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Comment Re:True that (Score 1) 551

I also avoid categorical imperatives.

There is testing that isn't unit testing. Knowing when it's sufficient is one of the things that separates good coders from highly productive coders.

Comment Re:True that (Score 3, Interesting) 551

I'd avoid the false dichotomy.

Only unit test what needs to be unit tested. If it needs to be tested the testing will pay for itself. If it's simple enough that it doesn't need testing, then you're wasting your time writing those tests.

Half the benefit of the unit tests/test-first methodology is that they force you to design even your internal interfaces in a reliable way. The other half is knowing you didn't introduce regressions in that oh-so-clever code.

For most projects you don't need a whole lot of tests but there will be a couple of subsystems that you almost can't manage without them.

Comment Re:More like a safeguard (Score 2, Informative) 326

It just makes it more expensive to fight your suit against the megacorp. Since justice belongs to the party with the deeper pockets, megacorp gets away with it until some defense lawyer can carry the whole thing through, which reduces how many attorneys might take on what might be an otherwise open-shut case.

Comment Re:Intellisense and Debuggers (Score 1) 731

You need to learn to use a command-line debugger. IDE debuggers "work" for simple bug and code flow tracing, but they are useless for anything subtle.

There's nothing I hate more than the IDE deciding to display the new value of a variable by overwriting the old one, making it impossible to track the history of a variable without a piece of paper. Try debugging tricky races without that history.

Real debuggers give you a log, in your window, of all your actions and of the previous state you examined. No IDE I know of gives you that.

Comment Re:Work (Score 1) 252

Really, the question about the question is: Do you mean "how many hours a day are you allocating to your job", vs "how many hours are doing useful work for your employer".

Job is easily 9-10 a day.

Useful work is capped around 5.

Overhead chews (from expense reports to travel arranging, to yet another bozo who couldn't be bothered coming to the meeting needing to be filled in) up the rest.

Mars

Phoenix Mars Lander Deploys Robotic Arm, Possibly Finds Ice 168

The Phoenix Mars Lander has successfully deployed its robotic arm and tested other instruments including a laser designed to detect dust, clouds, and fog. The arm will be used to dig up samples of the Martian surface, which will be analyzed as a possible habitat for life. A camera on the arm will allow pictures to be taken of the ground directly beneath the lander. The camera has already seen what may be ice, which was exposed when the soil was disturbed by the landing. The data collected by the arm will be compared to recent findings which suggest that water on Mars may have been too salty for most known forms of life.

Seagate Announces First SSD, 2TB HDD 229

Lucas123 writes "Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said today that the company plans to put out its first solid state disk drive next year as well as a 2TB version of its Barracuda hard disk drive. Watkins also alluded to Seagate's inevitable move from spinning disk to solid state drives, but emphasized it will be years away, saying the storage market is driven by cost-per-gigabyte and though SSDs provide benefits such as power savings, they won't be in laptops in the next few years. A 128GB SSD costs $460, or $3.58 per gigabyte, compared to $60 for a 160GB hard drive, according to Krishna Chander, an analyst at iSuppli. 'It will take three to four years for SSDs to come to parity with hard drives,' on price and reliability."
Software

Submission + - How Apple will convert HFS to ZFS (storagemojo.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The biggest problem with a new file system like ZFS is the conversion. Backup and restore? I don't think so. StorageMojo has a quick overview of the recent Apple patent application "Converting file-systems that organize and store data for computing systems". You don't move the files, you just change out the file system underneath them. Very neat.

The money quote:

The converter reads the existing file system to find out where all the files are on disk. Then it creates a new set of data structures, such as a catalog and file extents, for the new file system. After verifying the new data structures, the converter can then replace the first file system by modifying the disk's partition map and and overwriting the volume headers of the first file system.
The patent talks about embedding the converter in iTunes, but StorageMojo speculates Apple may be playing a deeper game to ultimately challenge Windows on non-Apple hardware.

Hardware

Navy Gets 8-Megajoule Rail Gun Working 650

prototypo writes "The Free Lance-Star newspaper is reporting that the Navy Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia has successfully demonstrated an 8-megajoule electromagnetic rail gun. A 32-megajoule version is due to be tested in June. A 64-megajoule version is anticipated to extend the range of naval gunfire (currently about 15 nautical miles for a 5-inch naval gun) to more than 200 nautical miles by 2020. The projectiles are small, but go so fast that have enough kinetic punch to replace a Tomahawk missile at a fraction of the cost. In the final version, they will apex at 95 miles altitude, well into space. These systems were initially part of Reagan's SDI program ("Star Wars"). An interesting tidbit in the article is that the rail gun is only expected to fire ten times or less per day, presumably because of the amount of electricity needed. I guess we now need a warp core to power them."

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