The Pirate Hawkings (whore kings).

Service guarantees citizenship!

I'm doing my part!

Software engineering has a tendency to enshrine ivory tower principles, that - although sound and logical, can end up making your project large, slow bloated and excessively encapsulated. I'm happy that NASA and the DoD both use it, those things need to be rock solid, but it just doesn't make sense for a lot of businesses where being first to market is more important than any code refactoring issues you might have 2 years down the track. Being slow to market might mean you don't even have a business 12 months from now.

Good programmers know when to lay on the engineering and when to pull out the stops and slap something together that does the job "just good enough". That's part of what makes it an art, not a science.

I can't wait for the VR release of Two Girls, One Cup.

I don't know where you learnt to program, but at my uni the first thing they taught us was dealing with algorithms, writing algorithms, and how to break an algorithm down and turn it into code. They taught us this before even teaching us any code, because if you can't write the problem down as an algorithm, you simply don't understand the problem.

Flow charting was introduced shortly after as another means of envisioning the algorithm / designing an implementation.

As for bubble sort - could you have picked a worse example?

for each item in the list
    compare current item to the previous item
        swap items if current previous
repeat until no swaps have occurred on a run

That's it as a pseudocode algorithm. If you're having trouble understanding that or implementing it in any language, well - you might be in the wrong business.

"...does anyone else look at bigbang-theory and think "wtf, WHEN are we gonna be done with this shit?"

Definitely.Those guys are a horrible parody of a decades old caricature of people with in depth technical and scientific skills (geeks). They are nerds, rather than geeks; socially inept (a creep, a social mute, a loser and a robot), and well into the autism spectrum. It's pretty insulting stuff.

All the geeks I know are very sociable, articulate and generally interesting / fun people.

But then again, what can you expect from the guy who gave us Two and a Half Men?

"Of course, all of this was done in software designed by people without any engineering experience at all...go figure."

You don't need to have an engineering degree to write a price of software that implements calculations and algorithms that are needed for an engineering project. Programmers turn math, algorithms, business methods, ideas and the like into code. That's our skill, understanding your needs and expressing it in a way a computer can understand.

"Many people including some "idiots off the street" seems to have wound up capable of bodging something really nasty together with exel and possibly powerpoint. Like it or not, that is programming."

The worst crimes I've seen were committed with MS Access. One of the accountants decided he suddenly had programming chops and took it on himself to slap together the most god awful mess of half assed end of month reporting procedures. Once the mainframes had done their work we used to have to get in at 7AM and start the EOM processing on the PCs, consisting of dozens of different MS Access databases, dragging in tables, crunching numbers, often failing at various points, and hopefully pushing out more tables to be handled by some other broke ass bitch Access database.

MS Access basically lowered the bar enough for an unskilled worker with no sense of perspective on his abilities to churn out a liability to the company that is probably still in operation today.

They should have just used a few professionals to turn out a well designed system instead.

Is now a good time to admit that I learnt BASIC programming from a book titled "Teach Yourself BASIC in 8 Hours" or something very much like that? To be fair, it was sometime around 1980 and you really could learn BASIC in that amount of time, with change left over to learn fun memory locations to PEEK and POKE. I was writing my own games before I made it to the end of the book.

You can learn Lua in under 8 hours, but really, that's just the syntax - the hard part of learning any language is learning it's libraries and good programming standards for that language. Lua is generally embedded, so you'd need to learn how to call into the host system and what calls it provides.

You can't learn how to build a highly optimised, always available, secure e-commerce trading platform in 8 hours.

I guess the underlying issue is that you can learn how to program and achieve modest things in a short period of time, but some people expect to be able to engineer vastly complex software with just a few hours of effort into the craft, and that's just insane.

People's expectations exceed their abilities to deal with complexity; therefore, they need to either scale back their expectations and learn to deal with and reduce complexity.

Skip the Pi and get a WD MyBook Live instead http://www.wdc.com/en/products.... It's got 1gbit networking, 1-4TB sized hard drives, a power PC processor and runs Linux. Mine has been slurping torrents off the net happily for the last 6 months. These cost a little more than the same sized hard drive with only USB3 but more than make up for it with utility and speed. You can run a web server on them, they have one installed already in fact.

I tried using a Pi for NAS but it was let down massively by the slow 100mbit networking and the way it shared that connector with the USB (which had the attached external hard drive). It was only able to push about 30mbit in one direction and 60mbit in another - and let me tell you, transferring a bunch of 2GB video files at 6MB/s is not a lot of fun.

I replaced it with a WD MyBook Live - which has a Power PC processor and 1gbs network connector. The MyBook Live runs Linux making it easy for me to add Transmission and BTSync to it. Potentially I could also load up Git, SVN, or a host of other Linux software.

I can transfer files back and forth at approximately 700mbit/s (70 MB/s), over 10 times the speed of the Rapsberry Pi. It supports SMB, NFS and Apple iTunes shares out the box, so works great with XBMC.

The drive cost me $50 more for a 3TB unit that a regular 3TB USB3 drive - which is on par with the cost of a Raspberry Pi and a drive of the same size.

The Pi is great for a lot of things, but a NAS is not one of them.

Google's other baby, Go has done quite well in some benchmarks too, despite having a pretty simple / inefficient garbage collector. For those of use who shudder a little at the thought of JS on the server, Go serves a good niche.

Non-techies should stay the fuck away from any website that is not just a collection of HTML, pictures of cats, and flashing text. Would you ask your GP to perform gastric bypass surgery on you? Do you ask your bartender to service your car? Let the people with the right skills handle the skilled work.

Depreciated...

"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

The word you are after is deprecated. The word you are using is generally used to mean a reduction in value over time (ask an accountant), whilst deprecated means...it's on it's death throes right now, stop using it.

The male members, which I'm sure is going to be pretty well represented at Mensa, is far better off joining a local yoga club if they want a chance at love ^.^ The females just need to go to a bar.