They don't think "Great programmers write the fastest code". Good programmers do tend to produce faster code, not usually by optimizing and instruction shaving (which they rail against) but by writing algorithms with lower asymptotic bounds. Many applications have performance concerns, and understanding algorithm performance (and how to improve it) is something I'd expect from a good programmer. Obviously it's a mistake to attempt certain kinds of optimization, but "fastest code" is often a legitimate target - and good programmers will tend towards writing much faster code than bad programmers.

They don't think that "Good code is 'simple' or 'elegant'", and then they complain about "clever" code that developers have to puzzle over to understand. That doesn't sound like simple or elegant code to me. Yes, if you redefine "simple" as "shortest" I suppose I agree with them - but that's just not what simple means. There are many times when a problem has a simple solution and a complex one. It's usually right to pick the simple one. Sure it's possible to have code that's too clever, just as it's possible (and more usual) to have code that's not clever enough, but that's a separate issue. Simple and elegant are both usually good things to aim for.

OK, got it. If a newspaper does something bad, it's not really a newspaper - it's an advocacy site or a right-wing tabloid.

So these PR people can feel free to answer quickly to newspapers, they just have to be careful about tabloids, magazines, periodicals, rogue reporters, and temporary lapses in judgement that are not indicative of a paper's overall quality.

Or, they could assume the worst of all media, just as so many journalists are trained to assume anyone they interview are lying liars telling lies.

"Let me read my notes back to you to make sure I'm getting you right."

Lol. Do you read the papers? Most reporters today aren't in the business of making sure they get the right quote. They're in the business of waiting for a mistake (or an isolated sentence or phrase that could be construed as one) - and, if they get one, putting it as a headline and milking it for all it's worth. The current Republican primary has turned on stupid phrases; the Alberta election coverage (I live in Alberta) has orbited around them as well. It hasn't given many journalists pause as to whether those quotes represent what those candidates think or feel - they've scored their points and made their splash.

If you can't imagine a journalist salivating about the prospect of reporting "government boondoggle spends x million dollars finding out it's snowing", then you just aren't paying attention. This isn't partisan, this isn't a bureaucratic problem, it's a problem with the perverse relationship that journalists now have with the public. They have tremendous pressure to be permanently adversarial to everyone - many seem to believe that's somehow what journalism is about - and it means that people are loath to be candid or off-the-cuff with any media.

These bureaucrats spending some time to avoid a trumped-up scandal probably saves the government a lot of time and money.

You want loudness control? Movies AND documentaries?

Resuming play?(!!)

You're going to need a lot of FPGAs, and you're going to need to rewrite a lot of popular codecs. Movie codecs. Documentary codecs. TV episode codecs. Audio codecs (with loudness control).

Thinking about this some more, are you sure the "popular" codecs meet all your requirements? Those codecs are for the kind of people satisfied without a customized library screen. Think big. You need to write some of your own codecs, running on your own optimized OS, and your own network protocols. Then shoot your own movies.

You're going to need a lot of books for this.

Well, at least we know how you approach these sorts of discussions.

If by "these sorts of discussions" you mean "discussions where I correct an idiot, and where I know that idiot will be unable to resist a stupid response" then yes, that is how I approach "these discussions". I find it entertaining to watch people desperately try to defend their ill-thought-out positions - and the barb on my post pretty much ensures they will, as you have. So, thanks.

But really, look at yourself objectively: your proposition is "buying someone the thing they would have bought if they had one more dollar" is "not even slightly similar" to "giving them $1". That's where you've arrived at. If I'm insulting you now it's because that's all that's left to do. What argument could make it any more clear that you're wrong?

As to the rest of the post, it's understandable that you'd try to deflect rather than actually defend that position. You may not see it that way. I don't care; I don't think I'll get any more entertainment out of this discussion. Bye.

I could spend $1 on my own campaign, or you could spend $1 for me. If you spend it, you have $1 less and I have $1 more. It's true you didn't pay me $1 directly, but the net effect is pretty similar.

It doesn't always work exactly like that, but hopefully you get the general idea - well, unless you're really, really fantastically stupid (which I imagine you'll demonstrate very clearly in a response).

And that actually gave me a good indication of both of your skills...

I was joking, clearly. And I kind of hope you were too, as otherwise that's a very sad observation there.

You've never had a debugging problem where paring down you attention to a few variables, and tracking the changes to them, was important?

Yes, I have had problems like that.

Here's a question that's a bit more relevant: "Have you ever had a problem where you had 7 variables you need to track in your mind?" The answer to that, for me, is no. My experience includes hundreds of hours doing programming competitions with problems purposefully designed to be convoluted, and I've never felt the need to track anywhere near 7 of them in my mind. Tracking 7 variables in your mind is not a core programming skill, nor close to one.

Yes, you can "interpert" him as saying something else. However, I was having a conversation with him, rather than an imaginary version of him that said something that wasn't stupid and wrong.

Anyone who can clearly explain a topic in English probably won't write readable code either.

Is this a clever dig at native English speaking programmers?

(which 7 variables do you need to track in your mind at any one time)

After 15 years of business programming, a smattering of embedded and OS programming, and a lot of algorithm programming competitions, I can't imagine a kind of programming where "which 7 variables do you need to track in your mind" is of any relevance. If this normally comes up for you, you're doing something very wrong.

I mean, fake obviously but still more interesting than the 45th "I'm too cool for 3d, which isn't even really 3d" pile-on thread.

Oh, and here's a video of someone who actually implemented a Meissner effect racetrack, complete with elevation changes: here

I feel a bit bad about it, but as I read the summary I was thinking: this guy is poison. I manage a team of developers, and I see a big red flag whenever I hear about a guy who figures he's doing more than his share, keeps secrets/hoards knowledge, thinks he's irreplaceable, or plays ultimatums.

Kills morale, usually means the guy isn't actually pulling his weight, kills positive relationships, creates politics, and generally poisons the workplace.

Oh, and by the way, via Google, I couldn't find any reference to the line "hate the sin, love the sinner" as actually being anywhere in the Bible, Old or New Testament.

Yeah... I don't think you'll find that. God loving righteous people and hating sinners is a major theme of the Bible. He just, uh, comes out and says it multiple times.

Psalms 11:5 - The Lord trieth the righteous: but the wicked and him that loveth violence his soul hateth

But Christians, as they exist today in the States, typically don't give two craps for the Bible. There's about 20 verses of generic Oprah-isms that they hold dear, and the rest is a pick-and-choose buffet.

Meh, there's still plenty of browser incompatibilities and quirks. You can get around a lot of them with things like jQuery, but you still run into some that are difficult. I was just doing a "code completion" popup thingee a bit ago, and there was quite a few places I had to split code for Firefox vs. IE - and it doesn't work in Chrome (yet) though I have no idea why. I can certainly understand how, if you can target only one browser, it's tempting to do so; even though doing a cross browser solutions are much easier than they used to be they're still not free.

Lol. You haven't spent a long time in corporate development I guess. For many companies, they're just starting to transition off parts of their 1983 mainframe/terminal setup, and they're happy to be getting most of their people on XP because now they can have people all remote into the same crazy old computer that terminals into their older, larger crazy old computer.

The 1998 website that only works in IE 6 is "the new system" for many, many companies.

To be fair, the situation looked a lot different in 1998. I mean, look at what web standards defined in 1998 (almost nothing) vs. what managers demanded from these web applications (pretty much everything we have now, plus some other stuff).

So say you want a page that can update dynamically? What are you going to tell your manager: wait for some more tech to be invented and put into a standard? OK, fine - we'll just sit out for 5 years while we get trampled.

Oh, or we'll go "cross browser" and limit ourselves to stuff you could get to work in Netscape 3 (hint: the answer is nothing, and you had to pay out the nose in layers and BS and image pre-load scripts to get that nothing).

No - you did what you could: and sometimes that meant using IE specific DOM and events, ActiveX BS, iFrames, showModalDialog, the wacky DHTML Edit control, and maybe you try to find some CSS that works in the browsers you try to support.

Some of that stuff worked out fine, by the way (lots of that IE specific DOM code eventually became standard - as did, in a practical sense, the XMLHTTP ActiveX control) - and other stuff didn't.

Sometimes you guessed wrong, sometimes you guessed right; sometimes you knew you were guessing wrong (as with ActiveX) but didn't have another real choice. Say you want your software to be able to save locally in the case of a downed network connection (remember, this is 1998) - what was your good option for the shiny new web app that's going to make your business millions?

Oh and if you, instead, try to write some native app you got destroyed by the market because people didn't want bloody native apps - and you have an even harder transition to come because many as cool as native apps weren't in 1998, they were even less cool in 2003.

Many companies have lax or no update control, and many allow logins from home computers and what not. People will end up in a version they didn't mean to get and that will create work for other people.

Not end of the world, and again I'm not saying the decision's wrong - I just think they're crazy if they don't expect some significant problems and complaints.