That's not even the worst of it. I'm a Gentoo user though I'm not proud of it mainly because it is too hard to keep the system up to date unless downloading and compiling updates every weekend is your idea of fun.
The issue I had was I didn't keep the system always updated. So it worked fine for about half year. Then my kernel was a little outdated. No biggie, I'll just keep using the existing stable ebuilds. Then stable ebuilds started getting dropped. Ok, well guess I'll stay with the older versions. Then my compiler was unsupported. Ok, I just won't update I guess. Then came a day when I wanted to install some new program only to find that I needed some other package updated. And it turned out the package was something critical like shadow which required a kernel update but I could get the new kernel unless I update 10 billion other things one of which included the compiler so there went a weekend into recompiling my entire system just to use a new piece of software.
Another really annoying thing is when they mark an ebuild stable and then take it back so when you sync your system lo-and-behold you're running a hard masked package! Shame on you! Better downgrade or else! But wait, I already tried the "downgraded" version and it sucked, screw you portage.
For my next OS or linux distro, I'm probably going to try FreeBSD or Solaris (I want to use ZFS). If not and I still need a linux box, I'm definitely jumping on the Ubuntu bandwagon. Though I will admit that Gentoo was a good learning experience (I can troubleshoot many more issues much faster than I could before), but it isn't a good everyday user experience where having it just work is much more important than understanding why it works.
It's clear you don't fully understand compiler technology because you chose the wrong argument to backup your claim. I agree that recompiling isn't always necessary or the right thing to do. The whole idea behind compiling is that you compile once and from that point on you run "fast."
The main reason your argument is flawed is because there is no magic combination of compiler optimizations that will work optimally for every program. For example program A might run faster if compiler optimizations N was followed by M but program B might run faster if optimizations M was followed by N (note there are no such optimizations 'M' and 'N', they're just variables). In fact, some optimizations have a potential to degrade performance under certain conditions. Correctly compiling for optimization is a very hard problem because you need to determine what optimizations will even give you any benefit (this varies depending on the source code and hardware) and in what order to apply those optimizations.
To make the problem harder, certain optimizations may make overall performance faster (less time to execute) but system resource usage will increase dramatically. I took an undergraduate course on compiler optimizations and one of our projects was to benchmark a program based on different choices of optimizations. One of the optimizations called trace scheduling tended to generate some really nice performance gains. However, because it caused more parallelism more of the cpu's units where used and many paths in the code were taken that did not need to be taken. This cause the cpu to use significantly more power than the non-optimized version. So while this optimization increased performance, it could hurt under conditions where power is not freely available.
Finally, you may simply not know the best order of optimizations for a certain program. In this case you could have the compiler spit out all the possible combinations but that will take an insanely long time to not only compile but test. So you have to ask yourself, "how long do I want to be compiling?" One solution is to go purchase some time on a super computer to get your results quicker, but that is only a trade off of time for money. The end result may still be the same as you might find your optimizations were already optimal for your set of optimizations.
So I'm not convinced that we need to totally give up on compiling. At the same time I'm not convinced that everyone should be recompiling their sources just because they don't want a dependency on this and that. The real situation is there are a set of common platforms most people run, therefore we just need to target those common sets and compile for those different flavors. Right now most distributions just compile to be generic. I don't blame them either as compiler optimization selection is a very time consuming problem.
Ultimately, we don't know if our binaries could be running faster, but just because we aren't, doesn't mean everyone should stop trying.
Content authors that choose not to have ads should still have that option. There's a lot of home grown content on youtube that currently has no embedded ads. The content provider should ultimately have the choice in determining whether or not they want ads (commercials) displayed in their content (and at what points). Furthermore, a portion of the ad revenue should go directly to the content provider in the same style as adsense.
This scheme would probably really start to kill broadcast television since a show can now use youtube as the medium to make money rather than regular TV time. It would also make it much easier for content providers to connect to viewers as the viewers now ultimately are in control of revenue streams and once a video is published, it remains there always (or at least we hope for a very long time).
H.264 is great but it does nothing to address the container format like AVI, MP4, MKV. I honestly prefer MKV as it is an open spec and has a lot of nice features. AVI has been dragged along with windows and MP4 while ok, doesn't do some things well like subtitles. You can essentially dump H.264 streams into any of the three container formats (AVI is a little bit of an issue but it can be done), but because there's no standard, you end up installing all of the splitters for each of the containers. That is a pain in the ass.
They need to come up with a standard container, or a container like MKV needs to gain massive popularity. It's getting pretty annoying having to install three different components (player, codec, and splitter) to play a file. Mplayer has everything bundled but I think it could use more interface work.
There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264.
You can gain free hard disk space as a trade off for a small but not noticeable loss in quality and increased processing power required to play the media.
You're forgetting that Google has one large disadvantage. Being the top search engine means the best traffic. So all of the "SEO" people and aspiring blogs/estores/media attempt to push their pages to the top of the list. As such Google's search quality has degraded significantly.
Their algorithm is also showing significant weaknesses. If you Google a term like a historical figure or a popular person's name, a wikipedia result is always near the top. This isn't necessarily bad as a good portion of the time a person may want to read the wikipedia article. But what if you've already read the wikipedia article or have no use for it and were intending to find other resources? Suddenly that search result was useless. Wikipedia is already well known that I don't feel that it's search result needs to be included in the search results; most people already know when they want to look something up on wikipedia.
So with these two combined facts, I find that the first page of results on Google is becoming more and more useless. I continually have to keep playing tricks with Google to get the first search results to be useful, but I'm knowledgeable enough to get by. Many other users are probably hopeless in getting adequate and useful search results from Google anymore.
Google is degenerating into a marketing battleground and there is no significant hope for things improving anytime soon... unless a couple of guys startup their own search engine in a basement that is vastly superior to what's currently out there and then make money off of advertising...oh wait.
It's funny. All of the vista complaints are similar to the win2k vs win98se days. I remember putting win2k on my computer only to find that there was no sound card driver for my system and none could be found for a couple months. So I went back to win98. Then people did the whole benchmark think and proclaimed win98se to be the "gaming platform". Eventually people caved in. Hardware/software was built to work with win2k and before you knew it everyone had win2k.
I like analog because then the cable company doesn't have to get me to pay them an extra $5 or $10 for a cheapo cable box and an additional fee for having "digital" cable. Furthermore, I know how the tech works and I know it's making them burn, so to me, it make me feel all good inside knowing that their profit margin is quite low.
Now, if they had worthy quality digital video, CHEAPER rates (digital is cheaper idiots), cable boxes that didn't take 2 seconds to change a channel, and idiot techs that are "required" to setup your tvs with additional fees per each tv, then maybe I'd reconsider. But seriously their business is driven by using digital as a marketing front with more gadets and fees to profit from while service only gets worse.
Seeing how TV is never going to come in decent quality in both video quality and content quality from the cable tv and entertainment companies, I seriously hope youtube and internet pipes get bigger so that the consumers will actually have choice again and not fed crap just to get 1 interesting channel out of 80 useless ones.
I'm ready to switch search engines now. It's getting harder every day to actually use Google's search to find useful results. People are continuously attempting to SEO their ebusinesses onto the front page of Google. So rather than returning useful resources I basically get advertisements in the search results. Add on the side ads and sometimes the ads that appear at the top and I begin to wonder why I even tried it in the first place. Unfortunately I haven't seen a compelling alternative and I think even if one did show up, Google would just buy them out.
So if you shoot your own movies in high definition, you're not going to be able to watch them that way on Vista. It's not a question of steering away from DRM-stricken media, unless it's the Vista-plagued hard drive you're talking about.
The article conveniently ignores the details. Vista is required to degrade DRM content if the output device doesn't support HDCP. Most computer monitors don't support HDCP. So even though people have Vista, they may not have the hardware requirements to watch the DRM'ed movie. So the fault isn't Vista, it is DRM. That means if you shoot your own high definition movie, without DRM, then you will be able to watch it on Vista on whatever hardware you want. Media degradation only applies to DRM media.
Yeah the tests are pretty lame. I'd like to see a full disk write/read graph and benchmarks that actually exploit the structure/capabilities of the disk. For example if I create a partition with the first 10% of the disk, how will performance on that partition compare to the last 10%? The answer is pretty obvious (the first 10% will have better than the last 10%, duh!) but the question is by how much. That sets the boundaries for best and worst case write speeds when the disk is written to sequentially.
Math is the basics to any technical, engineering, scientific, and business areas. While it won't help you with your everyday life, it can help you understand what all of those "mad" scientists are talking about and possibly help you call their bluffs. If you need some real world application, think finance and gambling. Most people simply take things "on faith" in these areas and get burned really bad by it. Had you had the basic math background to understand what's really going on, it will make you less prone to getting ripped off and help you with your finances.
I'm against any school attempting to restrict or reduce the requirements on students, partially because I felt that going through stricter requirements helped me out in the end. It took a while, and it wasn't necessarily "fun," but in the end it eventually comes together and you'll learn a lot. If the curriculum keeps getting watered down, the students will become lazier and end up less aware. They'll start questioning why they even need to learn anything in the first place. If the curriculum is so small, they may not even find anything that stimulates them.
Schools need to focus on expanding their curriculum or teaching students more. That is what education is about, not test averages, drop-out rates, or acceptance rates. It's about learning something. Until schools and the general population gets that, all of these stupid changes will only fail.
I'm going to take advice on hiring programmers from a Perl cool-aid drinker. Sure, just the very minute I get my brain replaced with a cauliflower. Perl is an horrifically bad language. It's called "write-only" for a reason. It makes great programmers produce merely adequate code, makes good programmers produce bad code, and makes bad programmers think they're great. Feh. A properly trained, incentivized and provisioned Java team can run rings around a Perl team in terms of working code produced, as well as (more importantly) cost to develop and cost to maintain.
If you need a language to keep you from doing bad things, that already suggests that you're a bad programmer. However, I won't deny that there exist bad programmers and as such the language should try to prevent them from doing bad things.
However, on the flame-bait portion of the post: I have experience in both Java and Perl and a number of other things. In the early days yes, Perl was a very bad language and encouraged bad practices. As time went on, things were implemented to help prevent these things. For example everything now has scope and if used correctly, it is actually a little tricky to mix bad code that ignores scope rules and good code that does follow scope rules. Things like the use strict; pragma and my declarations make Perl much more usable and maintainable. Somethings could be better, but it is quite obvious that Perl people are getting it, even more so than some Java people. There are actually a number of benefits to using Perl but obvious you with your closed mind and lack of knowledge refuse to accept that.
Now on to Java. I've worked with Java lot as well. One of the best laid out languages in terms of built-in classes that are ready to use. But it comes at a cost: things get deprecated and now your code won't work if you move to the next version. Instead you're stuck trying to hack a way to get multiple VMs to play nicely on people's machines or you're forced to upgrade the code. Then there's J2EE and all sorts of technologies built on top of Java. Java while organized and has some really good clean syntax, fails miserably at compatibility and packaging of libraries and software. For example if I want to use any specific technology beyond the basic servlet and jsp, I better be prepared to read and read some more about configuring my IDE, classpath and such to use the correct JARs. Then once I've gotten my head over that, the community will start working on the next whiz-bang stuff and now everything I currently use is obsolete. That's because the Java world seems to love building rather than maintaining. If something new comes along, they'd rather deprecate the existing "old" solution and add a new one rather than fix the old. The result is you're always outdated and there's too much documentation to read. I don't mind learning new things, but in the Java world the lifetime of each technology is simply too short to be useful for anyone.
Perl on the other hand has adopted a better model in my opinion. All packages and libraries are installed to the host system and often being some sort of unix, you work directly on the server. Each module on cpan.org is expected to: configure itself, test itself, and install itself. That means when I find a module that can help me or I'd like to use, I do the following:
perl Makefile.PL make make test make install
If a dependency doesn't exist, I will be told. If a test fails I will be told. If I don't care about a couple of test cases failing, I can still install the module. It is very clear to me what is missing and to what degree something is failing (failed test cases). It doesn't get any simpler than that. In Java, you might need an additional JAR but you won't be told until you compile/run where you'll get a nasty message that something is missing. So much for automated testi
I used to think like that, that I could always rewrite things in a shorter amount of time than it would take for me to keep maintaining it in the long run. I was right, to a degree, but in the end I was more wrong than right.
The issue came up when I actually took software engineering courses and when I was forced to go back to my own code and fix it years later. Even stuff I thought was beautifully documented at the time wasn't. Sure, it was designed well enough, could easily be fixed, but there was always a missing step before getting to that fix which was understanding why, how, and what cause me to write that code.
So I've given up on the, "I'll just rewrite everything" mentality only when I encounter something that either, is not finished or is too broken. In most cases, the application is working to a degree, therefore the choice is always to maintain it even if the code quality isn't very high.
The only project I have a lot of confidence in my entire career is the very first project I worked on when I started my full time software engineer position more than 2 years ago. And the reason isn't because the code is perfect, in fact it could be better. The reason is because the documentation is complete. And I don't mean documentation as in commenting every method and class (though it has that as well), but up to date requirements documentation, design documentation (no code), and testing documentation and test cases. The reason I'm so confident in that project is because I know for a fact that if I leave tomorrow, the next guy can pick up the documents (not the code) and know exactly why that project was create, what it was intended to solve, and how it solves that problem without reading a single line of code.
So going back to the "I can rewrite that in 6 months" idea: you may think you can rewrite it in 6 months, but you can't. All you're doing is reimplementing the same code and when the next guy comes around, he's just going to think the same because your 6 month estimate didn't include adequate requirements, design, and testing documentation. Instead, if you think "I can write the documentation in 6 months" then you're thinking on the right track. The documentation is independent of the implementation and will help any developer later more than a billion comments will in the source. You'll even find that the "spaghetti code" isn't so much spaghetti anymore because you actually understand the problem better. Suddenly, even if the code disappeared and you were forced to rewrite it, the reimplementation would take a very short amount of time because the surrounding documents were already prepared. But as long as you understand that the problem, it won't be necessary because it has very little benefit.
So whenever you get the bright idea of "rewriting code" don't rewrite it. Investigate and document it. That is more useful than throwing more new code at the problem.
I find that all of the projects I have low confidence in now are the projects that lack adequate requirements, design, and testing documentation. That's because the quality of the code is very trivial compared to if in plain English or diagrams it is explained how the software is intended to behave and why. As you might wonder, why haven't I had more confidence in any of my recent projects since I started? Well that's because documentation doesn't produce a working solution therefore it is skipped in the event of short time frames. Recently I've been pressured a lot to get things done even faster than they actually require. As such I can't document them as well. I still try, but it's never complete. I don't have a good solution (and I don't think a good one exists) other than to tell my boss that quality will suffer if adequate time isn't allocated to doing these things correctly.
For having all the documentation and tools available to you to actually fix the problem, he didn't ask for too much.
We've had an issue with one of our really old dated systems (94') which is proprietary. The company wanted to charge us $10k a day to have a lesser tech come and work on it--as much as 3x more for a qualified technician. The cost could be justified as the problem was causing potentially thousands of dollars lost per a month due to lost productivity with the tool, however, there was no guarantee on their part that after a day of work, the problem would be fixed. So me and another engineer decided to see if we could determine how to fix the problem and after just under a week of searching (in addition to some of our other activities) we found it. So the company problem lost about $3k for us to spend time working on the problem but didn't have to pay up the vendor for support and saves on improved productivity with the tool.
So in my book, your uber programmer charged a low rate for a lot of work.
And, frankly, little boys are socialized to think technology=cool much more than little girls are. We are a product of our upbringing to some extent.
That is the problem. Our society encourages the girls to play with barbie, dolls, and tea pots while the boy gets lego bricks, plastic water guns, and skateboards. Until it is solved at that level, issues like this will always come up.
I'm not asking for the option to instantly spawn characters at high levels. Leveling is an excellent way to allow players to understand and master a class. However, the amount of time required to do so is too much.
I don't think so. Any game that contains character "levels" is broken unless it is a console single player genre where it doesn't really matter. Levels are a weak excuse to give a player a goal: the highest level can be level 60 or 70, therefore you feel as though it is necessary to attain that level. That is the very flaw because now the player is given a goal, the game has a structure, and everything else goes out the window...
Until the player realizes the flaw: the level means nothing other than a PvE treadmill. The first time on the treadmill was probably the best. The second time, not so much. The third it starts to become a chore. The problem is knowledge about the game is retained regardless of the avatar the player controls. Therefore, the character should not grow at the game designer's intention, but at the player's intention. If the player already possesses the knowledge to use a skill, he should be allowed to use it, not be forced to go through the same mundane tasks to achieve proficiency in it that may not even teach him how to actually use the true potential.
MMO games need to change. They need to expand horizontally instead of vertically (levels, high level areas, high level gear, etc). Some would call this approach a "skill" based approach where a player learns each skill independently of the avatar's level. In fact, the avatar may have no level associated with it. The problem with this idea is it doesn't present customer lock-in because there in fact is no treadmill. But I wager that such an approach will be better than any treadmill approach. If the player attains enjoyment through playing the game, not because of a treadmill, but because it is actually a fun game, then that will keep it in business for just as long as any treadmill burdened game.
Entire system fails? Your car stalls, you throw it into neutral, and coast to the side of the road (PS, you breaks will still work, just have to push harder)
My coworker recently had an issue with a brand new Jeep. His wife was driving it only at about 5 mph and the brakes suddenly locked up. The brake pedal flew forward and would not press/release. Pushing the clutch down made the car roll backward. Fortunately the emergency brake was still working. After about a minute, the brakes reset and were functional again.
So a word of caution, the engineering isn't always perfect so don't rely on the system defaulting to a "good" mode.
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That's not even the worst of it. I'm a Gentoo user though I'm not proud of it mainly because it is too hard to keep the system up to date unless downloading and compiling updates every weekend is your idea of fun.
The issue I had was I didn't keep the system always updated. So it worked fine for about half year. Then my kernel was a little outdated. No biggie, I'll just keep using the existing stable ebuilds. Then stable ebuilds started getting dropped. Ok, well guess I'll stay with the older versions. Then my compiler was unsupported. Ok, I just won't update I guess. Then came a day when I wanted to install some new program only to find that I needed some other package updated. And it turned out the package was something critical like shadow which required a kernel update but I could get the new kernel unless I update 10 billion other things one of which included the compiler so there went a weekend into recompiling my entire system just to use a new piece of software.
Another really annoying thing is when they mark an ebuild stable and then take it back so when you sync your system lo-and-behold you're running a hard masked package! Shame on you! Better downgrade or else! But wait, I already tried the "downgraded" version and it sucked, screw you portage.
For my next OS or linux distro, I'm probably going to try FreeBSD or Solaris (I want to use ZFS). If not and I still need a linux box, I'm definitely jumping on the Ubuntu bandwagon. Though I will admit that Gentoo was a good learning experience (I can troubleshoot many more issues much faster than I could before), but it isn't a good everyday user experience where having it just work is much more important than understanding why it works.
It's clear you don't fully understand compiler technology because you chose the wrong argument to backup your claim. I agree that recompiling isn't always necessary or the right thing to do. The whole idea behind compiling is that you compile once and from that point on you run "fast."
The main reason your argument is flawed is because there is no magic combination of compiler optimizations that will work optimally for every program. For example program A might run faster if compiler optimizations N was followed by M but program B might run faster if optimizations M was followed by N (note there are no such optimizations 'M' and 'N', they're just variables). In fact, some optimizations have a potential to degrade performance under certain conditions. Correctly compiling for optimization is a very hard problem because you need to determine what optimizations will even give you any benefit (this varies depending on the source code and hardware) and in what order to apply those optimizations.
To make the problem harder, certain optimizations may make overall performance faster (less time to execute) but system resource usage will increase dramatically. I took an undergraduate course on compiler optimizations and one of our projects was to benchmark a program based on different choices of optimizations. One of the optimizations called trace scheduling tended to generate some really nice performance gains. However, because it caused more parallelism more of the cpu's units where used and many paths in the code were taken that did not need to be taken. This cause the cpu to use significantly more power than the non-optimized version. So while this optimization increased performance, it could hurt under conditions where power is not freely available.
Finally, you may simply not know the best order of optimizations for a certain program. In this case you could have the compiler spit out all the possible combinations but that will take an insanely long time to not only compile but test. So you have to ask yourself, "how long do I want to be compiling?" One solution is to go purchase some time on a super computer to get your results quicker, but that is only a trade off of time for money. The end result may still be the same as you might find your optimizations were already optimal for your set of optimizations.
So I'm not convinced that we need to totally give up on compiling. At the same time I'm not convinced that everyone should be recompiling their sources just because they don't want a dependency on this and that. The real situation is there are a set of common platforms most people run, therefore we just need to target those common sets and compile for those different flavors. Right now most distributions just compile to be generic. I don't blame them either as compiler optimization selection is a very time consuming problem.
Ultimately, we don't know if our binaries could be running faster, but just because we aren't, doesn't mean everyone should stop trying.
Well, if that's the case, when is this reality TV series going to air? What will be the title of the show? Survivor: Mars? The Mars Bachelors?
Content authors that choose not to have ads should still have that option. There's a lot of home grown content on youtube that currently has no embedded ads. The content provider should ultimately have the choice in determining whether or not they want ads (commercials) displayed in their content (and at what points). Furthermore, a portion of the ad revenue should go directly to the content provider in the same style as adsense.
This scheme would probably really start to kill broadcast television since a show can now use youtube as the medium to make money rather than regular TV time. It would also make it much easier for content providers to connect to viewers as the viewers now ultimately are in control of revenue streams and once a video is published, it remains there always (or at least we hope for a very long time).
Cash and Short Term Investments: 11,935.92 million as of 2007-03-31. Source.
Take one for the team Google!
H.264 is great but it does nothing to address the container format like AVI, MP4, MKV. I honestly prefer MKV as it is an open spec and has a lot of nice features. AVI has been dragged along with windows and MP4 while ok, doesn't do some things well like subtitles. You can essentially dump H.264 streams into any of the three container formats (AVI is a little bit of an issue but it can be done), but because there's no standard, you end up installing all of the splitters for each of the containers. That is a pain in the ass.
They need to come up with a standard container, or a container like MKV needs to gain massive popularity. It's getting pretty annoying having to install three different components (player, codec, and splitter) to play a file. Mplayer has everything bundled but I think it could use more interface work.
There is nothing to gain by converting Divx to H.264.
You can gain free hard disk space as a trade off for a small but not noticeable loss in quality and increased processing power required to play the media.
You're forgetting that Google has one large disadvantage. Being the top search engine means the best traffic. So all of the "SEO" people and aspiring blogs/estores/media attempt to push their pages to the top of the list. As such Google's search quality has degraded significantly.
Their algorithm is also showing significant weaknesses. If you Google a term like a historical figure or a popular person's name, a wikipedia result is always near the top. This isn't necessarily bad as a good portion of the time a person may want to read the wikipedia article. But what if you've already read the wikipedia article or have no use for it and were intending to find other resources? Suddenly that search result was useless. Wikipedia is already well known that I don't feel that it's search result needs to be included in the search results; most people already know when they want to look something up on wikipedia.
So with these two combined facts, I find that the first page of results on Google is becoming more and more useless. I continually have to keep playing tricks with Google to get the first search results to be useful, but I'm knowledgeable enough to get by. Many other users are probably hopeless in getting adequate and useful search results from Google anymore.
Google is degenerating into a marketing battleground and there is no significant hope for things improving anytime soon... unless a couple of guys startup their own search engine in a basement that is vastly superior to what's currently out there and then make money off of advertising...oh wait.
It's funny. All of the vista complaints are similar to the win2k vs win98se days. I remember putting win2k on my computer only to find that there was no sound card driver for my system and none could be found for a couple months. So I went back to win98. Then people did the whole benchmark think and proclaimed win98se to be the "gaming platform". Eventually people caved in. Hardware/software was built to work with win2k and before you knew it everyone had win2k.
I like analog because then the cable company doesn't have to get me to pay them an extra $5 or $10 for a cheapo cable box and an additional fee for having "digital" cable. Furthermore, I know how the tech works and I know it's making them burn, so to me, it make me feel all good inside knowing that their profit margin is quite low.
Now, if they had worthy quality digital video, CHEAPER rates (digital is cheaper idiots), cable boxes that didn't take 2 seconds to change a channel, and idiot techs that are "required" to setup your tvs with additional fees per each tv, then maybe I'd reconsider. But seriously their business is driven by using digital as a marketing front with more gadets and fees to profit from while service only gets worse.
Seeing how TV is never going to come in decent quality in both video quality and content quality from the cable tv and entertainment companies, I seriously hope youtube and internet pipes get bigger so that the consumers will actually have choice again and not fed crap just to get 1 interesting channel out of 80 useless ones.
I'm ready to switch search engines now. It's getting harder every day to actually use Google's search to find useful results. People are continuously attempting to SEO their ebusinesses onto the front page of Google. So rather than returning useful resources I basically get advertisements in the search results. Add on the side ads and sometimes the ads that appear at the top and I begin to wonder why I even tried it in the first place. Unfortunately I haven't seen a compelling alternative and I think even if one did show up, Google would just buy them out.
So if you shoot your own movies in high definition, you're not going to be able to watch them that way on Vista. It's not a question of steering away from DRM-stricken media, unless it's the Vista-plagued hard drive you're talking about.
The article conveniently ignores the details. Vista is required to degrade DRM content if the output device doesn't support HDCP. Most computer monitors don't support HDCP. So even though people have Vista, they may not have the hardware requirements to watch the DRM'ed movie. So the fault isn't Vista, it is DRM. That means if you shoot your own high definition movie, without DRM, then you will be able to watch it on Vista on whatever hardware you want. Media degradation only applies to DRM media.
Yeah the tests are pretty lame. I'd like to see a full disk write/read graph and benchmarks that actually exploit the structure/capabilities of the disk. For example if I create a partition with the first 10% of the disk, how will performance on that partition compare to the last 10%? The answer is pretty obvious (the first 10% will have better than the last 10%, duh!) but the question is by how much. That sets the boundaries for best and worst case write speeds when the disk is written to sequentially.
Math is the basics to any technical, engineering, scientific, and business areas. While it won't help you with your everyday life, it can help you understand what all of those "mad" scientists are talking about and possibly help you call their bluffs. If you need some real world application, think finance and gambling. Most people simply take things "on faith" in these areas and get burned really bad by it. Had you had the basic math background to understand what's really going on, it will make you less prone to getting ripped off and help you with your finances.
I'm against any school attempting to restrict or reduce the requirements on students, partially because I felt that going through stricter requirements helped me out in the end. It took a while, and it wasn't necessarily "fun," but in the end it eventually comes together and you'll learn a lot. If the curriculum keeps getting watered down, the students will become lazier and end up less aware. They'll start questioning why they even need to learn anything in the first place. If the curriculum is so small, they may not even find anything that stimulates them.
Schools need to focus on expanding their curriculum or teaching students more. That is what education is about, not test averages, drop-out rates, or acceptance rates. It's about learning something. Until schools and the general population gets that, all of these stupid changes will only fail.
Could you see that this "security" bug could actually be a selling argument FOR the hardware rather than against it?
In the case of some thing like the iphone, yes.
Come up with a "new" protocol and call it tnerroT.
They also renamed me to Linus - what more can a geek ask for? ;-)
Perhaps, relatime overlord?
add enough features and a filesystem begins to look like a source control system
That argument has no weight. See ZFS.
If you need a language to keep you from doing bad things, that already suggests that you're a bad programmer. However, I won't deny that there exist bad programmers and as such the language should try to prevent them from doing bad things.
However, on the flame-bait portion of the post: I have experience in both Java and Perl and a number of other things. In the early days yes, Perl was a very bad language and encouraged bad practices. As time went on, things were implemented to help prevent these things. For example everything now has scope and if used correctly, it is actually a little tricky to mix bad code that ignores scope rules and good code that does follow scope rules. Things like the use strict; pragma and my declarations make Perl much more usable and maintainable. Somethings could be better, but it is quite obvious that Perl people are getting it, even more so than some Java people. There are actually a number of benefits to using Perl but obvious you with your closed mind and lack of knowledge refuse to accept that.
Now on to Java. I've worked with Java lot as well. One of the best laid out languages in terms of built-in classes that are ready to use. But it comes at a cost: things get deprecated and now your code won't work if you move to the next version. Instead you're stuck trying to hack a way to get multiple VMs to play nicely on people's machines or you're forced to upgrade the code. Then there's J2EE and all sorts of technologies built on top of Java. Java while organized and has some really good clean syntax, fails miserably at compatibility and packaging of libraries and software. For example if I want to use any specific technology beyond the basic servlet and jsp, I better be prepared to read and read some more about configuring my IDE, classpath and such to use the correct JARs. Then once I've gotten my head over that, the community will start working on the next whiz-bang stuff and now everything I currently use is obsolete. That's because the Java world seems to love building rather than maintaining. If something new comes along, they'd rather deprecate the existing "old" solution and add a new one rather than fix the old. The result is you're always outdated and there's too much documentation to read. I don't mind learning new things, but in the Java world the lifetime of each technology is simply too short to be useful for anyone.
Perl on the other hand has adopted a better model in my opinion. All packages and libraries are installed to the host system and often being some sort of unix, you work directly on the server. Each module on cpan.org is expected to: configure itself, test itself, and install itself. That means when I find a module that can help me or I'd like to use, I do the following:
If a dependency doesn't exist, I will be told. If a test fails I will be told. If I don't care about a couple of test cases failing, I can still install the module. It is very clear to me what is missing and to what degree something is failing (failed test cases). It doesn't get any simpler than that. In Java, you might need an additional JAR but you won't be told until you compile/run where you'll get a nasty message that something is missing. So much for automated testi
I used to think like that, that I could always rewrite things in a shorter amount of time than it would take for me to keep maintaining it in the long run. I was right, to a degree, but in the end I was more wrong than right.
The issue came up when I actually took software engineering courses and when I was forced to go back to my own code and fix it years later. Even stuff I thought was beautifully documented at the time wasn't. Sure, it was designed well enough, could easily be fixed, but there was always a missing step before getting to that fix which was understanding why, how, and what cause me to write that code.
So I've given up on the, "I'll just rewrite everything" mentality only when I encounter something that either, is not finished or is too broken. In most cases, the application is working to a degree, therefore the choice is always to maintain it even if the code quality isn't very high.
The only project I have a lot of confidence in my entire career is the very first project I worked on when I started my full time software engineer position more than 2 years ago. And the reason isn't because the code is perfect, in fact it could be better. The reason is because the documentation is complete. And I don't mean documentation as in commenting every method and class (though it has that as well), but up to date requirements documentation, design documentation (no code), and testing documentation and test cases. The reason I'm so confident in that project is because I know for a fact that if I leave tomorrow, the next guy can pick up the documents (not the code) and know exactly why that project was create, what it was intended to solve, and how it solves that problem without reading a single line of code.
So going back to the "I can rewrite that in 6 months" idea: you may think you can rewrite it in 6 months, but you can't. All you're doing is reimplementing the same code and when the next guy comes around, he's just going to think the same because your 6 month estimate didn't include adequate requirements, design, and testing documentation. Instead, if you think "I can write the documentation in 6 months" then you're thinking on the right track. The documentation is independent of the implementation and will help any developer later more than a billion comments will in the source. You'll even find that the "spaghetti code" isn't so much spaghetti anymore because you actually understand the problem better. Suddenly, even if the code disappeared and you were forced to rewrite it, the reimplementation would take a very short amount of time because the surrounding documents were already prepared. But as long as you understand that the problem, it won't be necessary because it has very little benefit.
So whenever you get the bright idea of "rewriting code" don't rewrite it. Investigate and document it. That is more useful than throwing more new code at the problem.
I find that all of the projects I have low confidence in now are the projects that lack adequate requirements, design, and testing documentation. That's because the quality of the code is very trivial compared to if in plain English or diagrams it is explained how the software is intended to behave and why. As you might wonder, why haven't I had more confidence in any of my recent projects since I started? Well that's because documentation doesn't produce a working solution therefore it is skipped in the event of short time frames. Recently I've been pressured a lot to get things done even faster than they actually require. As such I can't document them as well. I still try, but it's never complete. I don't have a good solution (and I don't think a good one exists) other than to tell my boss that quality will suffer if adequate time isn't allocated to doing these things correctly.
For having all the documentation and tools available to you to actually fix the problem, he didn't ask for too much.
We've had an issue with one of our really old dated systems (94') which is proprietary. The company wanted to charge us $10k a day to have a lesser tech come and work on it--as much as 3x more for a qualified technician. The cost could be justified as the problem was causing potentially thousands of dollars lost per a month due to lost productivity with the tool, however, there was no guarantee on their part that after a day of work, the problem would be fixed. So me and another engineer decided to see if we could determine how to fix the problem and after just under a week of searching (in addition to some of our other activities) we found it. So the company problem lost about $3k for us to spend time working on the problem but didn't have to pay up the vendor for support and saves on improved productivity with the tool.
So in my book, your uber programmer charged a low rate for a lot of work.
And, frankly, little boys are socialized to think technology=cool much more than little girls are. We are a product of our upbringing to some extent.
That is the problem. Our society encourages the girls to play with barbie, dolls, and tea pots while the boy gets lego bricks, plastic water guns, and skateboards. Until it is solved at that level, issues like this will always come up.
I don't think so. Any game that contains character "levels" is broken unless it is a console single player genre where it doesn't really matter. Levels are a weak excuse to give a player a goal: the highest level can be level 60 or 70, therefore you feel as though it is necessary to attain that level. That is the very flaw because now the player is given a goal, the game has a structure, and everything else goes out the window...
Until the player realizes the flaw: the level means nothing other than a PvE treadmill. The first time on the treadmill was probably the best. The second time, not so much. The third it starts to become a chore. The problem is knowledge about the game is retained regardless of the avatar the player controls. Therefore, the character should not grow at the game designer's intention, but at the player's intention. If the player already possesses the knowledge to use a skill, he should be allowed to use it, not be forced to go through the same mundane tasks to achieve proficiency in it that may not even teach him how to actually use the true potential.
MMO games need to change. They need to expand horizontally instead of vertically (levels, high level areas, high level gear, etc). Some would call this approach a "skill" based approach where a player learns each skill independently of the avatar's level. In fact, the avatar may have no level associated with it. The problem with this idea is it doesn't present customer lock-in because there in fact is no treadmill. But I wager that such an approach will be better than any treadmill approach. If the player attains enjoyment through playing the game, not because of a treadmill, but because it is actually a fun game, then that will keep it in business for just as long as any treadmill burdened game.
My coworker recently had an issue with a brand new Jeep. His wife was driving it only at about 5 mph and the brakes suddenly locked up. The brake pedal flew forward and would not press/release. Pushing the clutch down made the car roll backward. Fortunately the emergency brake was still working. After about a minute, the brakes reset and were functional again.
So a word of caution, the engineering isn't always perfect so don't rely on the system defaulting to a "good" mode.
So what happens when the fud watchers spew out fud? Do they then watch their own fud and create an infinite loop?
This is a terrible idea because it's like fighting fire with fire.