Comment Re:NASA bot in FFXI (Score 1) 102
Three grand is peanuts. How about spending $100,000?
Three grand is peanuts. How about spending $100,000?
What are some of the most interesting and promising recent innovations available to the home brewer?
I don't know what USPS service you have, but in my experience:
1. USPS is rarely less expensive sending packages than FedEx or UPS.
2. USPS has slower delivery times than FedEx or UPS.
3. USPS has a much higher rate of package damage than FedEx or UPS.
4. USPS has a generally less helpful and less polite staff in the offices than FedEx or UPS.
It is inferior in every way. We can talk about delivery of letters to mailboxes, but I'm sure you know that the mailboxes on the side of the road are considered to be property of USPS. It is illegal for anyone other than USPS to deliver a letter, package, or anything else to that mailbox.
This means that if FedEx or UPS wanted to enter that business they would forced to set up secondary post boxes or deliver directly to the house by foot. I don't know how much this enters into the economics, but god dammit, that's my fucking mailbox.
I paid for it. I dug the hold. I set the post. I poured the concrete. It's my mailbox. Their dictatorial annexation of the mailbox that came from me is exceptionally douchey and for that alone USPS should be smacked upside the head.
If you have USPS service so exceptional that you find it to be truly better than all other alternatives, well, great, good for you. It just doesn't seem to mirror the experience that I and everyone else I know has.
Could not agree more. Sticking Libre! on the front of everything is getting annoying.
The original idea was simply to encourage others to build their own open source laptops at home
Yeah, um, let me see, I'll just fire up my clean room and source some rare earth stuff and plug in the old CPU creator I got at the garage sale, and I can bake screens in my oven I just add some plastic and finger paint and voila!
The single biggest problem with PHP is the tendency for old code and old programmers to keep their bad habits [...] code reviews will be rushed (or nonexistent)
I would be very surprised to learn that code review quality is language dependent. I always thought it depended on one's organization and the people working on the project. I also thought that a bad programmer would be bad no matter the language, too.
Here I was, writing well-formed PHP for over a decade (I had a background in C, C++, and Java before I started with PHP), using well known software patterns, dependency injection, and other best practices, but then I read this comment. Your well thought-out and decisive commentary has certainly changed my mind.
I haven't been writing good code at all! Obviously this is the fault of the language. I've never provided a good code review either, again, because of the language. That magic quotes thing? The thing that has been discouraged for the past decade, could always disabled, has been disabled by default many years, and has been removed completely? Yup, still a problem. It's the languages fault though, PHP made me use it, even though I could turn it off!
On a serious note, PHP does have its problems, but code review quality? Come on. Complaining about an ancient, deprecated, removed feature that nobody used (it wasn't a workaround, either - it was supposed to be a convenience feature)? Saying that the language itself creates bad developers? You're really reaching.
Poor education, bad mentoring, laziness, and plain stupidity make bad developers. Bad developers make bad code reviews. Bad developers rely on crap like magic quotes. Your problem isn't with the language. It's with the people who churn out crap. Let me tell you a secret: Bad developers will be bad no matter what language they're using.
Clunky indeed. Prepending var- in front of everything? It sure looks like a hack bolted on in desperation to provide this kind of functionality. I'm afraid I might need to DIM something next. Or perhaps even PIC.
Sure, it provides some nice functionality, but the great thing about the preprocessors like SASS and LESS is that they're very flexible, generally easy to read, and very extensible.
Thing is, with the tools available, I'm not convinced that CSS variables are even necessary. Do we really want to be injecting code into a style language? Wouldn't it be better to keep things relatively simple and leave the complex things to external tools, reducing the amount of cruft that browsers "have" to support?
Do you find the story objectionable, or do you find it objectionable to find this story on Slashdot?
I agree to the former but not the latter. I think it is very, very important that these kinds of stories get LOTS of exposure. A bright light shining on the people who think this is a good idea is the best way to prevent them from taking the next step - implementing that idea.
I hope you're not implying that having a (D) in charge instead of an (R) would make a difference. Both parties are full of filth.
Not to mention that most online gaming communities are full of sociopaths. An online game may have amazing gameplay, but if I'm being called names every minute or to I lose all interest.
"I am, therefore I am." -- Akira