On the plus side, it really is great working for a manager that actually does understand the ramifications of writing bad code for political reasons, and that can be trusted when he makes that decision. This is particularly good when he also understands that spending extra time now to write good reusable code will save time and money later, and is willing to make sure that the time is made available when the corporate politics allows it.
Do you really know such a manager? My experience with manager is that they pretend to understand, encourage you to ignore good coding practices for a quick, but dirty solution, but if the s***t really hits the fan because of those decisions, they cannot remember any of it and you stand there as an incompetent idiot.
always seems to me, at best, a sign of an unexperienced coder. Either that, or an extremely lucky one.
You forgot the third possibility: An experienced coder, who was responsible for such a design flaw himself and was seriously bitten by it.
Unless we're talking of brand-new projects of a small size, I find it really hard to believe that comminiting to 0% copy-and-paste-code is a practical proposition.
On the contrary, I'd say in a small project you can get away with code duplication.
And there is nothing wrong with copy-and-paste code per se, it just has to be removed in a following refactoring step.
- Do you really want to tightly couple these two unrelated components because you want to use those 5 lines of code?
There are many ways to avoid code duplication. If the method you choose makes you worry because of coupling, choose another. Btw. I don't know how many lines were wrong in the M$ code, but it must be enough to contain a serious bug.
- Can you afford to carry over all of the dependencies on that library or class?
Or an inline function, or a namespace with non-member functions, or.... See point above.
- Or can you afford the refactoring to avoid those dependencies? How many new components (which were not changing before) do you need to retest now that you pulled the code out?
- Can you afford to lose that development and testing time on other features that you need for RTM?
Here you are on to something really true. It does not need to be the fault of a coder. Given the right type of idiot project leader/management you can reduce every developer to a bumbling code moron.
But honestly, if you can ALWAYS say that avoiding copy-and-paste at all costs is the right decision for your product, for your team, and for yourself... I don't know whether to envy you, or to fear you.
Code duplication has risks. You learn about the risks in almost each book about software engineering. Is it always the right decision to avoid it? I don't know, I don't know all possible scenarios. For M$ it was clearly the wrong decision not to avoid it in this case.
You see, it is not only the code duplication. Be it documentation, be it requirements engineering be it whatever. You always get reasons to take shortcuts. We don't have the time, we cannot afford this, we cannot afford that.
It bites, sooner or later it bites.
Both of the first groups take up a LOT of time, efford and money.
True, but one group spends a LOT of time, effort and money into public relations and indoctrination, the other spends huge amount of time, effort and money more or less invisibly. Same thing why loudmouthed managers get all the money, while quit technicians in some back corner do all the work and are laughed at.
So anyone less scientifically educated than you (for instance, liberal arts majors) deserves to be made into food?
Thought that someone would choke on that.:-)
But to answer your question, it does not have to do with scientific education, but more with a frame of mind. None needs to be able to calculate the hydrogen atom or needs to be able to explain the difference between a boson and a fermion. But, let me give you an exaggerated example to make clear what I mean. If someone still believes in the earth being flat because the bible says so (it doesn't but suppose it does for the sake of the example) , even if you show him photos of a round earth taken from the moon, I refuse to regard someone like this as my equal. I am something better. Of course, the food stuff was a provocation, I would be totally content to have those as slaves.;-)
Come on, who cares? Let people be ignorant. It's not like bringing people of below average intelligence or fundamentalist mindset into the scientific fold is going to make them valuable contributors. It'll just be a new type of ignorance to deal with. Let them be.
I am afraid this is not so easy. Being stupid like that isn't an evolutionary disadvantage today. On the contrary, it seems to be an advantage. To learn todays science you have to invest time and hard work. Time where you are severely restricted in things you can do otherwise. The stupids don't bother with such efforts, believing is so much easier. So instead of hard work over books or in lecture halls, they have plenty of free time they can use to build their power base. What fundamentalists lack in brain power they easily compensate with aggressiveness and and falsehood.
The braindead cry loudly evolution does not happen. Scientist silently go to work. Maybe to find a way to prove facts, which will convince even those, which of course is impossible. But more likely because they don't care, thinking truth will always win.
The braindead cry more and louder, because there is nobody who really opposes them, they win more and more often. Without dedicated opponents they win at schools, they win in the public media. They are fare more visible than they deserve. The final result is, that two legged protein lumps, which would be better suited as emergency food rations in hard times govern you and tell you what is right and what is wrong.
Wow, an economical genius has spoken. An idiot like me could come to the conclusion that if there are two companies, which both almost hold 50% of the market, those few linux geeks might tip the balance in favour of those company, which might catch those additional 10% of PC users.
Especially since those linux geeks are no normal Joe Publics, which are content with the equipment they get at Wall-Mart and cannot even name the stuff they have in their machines.
Always a good idea to chase away potential information multiplicators.
Fine, it was to be expected that DRM causes trouble. But what causes the other 25% of the support calls, which are not related to DRM? The DRM problems are easy to solve, just drop DRM. The other 25% are much more interesting and knowing them might help improve usability.
This was the first thing I thought, when I read the article. Come on, you can recover data from hard disks, which are half burned. A simply formatted hard disk and the data is permanently and unrecoverably gone? Ridiculous.
True, windows simply is not trustworthy. I mean automatic updates are something great, but a company, which uses such a system to further their own interests and not that of their customers is simply unacceptable. Ok, one can say that if I use a pirate copy I cannot complain, but even as a legit user I'd be bound to be a plaything of Microsoft's political interests. Best example is how fast they updated their DRM routines. I doubt that a user complained that he could do things with his windows, which he should not.
Nope, the only way to use windows is in a virtual machine without network access.
Re:Gentoo definitely is in crisis.
on
Is Gentoo in crisis?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The first thing to do is to stop emerging world. Emerge things when you know you want them, otherwise just run glsa-check (really "glsa-check|grep '\[N\]'") to scan for vulnerabilities. And if you do upgrade a big package, run revdep-rebuild.
I really don't think this is a good advice. Superficially it sounds good, but Gentoo isn't stable enough for such a procedure. As I said, I once installed Gentoo for friends. Unfortunately one of my friends lives quite a distance from me and I have no remote access. So at one time we had a distance of more than one and a half year between two updates. It was hell. The portage package was totally out of date, his old profile did not even exist anymore in portage, which caused some trouble until I found out how to solve this problem. Before that many updates failed with strange error messages . After I solved this problem even seemingly simple updates resulted in a huge amount dependencies. One of them, of course, the upgrade to the new modular X. And of course more than one package failed and I had to search the forum for a fix. This was the most extreme case, but not the only one. Therefore I dropped Gentoo support for other people. When I visit friends I have better things to do than work the whole time on their Gentoo. I especially hated it when they saw me working for hours and then conclude from it that Linux is still not for general use and I had to explain that this is a problem of only this special distribution.
You surely get away with your method of only updating vulnerable packages for quite some time, but sooner or later it bites. I have much better experiences with weekly world updates + revdep-rebuild each time. But this is a crutch and as long as something like this is necessary, something is definitely wrong with Gentoo.
Re:Gentoo definitely is in crisis.
on
Is Gentoo in crisis?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I love to hear people complain that we're all egomaniacal when we decide not to maintain something...
Please read my statement carefully. I wrote: seemingly egomaniacal decisions. Yes, I know that this decision caused some bad blood in the Gentoo forum. And I do think complaining about this is unfair. However, even if I do understand, I don't have to like it. It just forces me to invest time in problems, which I already solved and have no interest in anymore. Sometimes again and again.
Nobody stepped up to pick up the slack, yet a bunch of people started whining about it.
Right, but what do you expect? For most people Gentoo or other Linux distributions are tools, which they use to solve their own problems. I for instance have two active projects on SourceForge. Do you expect me to abandon them to fix some Gentoo problems? Which problem exactly? Is xmms the only problematic package? So I volunteer to manage the xmms package. Then I find a bug in package foo, am I allowed to complain now? Or do I have to fix this too? What next? bar? Many other Gentoo users would not even have the skills to help you.
Sorry, sometimes the complaints are definitely far over the top. Some a******s forget too easily that Gentoo and similar projects are mainly run by volunteers. However, complaining that many make demands, but only very few are willing to help, isn't correct and helpful either. The time where Linux had much more developers than mere users are long gone. Fortunately.
Gentoo definitely is in crisis.
on
Is Gentoo in crisis?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Currently I still use it myself, since I can handle most of the problems myself and has the flexibility I like. But I stopped installing it for friends and relatives. And I strongly discourage its use in my company. It is just too unstable. It is fine if you are a geek (I am) and have too much time (I don't). For my friends it is kubuntu now.
Gentoo was and somewhat is great, but there hardly is a world update anymore, which goes smoothly. Sometimes things even break silently, so you cannot even be sure when something broke. Constantly the need to learn new configuration syntaxes because the old configuration stops working after an update is very tiring. Uprade/downgrade ping-pong also stops being funny quickly. I could complain because of seemingly egomaniacal decisions of the maintainers to remove widely used packages like xmms, but this would not be fair. If they have not enough manpower to maintain those packages, better remove them, but it still stings to be forced to search for alternatives.
I would not say there is no quality control in the Gentoo development, if I find 10 bugs, there might have been 100 others, which had been caught before release, but it simply isn't enough. I think it is fair to say that the Gentoo project has outgrown the current staff. They simply cannot handle it adequately anymore.
If anyone from the Gentoo staff should read this lines: It really isn't meant as an insult. You did great, but reached a point where your current methods are not sufficient anymore.
Could not agree more. Just have quit my job because of that. First 'reporting' to an idiot sales manager, which did not understand the concept of 'priority' or anything else, then when the project was almost finished they 'gave' me because of the problems a 'project manager' with absolutely no experience and who could not distinguish between C and LISP even if you shoved him a textbook up his....
The payment was ok, but there is only so much someone should have to tolerate.
But when you really build a prototype, don't build a good one. Make the part you are interested in nice and everything else really ugly. Stupids usually cannot distinguish between a prototype and the real deal.
Actually I have not problem with it when Superman is doing it. Suspension of Disbelieve. I want to enjoy comics. And it is easy to work around this problem, giving him some sort of telekinesis. It is just one of his less well known powers. However, I have the problem when same is done by a mere robot in the same book.
True. And there is a chance, that we are wrong again. However, it is not very likely that we are that wrong. Based on the special and general relativity theories many predictions have been made, which much later could be proved to be true. Things like the twin paradox, which no sane person would even consider to be real if there wasn't hard experimental evidence. So the relativity theories seem to be a very good model. This does not mean that there cannot be a better one in which special and general relativity are only a special case and a generalization would somehow allow ftl travel, but except from wishing I currently don't see any reason to believe this.
I'll point out that none of Einstein's theories prevent apparently-faster-than-light travel, such as warp drive or wormholes, nor time travel.
Maybe not, but as far as I think to know, the same theories demand that if you can go faster than light, regardless how, which includes apparently-faster-than-light travel, such as warp drive or wormholes, causality goes down the drain, e.g. time travel really becomes possible. And if you ask me, if I have to sacrifice faster than light travel or causality, you have to give me _very_ good evidence to convince me to choose causality.
I think you are missing a key point of my argument.
Nope, there was a slight misunderstanding, but I don't think we differ that much in our opinion.
I'd say let teachers negotiate their wages themselves like many other employees must do. If there is a shortage of some kind of teacher, they can negotiate a better contract. This is a totally normal thing. If I can do something others cannot, and there is a high demand for I skills, I become more expensive. Why should this be different for teachers?
Nevertheless, I'd prefer to have some sort of right of continuance. So if suddenly a demand decreases a teacher is threatened to get less money. I doubt such uncertainty would be beneficial for his work.
There are no incentives or decentives (is that a word?).
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, I'd say in a small project you can get away with code duplication. And there is nothing wrong with copy-and-paste code per se, it just has to be removed in a following refactoring step. There are many ways to avoid code duplication. If the method you choose makes you worry because of coupling, choose another. Btw. I don't know how many lines were wrong in the M$ code, but it must be enough to contain a serious bug. Or an inline function, or a namespace with non-member functions, or.... See point above. Here you are on to something really true. It does not need to be the fault of a coder. Given the right type of idiot project leader/management you can reduce every developer to a bumbling code moron. Code duplication has risks. You learn about the risks in almost each book about software engineering. Is it always the right decision to avoid it? I don't know, I don't know all possible scenarios. For M$ it was clearly the wrong decision not to avoid it in this case.
You see, it is not only the code duplication. Be it documentation, be it requirements engineering be it whatever. You always get reasons to take shortcuts. We don't have the time, we cannot afford this, we cannot afford that. It bites, sooner or later it bites.
But to answer your question, it does not have to do with scientific education, but more with a frame of mind. None needs to be able to calculate the hydrogen atom or needs to be able to explain the difference between a boson and a fermion. But, let me give you an exaggerated example to make clear what I mean. If someone still believes in the earth being flat because the bible says so (it doesn't but suppose it does for the sake of the example) , even if you show him photos of a round earth taken from the moon, I refuse to regard someone like this as my equal. I am something better. Of course, the food stuff was a provocation, I would be totally content to have those as slaves.
The braindead cry loudly evolution does not happen. Scientist silently go to work. Maybe to find a way to prove facts, which will convince even those, which of course is impossible. But more likely because they don't care, thinking truth will always win.
The braindead cry more and louder, because there is nobody who really opposes them, they win more and more often. Without dedicated opponents they win at schools, they win in the public media. They are fare more visible than they deserve. The final result is, that two legged protein lumps, which would be better suited as emergency food rations in hard times govern you and tell you what is right and what is wrong.
Wow, an economical genius has spoken. An idiot like me could come to the conclusion that if there are two companies, which both almost hold 50% of the market, those few linux geeks might tip the balance in favour of those company, which might catch those additional 10% of PC users.
Especially since those linux geeks are no normal Joe Publics, which are content with the equipment they get at Wall-Mart and cannot even name the stuff they have in their machines.
Always a good idea to chase away potential information multiplicators.
Ok, if this question is asked more often, than only sell slot-in drives. Problem solved. ;-)
Fine, it was to be expected that DRM causes trouble. But what causes the other 25% of the support calls, which are not related to DRM? The DRM problems are easy to solve, just drop DRM. The other 25% are much more interesting and knowing them might help improve usability.
This was the first thing I thought, when I read the article. Come on, you can recover data from hard disks, which are half burned. A simply formatted hard disk and the data is permanently and unrecoverably gone? Ridiculous.
You lost.
True, windows simply is not trustworthy. I mean automatic updates are something great, but a company, which uses such a system to further their own interests and not that of their customers is simply unacceptable. Ok, one can say that if I use a pirate copy I cannot complain, but even as a legit user I'd be bound to be a plaything of Microsoft's political interests. Best example is how fast they updated their DRM routines. I doubt that a user complained that he could do things with his windows, which he should not.
Nope, the only way to use windows is in a virtual machine without network access.
...does it run with activation key? SCNR :-)
You surely get away with your method of only updating vulnerable packages for quite some time, but sooner or later it bites. I have much better experiences with weekly world updates + revdep-rebuild each time. But this is a crutch and as long as something like this is necessary, something is definitely wrong with Gentoo.
Sorry, sometimes the complaints are definitely far over the top. Some a******s forget too easily that Gentoo and similar projects are mainly run by volunteers. However, complaining that many make demands, but only very few are willing to help, isn't correct and helpful either. The time where Linux had much more developers than mere users are long gone. Fortunately.
Currently I still use it myself, since I can handle most of the problems myself and has the flexibility I like. But I stopped installing it for friends and relatives. And I strongly discourage its use in my company. It is just too unstable. It is fine if you are a geek (I am) and have too much time (I don't). For my friends it is kubuntu now.
Gentoo was and somewhat is great, but there hardly is a world update anymore, which goes smoothly. Sometimes things even break silently, so you cannot even be sure when something broke. Constantly the need to learn new configuration syntaxes because the old configuration stops working after an update is very tiring. Uprade/downgrade ping-pong also stops being funny quickly. I could complain because of seemingly egomaniacal decisions of the maintainers to remove widely used packages like xmms, but this would not be fair. If they have not enough manpower to maintain those packages, better remove them, but it still stings to be forced to search for alternatives.
I would not say there is no quality control in the Gentoo development, if I find 10 bugs, there might have been 100 others, which had been caught before release, but it simply isn't enough. I think it is fair to say that the Gentoo project has outgrown the current staff. They simply cannot handle it adequately anymore.
If anyone from the Gentoo staff should read this lines: It really isn't meant as an insult. You did great, but reached a point where your current methods are not sufficient anymore.
...if Pluto was discovered by a Russian.
Could not agree more. Just have quit my job because of that. First 'reporting' to an idiot sales manager, which did not understand the concept of 'priority' or anything else, then when the project was almost finished they 'gave' me because of the problems a 'project manager' with absolutely no experience and who could not distinguish between C and LISP even if you shoved him a textbook up his ....
The payment was ok, but there is only so much someone should have to tolerate.
But when you really build a prototype, don't build a good one. Make the part you are interested in nice and everything else really ugly. Stupids usually cannot distinguish between a prototype and the real deal.
Try this one:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hfobjects/
Fairly simple, fun to read and far more useful than it appears at first sight.
Actually I have not problem with it when Superman is doing it. Suspension of Disbelieve. I want to enjoy comics. And it is easy to work around this problem, giving him some sort of telekinesis. It is just one of his less well known powers. However, I have the problem when same is done by a mere robot in the same book.
True. And there is a chance, that we are wrong again. However, it is not very likely that we are that wrong. Based on the special and general relativity theories many predictions have been made, which much later could be proved to be true. Things like the twin paradox, which no sane person would even consider to be real if there wasn't hard experimental evidence. So the relativity theories seem to be a very good model. This does not mean that there cannot be a better one in which special and general relativity are only a special case and a generalization would somehow allow ftl travel, but except from wishing I currently don't see any reason to believe this.