is making sure they stay on your side when they get to the asteroid...
> What on earth (or on Mars) could we possibly take away from this experience?
Rule 3: Never ignore the return value from open.
You might not be able to recover from every possible thing that might ever go wrong, but there is no excuse for not checking for a file creation error. If there is only one error you check for, it should be that. And there is no excuse for dying after not being able to create a file either. You should simply report the error and return to idle.
> What matters is that you show up to work on time and work for eight hours.
Let's have a poll here: how many people on this forum have an eight-hour work day? Anybody? Anybody at all?
Ayn Rand seems to be losing 5 to 2 in this forum. I am losing faith in nerds.
Read "Anthem" by Ayn Rand to find out exactly what would happen if more people in the world were motivated by altruism rather than the almighty dollar.
He would need to invent transparent chocolate first, and if that can not be a billion dollar business, then transparent aluminum most certainly will be.
Surely, with such detailed instructions, any self respecting nerd can grow his own diamond. With proper dopant control you can get the color to exactly match her eyes, beating by many leagues the jock who is stuck having to purchase an overpriced hunk of colorless rock.