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Comment Re:Comment your damn code (Score 1) 373

If your developers didn't write shitty code you wouldn't need the comments. Comments are extremely useful for explaining edge cases that aren't apparent just by looking at the code so some other developer doesn't remove your changes thinking they are incorrect or explaining a configuration of an object or external service that other developers might not be familiar with. If every single line of code is unintelligible or it isn't obvious what it's doing you have way bigger problems.

Comment Re:This is such a bizarre case... (Score 1) 87

Most organizations see PCI compliance as a huge annoyance. It's generally too technical for an executive to have eyes on so it falls to a technical person to enforce it. Once you get big enough merchants tend to go easier on you because it's a huge cost to be PCI compliant and they really want your business. Then shit like this happens.

Comment Re:Comment your damn code (Score 1) 373

If your code needs a lot of comments, then your code is not easy to read by definition. Code should be written to be easily read with small functions with names that are self explanatory as to what the code is doing. Comments are great for those little exceptions and cases where the code looks daft but has a legitimate purpose that you don't want someone else to remove, but if your code is 20% or more comments, then they are either completely unnecessary or your code is not well written.

Comment Code that is easy to read. (Score 1) 373

  • Self explanatory method names.
  • Low cyclomatic complexity
  • Good test coverage

Good code should be easy to follow with no function taking more than a minute to read and understand with meaningful names that can be trusted to do what they imply they do. Each function should ideally have 4 or less paths through the code with greater complexity being shoved into another method. Test Coverage is sexy. There is nothing that will make me hate a codebase more than when I have to dig deep down into a code base and find that one little variable that's getting set to null in some peripheral object instead of what it's supposed to be after hours of debugging.

Comment Re:significant contributor (Score 1) 269

Even if you aren't a vegan and don't care about the environment it makes great economic sense. Animal protein is expensive and wasteful to produce. If a vegan option can mimic what is a fairly plain tasting foodstuff, then the cost savings on a lot of dishes and processed foods would be huge.

Comment Re:A few problems... (Score 2) 149

It is taking away exactly the key features that languages like Java have that make them ideal for business logic. It takes away the generalist properties and ties each line of code into a database process, removing the separation of logic from implementation. It encapsulates functionality without giving access to it by tying procedural code to relationship statements rather than to actual calls, making it extremely vulnerable to the law of leaky algorithms, making it more difficult to both debug and optimize. There's no way this could actually produce scalable, stable codebase that you could use to provide a large scale solution to any business problem.

Comment Good (Score 3, Interesting) 251

Google apps aren't really that powerful, but then I've never considered any of Microsoft's office products to really be professional tools. Even in college when I wanted to produce papers I'd use some laTeX or DITA editor. Word, Excel and the rest always felt amateurish. If you're going to use poor amateurish WYSIWYG tools you might as well use the free ones.

Comment Re: Now where's the cheap monitors? (Score 1) 201

And what did you watch on that Trinitron? Exactly. Fuck all that that resolution.

What are you really going to do with a 4K television and why is anyone going to make content at that resolution for you? No one will make content at that resolution for consumers because noone has the bandwidth to stream that kind of content. Upscaled content generally looks awful and graphics cards are always being pushed to the limit in terms of what we can render at acceptable framerates with given resolutions. Hell current gen consoles are still stuck at 30 fps at 1080p and plenty of games are pushing the hardware to the absolute limit. Even if we have 60 100 times the graphical processing power that we did ten years ago, it doesn't mean we should be using a resolution 60-100 times bigger, every improvement takes its toll(framerates, resolution, antialiasing lighting, texture quality, filtering,realworld physics offloaded to the graphics card.)

Expect your 4K monitor in a good five years or more when graphics cards are almost 20 times more powerful. Expect your 4K TV when 100Mb/s down stream fiber bundles are common place. And then barely expect it to change for a good decade after that.

Comment Re:Money well spent (Score 1) 347

We really need to know how they came up with that figure. If you have decently paid employees not able to work for 2-3 days while repaving those computers that could be a large chunk of that cost in terms of lost productivity. 3 days of 170 employees not working is almost 2 years of one employee not working. Then consider the age of the computers. For little over a third more of the cost to fix, they could get new computers, it could easily be worth it to upgrade to new computers if the original ones were old enough. The increased lifespan of new computers could alone justify the cost and the increased productivity from having up to date hardware only helps.

Comment Re:Unprofitable (Score 5, Insightful) 477

It's a huge problem if they selling them below their own production costs. It's a strategy to push your competitors out of a market by selling a competing product at a an unsustainable loss. When the competitor leaves the market you use your new found monopoly to ramp up the prices to extortionate rates. The outcome is almost never in the public interest.

Comment Re:"Always on" is "Mostly Unusable For Several Wee (Score 2) 511

It's probably just SC's equivalent of matchmaking and DRM. If some minor calculations were being done server side, they could probably be done on any client machine and the lack of any subscription cost with the game means they certainly didn't invest much more in server hardware than they needed to prop up their DRM scheme. In any case it was shown that no more than 40 MB were downloaded from the servers for every hour of play and unless there's some serious number crunching to produce that data that any moderately powerful dual core processor can't handle, that functionality could have been emulated for an offline mode especially if it is all based around your interactions with other players.

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