Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re:Another Big Impediment (Score 1) 457

by PJ6 (#42565143) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Practices Impede Developers' Productivity?

Anytime the process boils down to "if it's not a new feature or an emergency bug fix, you are not allowed to spend any time on it. And if you do spend any time on something like fixing spaghetti code so that implementing new features and emergency fixes don't take an act of God, we will refuse to promote it to production, as our policy is to not promote changes to anything that 'already works.'"

This is the kind of attitude that naturally emerges from an environment without unit tests.

And the biggest kiss of death comes from this - the old, "we can't change the database design because we don't know what will break". The growing strain between changing requirements and the DB implementation eventually breaks the project utterly.

Comment: because Google will be ground zero (Score 2) 117

by PJ6 (#42372749) Attached to: Why Google Hired Ray Kurzweil
This is a late post and nobody will read it, but I will say it here anyway.

Free translation between all languages is just a nice to have compared to the real thrust and purpose of their effort: Human Intermediate Language, and the compilers / reflectors that go with it. It's a hard nut to crack, but this is a natural progression for Google. And applied at Google scale with Google resources... well that could be scary powerful.

I would guess they already have a proof of concept and some execs are shitting themselves over the possibilities. Strong A.I. or something that looks like it is not too far behind. Ask the whole goddamn internet what all of human civilization thinks the meaning of life is, and actually get brilliant results back, with citations, in the language of your choice. This is why they brought Ray on.

Comment: beat your chest or get shoved aside (Score 2) 276

by PJ6 (#42371485) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How To Gently Keep Management From Wrecking a Project?
This situation is like a religious debate - it's a social thing that has nothing to do with who has the best arguments. If you go down the route of explaining your point of view in a well-reasoned way, don't be surprised when you're ignored for reasons that seem to not make any sense, or at least have nothing to do with the well-being of the project.

Look around the ponderously inefficient, devastated landscape of medium to large-scale engineering. There are no meritocracies.

In no uncertain terms, this will be a pissing contest - let it be known IMMEDIATELY that you are on the warpath and you must get your way. Even if it is completely against your nature... be the asshole. Be the alpha type you may hate. FIGHT AND WIN according to the stupid and predictable primate rules of social structure and power that we all live by - power is taken, not given.

Comment: versioning will never fix fundamental flaw (Score 2, Interesting) 113

by PJ6 (#42319261) Attached to: W3C Finalizes the Definition of HTML5
HTML and anything like it is the wrong thing to put a standards body on. Authoring (human "readable") is a level in the abstraction chain where innovation and competition is supposed to occur, not this ponderous shit. Sticking with HTML as the standard has easily set us back ten years from where we could have been, and I fear it will continue to stifle innovation for decades to come.

Comment: use both exceptions and return values (Score 1) 536

by PJ6 (#42235785) Attached to: The Scourge of Error Handling
This isn't an either-or / where's-the-third option question - exceptions and return values just need to be used for what they're best suited.

Use exceptions for error conditions that can be generalized, i.e., they need no more information than this for a domain-specific (client/service/DAL) Policy to decide what to do.

1. Is it a genuine error, or a stopping condition encountered in normal operation?
2. Does it contain a message intended for the end-user to see?
3. Should it be logged?

No need for try/catch blocks everywhere for this since you've generalized it.

Error conditions that can't or shouldn't be integrated into a generalized exception-handling policy... these should relay information through function return values as part of an application's business process, not through exceptions.

It's not complicated.

Comment: still waiting for 1 trillion+ solar masses... (Score 3, Interesting) 65

by PJ6 (#42151109) Attached to: Black Hole Found That Takes Up 14% of Its Galaxy's Mass
I read (I think it was in 'death by black hole') that the more massive the black hole, the less gravity you experience at the event horizon. For a 1 trillion mass black hole, supposedly it would only have 10g at its event horizon. For still greater masses, you could have 1g, something reasonable for both a human and a spaceship to deal with... in theory, you could hover a ship with a person in it at the very boundary of such an event horizon... how sharp would this boundary be? I'd lower a string to see where and how it gets clipped.

Comment: problems come from file system use, not the IDE (Score 1) 586

by PJ6 (#41825003) Attached to: The IDE As a Bad Programming Language Enabler
The OP actually glanced off what I consider a big issue with modern IDEs. Especially for over-engineered projects, there is a clear need to be able to view files that change together, grouped together, regardless of how the Separation of Concerns has been implemented. The idea of using the file system as organizer needs to die. Code is data and should get the support a real database makes possible.

Comment: trying to understnad this (Score 2) 529

by PJ6 (#41644073) Attached to: Physicists Devise Test For Whether the Universe Is a Simulation

The numerical simulation scenario could reveal itself in the distributions of the highest energy cosmic rays exhibiting a degree of rotational symmetry breaking that reflects the structure of the underlying lattice.

This sounds similar to looking for aliasing artifacts. Right?

Among the observables that are considered are the muon g-2 and the current differences between determinations of alpha, but the most stringent bound on the inverse lattice spacing of the universe, b^(-1) >~ 10^(11) GeV, is derived from the high-energy cut off of the cosmic ray spectrum.

This is do not understand, I thought we already had a theory predicting and explaining a high-energy cutoff.

Comment: 'actual cash'... well that's an odd image (Score 1) 89

by PJ6 (#41626313) Attached to: New Zealand Turning Hobbits Into Actual Cash
The title had me thinking of a scene out of The Wall, with hobbits on a conveyor belt being dropped into a grinder oozing cash out of it.

Never mixed Pink Floyd with Tolkien before. I usually don't get really creative, screwed up images like that unless I'm dreaming. Thanks, Slashdot!

Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep. -- Carl Sandburg

Close