From the looks of your user number you are pretty new. For those of us who have been around a while, this is THE technical forum--even if it's not so much any more, respect the tradition.
I've used yahoo for years as well, but I think that Google pushed Yahoo, not the other way around.
The size of the Yahoo email used to be severely limited as well until Google came along, and the UI was as bad as microsofts.
I used it to sync calendar/notes/contacts with my palm and with outlook--their free syncing software is fantastic.
I have given up on yahoo for two reasons.
#1 they re-arranged my.yahoo.com to work differently and I could never get my footing back. It was a great portal site, but then google.com/ig is cleaner and more flexible (being able to drag content around the page at will just rocks)--It's simply a matter of getting a few more features in.
#2 I HATE HATE HATE their Yahoo toolbar SO MUCH! It makes me despise everything with a 'Y' in the name, I'm starting to dislike Yogurt! EVERY TIME you install anything from yahoo they try to slip in that stupid freaking thing. If you forget to click "Advanced setup" you get that shitware on your computer and have to go through figuring out how to disable it again--and even at that I'm never fully convinced it's gone.
So I guess I agree with half your post--I think their portal features are a bit more advanced than Google, but I was just talking about email, and so far, google owns that category and the others are struggling to keep up (Yahoo re-invented their email client because of Google, but as I said, I'm so frustrated with yahoo that I haven't checked it out)
>It's happened before but the question is how long Microsoft can continue along that route
Short answer, For ever.
Think about it, with their creation/distribution costs they could probably sell each copy of windows for a few dollars--maybe ten, the rest is profit.
In fact, I'm pretty damn sure they have already made back all the money they invested into every product they have created so far, so if they were to charge $1.50 per download for all their current products, they would still make money.
I was a strong hotmail user before Microsoft took it down, uh, I mean took it over.
It was a great service! One of the first, and probably the best.
Microsoft took it over and there was no advancement or innovation for years (a decade?). Spam ate up my tiny inbox while Microsoft just threw MSN graphics all over the place.
When Gmail came out, I gave it a try. It was everything Hotmail could have been years ago if it hadn't been bought by MS! (Well, it COULD have been out of business, so I've got to give them that I suppose).
They forced Microsoft to pay a little attention to features. They gave out a little more storage and started blocking some spam, but it was too little too late.
In order to write this I decided to visit my hotmail inbox, I haven't been there for a while. 136 emails, and 43 have been detected as junk. They are ALL junk--A party invite from "heather", a Cola Quiz, etc. 136 undetected junk emails out of 179.
And even at that, they still only give 1/8 the amount of storage that Google does.
Crap, on top of that I just looked at a spam with pictures in it and it didn't auto-block them like Google does. Now I'm probably infected.
Thanks Microsoft!
From,
The guy who used to argue the advantages of Microsoft to the Unix admins...
I seriously doubt that you could replace a power-plant with a forest, just not going to happen.
What you might have is an extremely cheap power supply for wireless webcams in the forest. Maybe not even enough power for this, but...
Imagine a square mile of forest. In a hundred of the trees (evenly distributed) you shoot a spike with a CPU/transmitter on it and then shoot a second spike into the ground.
These CPUs could track tagged animals exact locations with almost no power or investment.
How about a tiny, free mesh network that connects people who live far apart? Even if each transmitter could only reach a hundred feet, at a price of tens of dollars a piece you could saturate an area with 'em.
100% wireless coverage in a city, even in the middle of large parks?
I think the advantage here would be the ability to create devices without batteries (yet with reliable 24hr power) that could be created cheaply enough to spam across a large area.
Yep. I really like the Java commenting system where, if done right, you get generated documents (rather than trying to correlate your code with the requirements).
It really is important to consider your audience. You don't want to reproduce stuff in another document, but if a function implements a certian requirement, it doesn't hurt to refer to the exact requirement (with a URL). Hmm, that might even be a good tag to add to the Javadocs system...
I think most good programmers understand this stuff and would agree with us, but you might consider the effect your statements have on newer programmers who don't understand how useless code without documentation is.
They might put an importance on the opinion of a good programmer and try to cut their already minimal comments down rather than being smarter about crafting them to be usable at any volume.
This should be really good for podcasters, they should get a nice set of statistics.
As for music, start shifting over to pod-safe music and lose this RIAA shit. Independent no-label music has been becoming much better and easier to find within the past half year or so. Many music-oriented podcasts have shifted to entirely pod-safe music.
One of the better new music podcasts is Podsafe Music Daily. It's around a half hour a day with a "Best-of" on Friday. If you set it up to record this, you'll always have a little something legal to listen to.
There are other legal podcasts, by the way. My favorite is "Coverville". Although it's not generally indi music, Brian has a license to "Broadcast" the songs.
As far as tracking the music goes, I really don't know if they are doing anything worse than Google or MSN or any of the other sites that collect information--at least they are offering a fantastic service in exchange.
Unless you have a manager that has some program to count comments per lines of code, I can't see having that complaint.
If you have a co-worker who isn't commenting for readability, that's another thing. Bad commenting has nothing to do with volume of comments, it has to do with understanding your target audience. Commenting is like any type of technical writing--you write to communicate in a way that your audience will best understand.
However, this is from the point of view of a heavy coder. If you write scripts or small throw-away programs, you have a completely different problem space.
I understand the importance of such experements, and I don't have a problem making them fly in wind tunnels, but to put them into a helium atmosphere! Aren't their little voices already high enough???
I keep seeing all these arguments either against commenting or against verbose languages because, supposedly, they slow development.
Now, Maybe I've just been programming too long and have gotten too good at it, but typing is never ever a slow-point in coding; heck, even learning a new language doesn't slow you down too much!
The slow part is designing your code correctly so that it's fully factored and as bug-free as you can manage--this takes thought and a bit of time, but no where near as much time as it would take to do the same release with cut & paste (I've seen it many times).
So I'm trying to figure this out, why are people making these arguments? Is it that for unexperienced people it truly is harder to put comments in with your code? Maybe they don't know how they did their magic and don't want others to figure them out? Maybe they never took a typing class and it truly takes more time to code than think? I'm really at a loss here.
Oh, and as for the authors question, you have a FANTASTIC opportunity to improve your company tenfold. Take notes of those arguing against commenting. As soon as you've collected all the votes, throw them away and FIRE anyone who was against documentation--they should not be working in any company, at least not as a programmer! If you hired people who understood programming and the development cycle, that question would have never come up.
What a lot of people don't realize is that being a Guru is an art.
What's the quickest way to paint the roof of the Sistine chapel? Are you going to be able to hire 30 artists with enough talent, or should you stick with the one that is qualified and a couple assistants and just wait a few years?
Can you train 30 artists to be good enough to do the work? How about 300?
After a point, being a super-coder is just as much of an art. You won't be able to produce these people, it's kinda in their soul. Great musicians pick up their first instrument and know it's what they are going to do--what they are made for. My guess would be that if you have had access to a computer for over a year and you aren't coding yet, you'll probably never be a really great coder--a real computer artist couldn't have resisted.
Hmm, maybe a better word that Guru or Architect would be Computer Artist or Code Artist? It should convey the relative rarity much better.
This should be obvious. Every other art has it's gurus, and they are usually the top 1%, 99% of the others in the field simply will never be able to do what the gurus do, regardless of training or experience. I'll never play the piano like a savant that started at age 3, period.
> and therefore there will be a huge mortality rate.
My point exactly. It would be nice if we could avoid this (and the fact that it will FUBAR the world in the process) but I don't see that happening since everyone HAS to have kids.
passangers are overrated. an automated probe that could reach another star, gather info and return would suffice for years of entertainment.
Know what's probably a more difficult problem than FTL travel? Getting people off the planet earth as fast (or faster) than population increase.
Even if you had some mechanism like stargate (That could take people off the earth as fast as you wanted to feed it) and you had people running into it constantly, I don't think you would even slow the rate of world population growth much.
I think more "Fake" sci-fi stuff becomes reality than not, but honestly I never thought there would be a way to implement a practical FTL engine.
On top of this, it works exactly as specified on startrek, with the "Warping" entering another dimension,...
If they figure out that they can creat some new crystal that will power such a monster, I'm going to quit my job and start designing a world that can wrap all the way around a star.
Yeah, my setup is about that effective, and some might find the implementaiton slightly easier:
Gmail -> me
27 blocked spam since 1/1 when I last cleaned my junk mail folder. 0 spam got through.
Umm, okay but why does it have to be so ugly?
on
The USB Wristband
·
· Score: 1
If you were going to do something like that wouldn't you make it look a little nicer?
The only reason I can see for this is sneaking data out of protected places.
I suppose if you were in IT a few utilities on your wrist would be nice, but wouldn't it be more likely that you forget to wear this than one in your wallet or on your keychain?
The point is simply that a recount is possible, not that the machine records exactly what is printed.
If I were running such a program, I'd have the additional requirement to randomly do 100% audits of election results and if the paper vote is in any way different than the vote the machine put out, remove that entire class of machine from service and assign a commission that must produce the EXACT cause of the mismatch and a suggest correction before that type of machine can be used again.
The fact that a system like that is not in place on these voting machines is mind-boggling, it seems so completely obvious to me. To not have some kind of trail is deliberate sabotage.
Free markets work the same way monarchies work. Occasionally and only for a short period of time (and that, only if carefully tweaked by outside forces).
You can quote all the wingnut theories you like, but the fact is that the hugest depression in recent history was preceded by an unprecedented level of market freedom. If something went wrong, that's exactly where it started.
First of all, the government is "Supposed" to do whatever it must to meet its charter (In this case, the constitution) right?
Well, if the government must "get involved" with business to ensure our safety and well being, it certainly should, right?
So where on earth would one come up with a concept like "The government isn't really supposed to get too involved with business."? Go study the effects of the EXTREMELY free-market views of the 20's and try to figure out the results of THAT fiasco if you think I'm being alarmist about it endangering our safety.
This free-market religion (and it IS a religion, based solely on faith) is starting to piss me off. Otherwise intelligent engineers are coming up with bullshit like that and spewing it all over the net, just like "Jesus Saves" or "Long Live Alla".
Slashdot Mirror
From the looks of your user number you are pretty new. For those of us who have been around a while, this is THE technical forum--even if it's not so much any more, respect the tradition.
I've used yahoo for years as well, but I think that Google pushed Yahoo, not the other way around.
The size of the Yahoo email used to be severely limited as well until Google came along, and the UI was as bad as microsofts.
I used it to sync calendar/notes/contacts with my palm and with outlook--their free syncing software is fantastic.
I have given up on yahoo for two reasons.
#1 they re-arranged my.yahoo.com to work differently and I could never get my footing back. It was a great portal site, but then google.com/ig is cleaner and more flexible (being able to drag content around the page at will just rocks)--It's simply a matter of getting a few more features in.
#2 I HATE HATE HATE their Yahoo toolbar SO MUCH! It makes me despise everything with a 'Y' in the name, I'm starting to dislike Yogurt! EVERY TIME you install anything from yahoo they try to slip in that stupid freaking thing. If you forget to click "Advanced setup" you get that shitware on your computer and have to go through figuring out how to disable it again--and even at that I'm never fully convinced it's gone.
So I guess I agree with half your post--I think their portal features are a bit more advanced than Google, but I was just talking about email, and so far, google owns that category and the others are struggling to keep up (Yahoo re-invented their email client because of Google, but as I said, I'm so frustrated with yahoo that I haven't checked it out)
>It's happened before but the question is how long Microsoft can continue along that route
Short answer, For ever.
Think about it, with their creation/distribution costs they could probably sell each copy of windows for a few dollars--maybe ten, the rest is profit.
In fact, I'm pretty damn sure they have already made back all the money they invested into every product they have created so far, so if they were to charge $1.50 per download for all their current products, they would still make money.
Monopolies have strange properties.
I was a strong hotmail user before Microsoft took it down, uh, I mean took it over.
It was a great service! One of the first, and probably the best.
Microsoft took it over and there was no advancement or innovation for years (a decade?). Spam ate up my tiny inbox while Microsoft just threw MSN graphics all over the place.
When Gmail came out, I gave it a try. It was everything Hotmail could have been years ago if it hadn't been bought by MS! (Well, it COULD have been out of business, so I've got to give them that I suppose).
They forced Microsoft to pay a little attention to features. They gave out a little more storage and started blocking some spam, but it was too little too late.
In order to write this I decided to visit my hotmail inbox, I haven't been there for a while. 136 emails, and 43 have been detected as junk. They are ALL junk--A party invite from "heather", a Cola Quiz, etc. 136 undetected junk emails out of 179.
And even at that, they still only give 1/8 the amount of storage that Google does.
Crap, on top of that I just looked at a spam with pictures in it and it didn't auto-block them like Google does. Now I'm probably infected.
Thanks Microsoft!
From,
The guy who used to argue the advantages of Microsoft to the Unix admins...
I seriously doubt that you could replace a power-plant with a forest, just not going to happen.
What you might have is an extremely cheap power supply for wireless webcams in the forest. Maybe not even enough power for this, but...
Imagine a square mile of forest. In a hundred of the trees (evenly distributed) you shoot a spike with a CPU/transmitter on it and then shoot a second spike into the ground.
These CPUs could track tagged animals exact locations with almost no power or investment.
How about a tiny, free mesh network that connects people who live far apart? Even if each transmitter could only reach a hundred feet, at a price of tens of dollars a piece you could saturate an area with 'em.
100% wireless coverage in a city, even in the middle of large parks?
I think the advantage here would be the ability to create devices without batteries (yet with reliable 24hr power) that could be created cheaply enough to spam across a large area.
Yep. I really like the Java commenting system where, if done right, you get generated documents (rather than trying to correlate your code with the requirements).
It really is important to consider your audience. You don't want to reproduce stuff in another document, but if a function implements a certian requirement, it doesn't hurt to refer to the exact requirement (with a URL). Hmm, that might even be a good tag to add to the Javadocs system...
I think most good programmers understand this stuff and would agree with us, but you might consider the effect your statements have on newer programmers who don't understand how useless code without documentation is.
They might put an importance on the opinion of a good programmer and try to cut their already minimal comments down rather than being smarter about crafting them to be usable at any volume.
Naw, same people different decade.
This should be really good for podcasters, they should get a nice set of statistics.
As for music, start shifting over to pod-safe music and lose this RIAA shit. Independent no-label music has been becoming much better and easier to find within the past half year or so. Many music-oriented podcasts have shifted to entirely pod-safe music.
One of the better new music podcasts is Podsafe Music Daily. It's around a half hour a day with a "Best-of" on Friday. If you set it up to record this, you'll always have a little something legal to listen to.
There are other legal podcasts, by the way. My favorite is "Coverville". Although it's not generally indi music, Brian has a license to "Broadcast" the songs.
As far as tracking the music goes, I really don't know if they are doing anything worse than Google or MSN or any of the other sites that collect information--at least they are offering a fantastic service in exchange.
When is over-commenting seriously a problem?
Unless you have a manager that has some program to count comments per lines of code, I can't see having that complaint.
If you have a co-worker who isn't commenting for readability, that's another thing. Bad commenting has nothing to do with volume of comments, it has to do with understanding your target audience. Commenting is like any type of technical writing--you write to communicate in a way that your audience will best understand.
However, this is from the point of view of a heavy coder. If you write scripts or small throw-away programs, you have a completely different problem space.
I understand the importance of such experements, and I don't have a problem making them fly in wind tunnels, but to put them into a helium atmosphere! Aren't their little voices already high enough???
Yeah, I agree.
It's pretty much like saying "Another picture of the earth was taken from space today, putting another nail in the coffin of the flat-earth society".
I keep seeing all these arguments either against commenting or against verbose languages because, supposedly, they slow development.
Now, Maybe I've just been programming too long and have gotten too good at it, but typing is never ever a slow-point in coding; heck, even learning a new language doesn't slow you down too much!
The slow part is designing your code correctly so that it's fully factored and as bug-free as you can manage--this takes thought and a bit of time, but no where near as much time as it would take to do the same release with cut & paste (I've seen it many times).
So I'm trying to figure this out, why are people making these arguments? Is it that for unexperienced people it truly is harder to put comments in with your code? Maybe they don't know how they did their magic and don't want others to figure them out? Maybe they never took a typing class and it truly takes more time to code than think? I'm really at a loss here.
Oh, and as for the authors question, you have a FANTASTIC opportunity to improve your company tenfold. Take notes of those arguing against commenting. As soon as you've collected all the votes, throw them away and FIRE anyone who was against documentation--they should not be working in any company, at least not as a programmer! If you hired people who understood programming and the development cycle, that question would have never come up.
What a lot of people don't realize is that being a Guru is an art.
What's the quickest way to paint the roof of the Sistine chapel? Are you going to be able to hire 30 artists with enough talent, or should you stick with the one that is qualified and a couple assistants and just wait a few years?
Can you train 30 artists to be good enough to do the work? How about 300?
After a point, being a super-coder is just as much of an art. You won't be able to produce these people, it's kinda in their soul. Great musicians pick up their first instrument and know it's what they are going to do--what they are made for. My guess would be that if you have had access to a computer for over a year and you aren't coding yet, you'll probably never be a really great coder--a real computer artist couldn't have resisted.
Hmm, maybe a better word that Guru or Architect would be Computer Artist or Code Artist? It should convey the relative rarity much better.
This should be obvious. Every other art has it's gurus, and they are usually the top 1%, 99% of the others in the field simply will never be able to do what the gurus do, regardless of training or experience. I'll never play the piano like a savant that started at age 3, period.
> and therefore there will be a huge mortality rate.
My point exactly. It would be nice if we could avoid this (and the fact that it will FUBAR the world in the process) but I don't see that happening since everyone HAS to have kids.
Actually it was a reference to the ringworld sci-fi epic, but good try.
passangers are overrated. an automated probe that could reach another star, gather info and return would suffice for years of entertainment.
Know what's probably a more difficult problem than FTL travel? Getting people off the planet earth as fast (or faster) than population increase.
Even if you had some mechanism like stargate (That could take people off the earth as fast as you wanted to feed it) and you had people running into it constantly, I don't think you would even slow the rate of world population growth much.
I think more "Fake" sci-fi stuff becomes reality than not, but honestly I never thought there would be a way to implement a practical FTL engine.
...
On top of this, it works exactly as specified on startrek, with the "Warping" entering another dimension,
If they figure out that they can creat some new crystal that will power such a monster, I'm going to quit my job and start designing a world that can wrap all the way around a star.
How very Get Smart.
I'd have gone for Scotty myself
Yeah, my setup is about that effective, and some might find the implementaiton slightly easier:
Gmail -> me
27 blocked spam since 1/1 when I last cleaned my junk mail folder. 0 spam got through.
If you were going to do something like that wouldn't you make it look a little nicer?
The only reason I can see for this is sneaking data out of protected places.
I suppose if you were in IT a few utilities on your wrist would be nice, but wouldn't it be more likely that you forget to wear this than one in your wallet or on your keychain?
It is not possible to "Do it right". There is always going to be a level of trust involved. Even if "They" did it right, how do "I" Trust them?
I'm not talking about recounts either, I'm talking about random audits. If the random audits succeeded, you're right, recounts should be unheard of.
You could also randomly videotape the voting (Just the screen and the hand of the voter) and line up votes with video timestamps to ensure it worked.
Strangely enough, your comment about scoffing people who don't understand is the worst thing that could possibly have.
The point is simply that a recount is possible, not that the machine records exactly what is printed.
If I were running such a program, I'd have the additional requirement to randomly do 100% audits of election results and if the paper vote is in any way different than the vote the machine put out, remove that entire class of machine from service and assign a commission that must produce the EXACT cause of the mismatch and a suggest correction before that type of machine can be used again.
The fact that a system like that is not in place on these voting machines is mind-boggling, it seems so completely obvious to me. To not have some kind of trail is deliberate sabotage.
Free markets work the same way monarchies work. Occasionally and only for a short period of time (and that, only if carefully tweaked by outside forces).
You can quote all the wingnut theories you like, but the fact is that the hugest depression in recent history was preceded by an unprecedented level of market freedom. If something went wrong, that's exactly where it started.
fO
fOad
fU
fUbar
fTw
fTn (or fTa or fTm I suppose)
fIgmo
Which also leads to the capitalized letter being the significant one:
aFu
tFu
snaFu
gtFo
milF
rtFm
pFm
bFd
bFg
?
First of all, the government is "Supposed" to do whatever it must to meet its charter (In this case, the constitution) right?
Well, if the government must "get involved" with business to ensure our safety and well being, it certainly should, right?
So where on earth would one come up with a concept like "The government isn't really supposed to get too involved with business."? Go study the effects of the EXTREMELY free-market views of the 20's and try to figure out the results of THAT fiasco if you think I'm being alarmist about it endangering our safety.
This free-market religion (and it IS a religion, based solely on faith) is starting to piss me off. Otherwise intelligent engineers are coming up with bullshit like that and spewing it all over the net, just like "Jesus Saves" or "Long Live Alla".