On second thought, maybe you shouldn't click on those links.
Re:Who Cares What Language, It Reeks of Poor Desig
on
Why COBOL Could Come Back
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If software is implemented correctly, it will stand the test of time.
Sturgeon's [Ll]aw applies to software -- except probably with the 90% figure adjusted upward as some function of Moore's law and the observations of Fred Brooks, of Mythical Man-Month fame.
IMHO, after a couple decades of accretion of existing software systems, poorly implemented and even designed software systems are production reality today. If you don't take this into account, you're dealing with an ideal that will statistically exist only 10% or less of the time, and when it does, only when rigorous administration and maintenance is continuously applied to the software.
Re:So most companies are like Lake Woebegone...
on
Subject to Change
·
· Score: 1
... would claim they're... delivering... an above-average... service... to their customers
The full quote is '... would claim they're committed to delivering you a pleasant experience, and are experiencing an above-average call volume for customer service, so please hold while they do the best to be fair to their customers who have already been waiting.'
And since I always get that when I call their customer service, how come they can still claim it's 'above' average?
Distribution compatibility and package management is a big problem for most, if not all developers, and has been for a very long time.
Debian focused on and solved this problem with their FHS (the whole lwn discussion on LSB4 is here), and take packaging and interoperability seriously (they also take distribution seriously, but other distros do that too). But IMHO, Debian represents the amount of rigor, effort, and time it takes to get these non-glamorous 'administrative' things right. In particular, a commitment to 'must pass defined installation/filesystem/interoperability test suite' over 'rpm -i seems to drop stuff in place ok' is historically sufficient to make installation reliable, and you could moot the point as to whether it's necessary now, and importantly, in the future.
If developers provided hints (in the form of a skeleton debian control or rpm spec file) describing even roughly
how their.tar.gz divides into logical installable parts
what dependencies they know it needs to build and run
generally what dirs in the.tar.gz contain libs, executables, docs, and config files
I think it would go a long way towards helping distribution authors. Even a text file (README.packagers.txt) with a couple paragraphs of prose describing this would give a big boost to packagers, and in turn, to the interoperability of the software with others as a good distro constituent. Debian recognized this, and IMHO the sooner developers visualize helping distribution creators by feeding this kind of information forward, the sooner distributions will converge on internal interoperability, leading to higher quality distributions, and subsequently to FLOSS maturing faster.
Scrabulous was a popular, well implemented version of a game I own no less than 4 boards for. i probably have purchased anywhere from 10 -15 boards over the past 20 years.
Not just popular, it was a fabulous, crabulous version!
Why aren't the 'good cops' turning in their corrupt, violent and evil coworkers?
Sorry, until I see more exposure of bad cops from within their departments, I'm lumping the 'good cops' in with the bad cops.
It's well known on the streets that you don't turn in one of your own -- even if you do think they're evil, it can only end badly for you.
one of the hallmarks of that is the kneejerk reaction that every bureaucrat is by nature evil and dishonest.
I had a conversation with an insurance lobbyist on a flight to Boston a couple years ago. She has a lot of dealings with state and federal senators and congresscritters, so I asked her what were the things she discovered in her interactions with them that came as a surprise. Three of them were:
Most of the time, the sens/reps really actually want to do the right thing, the same way you do.
She did have influence over them as a lobbyist, but when they already had an reason to vote one way or another on a bill -- whether they make it clear overtly or not -- there wasn't anything she could do to change their minds, and with experience, she could kind of tell.
For bills that a sen/rep could go one way or another on, as few as three handwritten letters could cause them to revisit the issue.
The first one is relevant here, but the last one has been on my mind since then. Slashpac, anyone?
the metric is not how good a movie is, but rather, how effectively they can trick people into seeing a really bad movie.
Another option is to lower your movie budget to the point where different economics come into play. From the Disaster Movie FAQ:
Q: Why do these movies keep getting made?
A: Even though the "Movie" series has been grossing less and less at the box office, these "films" for lack of a better term cost next to nothing to make and we won't see the end of them until one grosses less than it cost to make.
Maybe the cops have become more annoying to parts of society than the criminals.
I remember reading about someone speaking on the 'Stop Snitchin' campaign. His point was that people on the street should stand up for what's right and be ready to snitch on one of their own -- the day the cops themselves are willing to.
There's the kicker right there. Fine if you want to picket outside, but it's a courtesy that Apple provides personal tech support -- not the most glamorous of jobs -- from fairly knowledgeable people who choose to use their knowledge to help people. Abusing those people (ignoring the abuse of the free service for the moment), is akin to tormenting a seeing-eye dog for fun. If the FSF supports harrassing people, it shouldn't be the poor frontline customer-facing people who don't have a whole lot of pull in the first place -- get attention the right way -- you'll want to read to the last part of the last section to see what I mean.
Disclaimer: I worked in tech support with a bunch of very knowledgeable people for about 4 years. People with that combination of smarts and willingness to help is pretty rare -- consider the (albeit at least partly justifiable) range of complaints about 'family tech support' on this forum.
Again this isn't to say I don't love my dad, or appreciate time spent with him, but I would much rather go sailing, skiing, talk about investing, or just about anything else besides work on math problems with him. It seems this could be a similar situation, a veteran kernel hacker with poor teaching skills could really turn off someone to programming because their insights, ability to see through problems and solve them without needing to express what their brain is actually doing can be extremely detrimental to the learning process and therefore ongoing interest in a subject.
I wish I had modpoints -- argh. This paragraph really beautifully states what a dad's relationship is with his son, and what a teacher's relationship is with a pupil. Being able to teach has something to do with being able to externalize and communicate the thought process between both parties, and for the teacher to be able to temporarily (if not a professional instructor) unlearn enough to be at the student's level.
I think it's both a rare talent and a valuable gift to provide a child. My dad either had the talent or stretched himself to do it -- and I recognize that as an incredibly precious thing both to give and receive.
I don't usually write flaming posts, but C++ as a teaching language ?!?
I agree with both of these points. C++ is not that great as a teaching language, but I've found C Primer Plus and C++ Primer Plus to be excellently written, beautifully expositional books. The way I describe it to people is
the book is thick because it's not dense
you can skip over stuff you do understand
for stuff that's more difficult for you, the friendly, thorough explanation is available -- in my case, pointers was where C Primer Plus really shined
the distance between where you are right now and complete mastery of the foundation of the language is about 2 inches of paper.
With so many books out there, picking one good book that will reliably educate a variety of novices is a minefield. You could commit to a book, really sacrifice your time and attention to the material, and find out only a week later that it wasn't worth the effort. These two books are the only two I've come across that properly reward that sacrifice for the novice, with mastery of what it sets out to teach. Learning C or even C++ from these books provide a strong foundation in expressing concepts in a programming language, and with the complete command of those concepts in that language, it becomes possible to make the bridge over to new languages -- where you'll invariably have to rely on less well-written books.
And when you do, you can take the poorly-conveyed concepts in those, whack them against your solid foundation in C and C++, and watch what parts of them fall apart as poor or wrong description of the new language's features; and which hold together as something to learn and internalize. Without that solid foundation, whacking both bodies of knowledge against each other will make them both fall apart in your head.
The only thing these books are not good for is preparing the novice for the general quality of instructional books out there. But then I'll recommend the poster gently break Sturgeon's Law to his son.
Is their own IT department even remotely considering using anything other than a standard mouse across their own corporate desktop deployment? How about moving forward into the 1930's by using a keyboard layout that wasn't designed to prevent hammers from jamming, or even using a split-keyboard layout for most of the people in their office?
The only thing I can see happening is some kind of multiple-POV camera that looks at your hands and figures out what you're trying to type or where you're trying to move the mouse, without actually needing to have a physical keyboard or mouse. Until then, the mouse, especially an optical one, solves a problem inexpensively, reliably, and at least acceptably.
To my shock, I got an angry call from their HR department, who were actually calling to chew me out for applying even though I was "unqualified" for not having the required 6 years of experience.
The weird thing is that you got a phone call from them. Why would they not just send you a generic rejection letter, but actually make the effort to pick up the phone and take the time to call you personally? Something seems fishy -- like it was posted to satisfy some requirement but could get them in trouble if someone actually found out that it was fake and that they had no intention of filling the position -- if it existed in the first place.
People selfishly look for their representative to represent them best personally, when people instead should have the maturity to look for someone who represents them collectively.
I can't remember where I heard this (NPR?) but there were studies done that showed that people vote for who and what that they identify with, not who and what benefits them most or represents them most closely.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing to see in sports coverage is who won.
And the occasional football injury, hockey injury, hockey fight, etc.
On second thought, maybe you shouldn't click on those links.
If software is implemented correctly, it will stand the test of time.
Sturgeon's [Ll]aw applies to software -- except probably with the 90% figure adjusted upward as some function of Moore's law and the observations of Fred Brooks, of Mythical Man-Month fame.
IMHO, after a couple decades of accretion of existing software systems, poorly implemented and even designed software systems are production reality today. If you don't take this into account, you're dealing with an ideal that will statistically exist only 10% or less of the time, and when it does, only when rigorous administration and maintenance is continuously applied to the software.
The full quote is '... would claim they're committed to delivering you a pleasant experience, and are experiencing an above-average call volume for customer service, so please hold while they do the best to be fair to their customers who have already been waiting.'
And since I always get that when I call their customer service, how come they can still claim it's 'above' average?
Well, at least they're cheaper than day rates.
-Theo, The Cosby Show (and others)
Seriously, I'm wondering how anyone with this man's surname will ever be able to get past this particular problem ...
One smart pill, coming right up.
Distribution compatibility and package management is a big problem for most, if not all developers, and has been for a very long time.
Debian focused on and solved this problem with their FHS (the whole lwn discussion on LSB4 is here), and take packaging and interoperability seriously (they also take distribution seriously, but other distros do that too). But IMHO, Debian represents the amount of rigor, effort, and time it takes to get these non-glamorous 'administrative' things right. In particular, a commitment to 'must pass defined installation/filesystem/interoperability test suite' over 'rpm -i seems to drop stuff in place ok' is historically sufficient to make installation reliable, and you could moot the point as to whether it's necessary now, and importantly, in the future.
If developers provided hints (in the form of a skeleton debian control or rpm spec file) describing even roughly
I think it would go a long way towards helping distribution authors. Even a text file (README.packagers.txt) with a couple paragraphs of prose describing this would give a big boost to packagers, and in turn, to the interoperability of the software with others as a good distro constituent. Debian recognized this, and IMHO the sooner developers visualize helping distribution creators by feeding this kind of information forward, the sooner distributions will converge on internal interoperability, leading to higher quality distributions, and subsequently to FLOSS maturing faster.
Why get a printed one when you can get a nice hand-blown one from someone well-known in our field?
Scrabulous was a popular, well implemented version of a game I own no less than 4 boards for. i probably have purchased anywhere from 10 -15 boards over the past 20 years.
Not just popular, it was a fabulous, crabulous version!
Why aren't the 'good cops' turning in their corrupt, violent and evil coworkers? Sorry, until I see more exposure of bad cops from within their departments, I'm lumping the 'good cops' in with the bad cops.
It's well known on the streets that you don't turn in one of your own -- even if you do think they're evil, it can only end badly for you.
one of the hallmarks of that is the kneejerk reaction that every bureaucrat is by nature evil and dishonest.
I had a conversation with an insurance lobbyist on a flight to Boston a couple years ago. She has a lot of dealings with state and federal senators and congresscritters, so I asked her what were the things she discovered in her interactions with them that came as a surprise. Three of them were:
The first one is relevant here, but the last one has been on my mind since then. Slashpac, anyone?
the metric is not how good a movie is, but rather, how effectively they can trick people into seeing a really bad movie.
Another option is to lower your movie budget to the point where different economics come into play. From the Disaster Movie FAQ:
Q: Why do these movies keep getting made? A: Even though the "Movie" series has been grossing less and less at the box office, these "films" for lack of a better term cost next to nothing to make and we won't see the end of them until one grosses less than it cost to make.
Maybe the cops have become more annoying to parts of society than the criminals.
I remember reading about someone speaking on the 'Stop Snitchin' campaign. His point was that people on the street should stand up for what's right and be ready to snitch on one of their own -- the day the cops themselves are willing to.
block Apple's customers from getting tech support
There's the kicker right there. Fine if you want to picket outside, but it's a courtesy that Apple provides personal tech support -- not the most glamorous of jobs -- from fairly knowledgeable people who choose to use their knowledge to help people. Abusing those people (ignoring the abuse of the free service for the moment), is akin to tormenting a seeing-eye dog for fun. If the FSF supports harrassing people, it shouldn't be the poor frontline customer-facing people who don't have a whole lot of pull in the first place -- get attention the right way -- you'll want to read to the last part of the last section to see what I mean.
Disclaimer: I worked in tech support with a bunch of very knowledgeable people for about 4 years. People with that combination of smarts and willingness to help is pretty rare -- consider the (albeit at least partly justifiable) range of complaints about 'family tech support' on this forum.
An upcoming Debian release!
Here on Slashdot, a Wife is at the very least a mythical creature like a Gorgon or a Chimera
Hey, even mythical creatures can have problems relating to the fairer sex.
This one doesn't even leave a bruise.
So no, if he doesn't have the drive to learn and problem solve he's better off playing ... or [with] girls since he's a teen.
Why not both?
Again this isn't to say I don't love my dad, or appreciate time spent with him, but I would much rather go sailing, skiing, talk about investing, or just about anything else besides work on math problems with him. It seems this could be a similar situation, a veteran kernel hacker with poor teaching skills could really turn off someone to programming because their insights, ability to see through problems and solve them without needing to express what their brain is actually doing can be extremely detrimental to the learning process and therefore ongoing interest in a subject.
I wish I had modpoints -- argh. This paragraph really beautifully states what a dad's relationship is with his son, and what a teacher's relationship is with a pupil. Being able to teach has something to do with being able to externalize and communicate the thought process between both parties, and for the teacher to be able to temporarily (if not a professional instructor) unlearn enough to be at the student's level.
I think it's both a rare talent and a valuable gift to provide a child. My dad either had the talent or stretched himself to do it -- and I recognize that as an incredibly precious thing both to give and receive.
C++ primer plus by stephen prata.
I don't usually write flaming posts, but C++ as a teaching language ?!?
I agree with both of these points. C++ is not that great as a teaching language, but I've found C Primer Plus and C++ Primer Plus to be excellently written, beautifully expositional books. The way I describe it to people is
With so many books out there, picking one good book that will reliably educate a variety of novices is a minefield. You could commit to a book, really sacrifice your time and attention to the material, and find out only a week later that it wasn't worth the effort. These two books are the only two I've come across that properly reward that sacrifice for the novice, with mastery of what it sets out to teach. Learning C or even C++ from these books provide a strong foundation in expressing concepts in a programming language, and with the complete command of those concepts in that language, it becomes possible to make the bridge over to new languages -- where you'll invariably have to rely on less well-written books.
And when you do, you can take the poorly-conveyed concepts in those, whack them against your solid foundation in C and C++, and watch what parts of them fall apart as poor or wrong description of the new language's features; and which hold together as something to learn and internalize. Without that solid foundation, whacking both bodies of knowledge against each other will make them both fall apart in your head.
The only thing these books are not good for is preparing the novice for the general quality of instructional books out there. But then I'll recommend the poster gently break Sturgeon's Law to his son.
These analysts are idiots.
Is their own IT department even remotely considering using anything other than a standard mouse across their own corporate desktop deployment? How about moving forward into the 1930's by using a keyboard layout that wasn't designed to prevent hammers from jamming, or even using a split-keyboard layout for most of the people in their office?
The only thing I can see happening is some kind of multiple-POV camera that looks at your hands and figures out what you're trying to type or where you're trying to move the mouse, without actually needing to have a physical keyboard or mouse. Until then, the mouse, especially an optical one, solves a problem inexpensively, reliably, and at least acceptably.
No paperclip, but how about a grape ape?
Vista is a fatass riced-out American SUV with flat tires and the brakes stuck halfway on. Dump that POS and try again.
And a cupholder *THIS BIG*. And with regards to Powell Motors' fate at the end of that episode, well...
To my shock, I got an angry call from their HR department, who were actually calling to chew me out for applying even though I was "unqualified" for not having the required 6 years of experience.
The weird thing is that you got a phone call from them. Why would they not just send you a generic rejection letter, but actually make the effort to pick up the phone and take the time to call you personally? Something seems fishy -- like it was posted to satisfy some requirement but could get them in trouble if someone actually found out that it was fake and that they had no intention of filling the position -- if it existed in the first place.
People selfishly look for their representative to represent them best personally, when people instead should have the maturity to look for someone who represents them collectively.
I can't remember where I heard this (NPR?) but there were studies done that showed that people vote for who and what that they identify with, not who and what benefits them most or represents them most closely.