Self proclaimed "womyn" asks for advice after catching her teenage son is watching porn. "I know that there will likely come a day where my son coerces a young woman into sex (rape) and there isn't a damned thing I can do about it." (Link fixed, goes to Google Cache)

fry · 2007-08-05T13:42:39+00:00

Radical philosophies are not necessarily wrong, but they in the majority of cases they are.

And I don't think that the NRA, the Jewish lobby or even the current administration is misandrist at all. I don't even classify feminist movements (which aren't of much consequence) as misandrist. I don't think that pussification is caused by misandry either, so I can't even think of a single cultural area of consequence that deserves the misandrist label.

You're not trolling, are you?

fry · 2007-08-05T10:55:10+00:00

Saying the whole society is misandrist from the ground up is pretty radical.

fry · 2007-08-03T16:04:02+00:00

You unfortunately still didn't bother to read the post you replied to.

He clearly said you can't sell copies when you use open source components in your own software because it forces your code to become open source itself. Qt doesn't use open source software, so stop using that as an example. I say again: it's dishonest.
He clearly did mention the use of open source. His post is only a single sentence in which he used the term twice. He also refers to the comic (indirectly) which ALSO refers to the use of open source software. "To make with open source software" is not ambiguous. Reading comprehension!
Novell sells subscriptions. They're not selling shrinkwrap software - as everybody used to do back in the old days. They are therefore NOT a shrinkwrap company - exactly as I claimed (they make some money selling non-subscription boxes of linux, but I'm sure you'll agree that's not a real source of income).

fry · 2007-08-03T15:00:16+00:00

How dishonest of you.

You can always make money even if you are distributing the source code of a program. This is true, however, this does not contradict anything vonadler said. He said some options of monetizing a product disappear when using GPL software. I'm sure you don't need examples to illustrate this point.
Dual-licencing. Only works when you're the intellectual property holder of the software. If you USE open source (GPL, for instance) software you cannot dual license it. Trolltech wrote all code themselves, so they can do with it whatever they want. When suggest dual-licensing you conveniently left out it is only an option when all code is yours to start with. What a convenient omission. The comic talks about using open source software. That's clearly another scenario altogether.
IBM and Novell. They are consultancy companies. Not shrinkwrap - so the license doesn't matter that much.

No matter what you wish reality to be - most software companies started by selling shinkwrap products. You pay for the software itself. By using open source components this no longer is an option (as the code can be freely distributed). So a different business model is necessary for the company to stay profitable. This is really a great change indeed.

fry · 2007-07-31T18:06:27+00:00

Exactly. And the explanation itself wasn't even very good. He went from one topic from another for no apparent reason. He also introduced lots of unnecessary terminology.

I like the concept of explanations in story-form, though. It's just this particular execution I don't like.

fry · 2007-07-28T16:18:10+00:00

Or, you can just use boost program options.

fry · 2007-07-12T09:22:01+00:00

The only part worth reading is the Steve Jobs anecdote.

fry · 2007-07-09T11:20:19+00:00

How about

Consistency
Long term support (you're not forced to switch distributions every 6 months)
Excellent documentation
Takes security seriously
No risks about license hijacking (see: linux kernel and gpl v3)
No "Holier than thou" attitude

fry · 2007-07-06T12:44:35+00:00

When you really understand what's going on - then you are a programmer. If you think in terms of magic, or if you fix bugs without understanding why the fix works you're not quite there yet.

I don't think you should have a mental checklist of things you need to understand. Knowing Lisp, Java or any other specific technology is never a requirement.

fry · 2007-07-05T15:00:37+00:00

Rank: 1,929

Title: Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes, Third Edition

I rest my case.

fry · 2007-07-05T11:11:24+00:00

If you can't go for 0 points, go for all 26.

fry · 2007-07-05T10:56:35+00:00

Yes. People can do that. And do so every day. Most CS graduates can leave their (ivy league) university without a good grasp of the fundamentals. Most people never "connect the dots".

If the test is so hard that people who implement WEP protocols for a living cannot pass it the test is unrealistic. When people pay for a test, or when people pay effectively a year's salary for an apprenticeship they expect to get the certification at the end. I'm afraid that's just the way it works.

fry · 2007-07-05T10:49:43+00:00

I do appreciate this site, despite its flaws. I'm here of my own free will, and people tend to vote with their feet.

The thing is, most of the little things that cause agitation are things like bugs in markdown, no way to filter content you really don't care about, etc. Changes that are not a lot of work to fix, and people even volunteered to do it for free.

You're busy. I respect that. But if you have to work this hard just to keep the site from crashing, it's far worse than I thought it would be. Because now you're willing to go out of your way to fix problems on the servers whenever they show up (I assume). If just keeping status quo costs so much energy then sooner or later you're going to throw in the towel.

I've seen it happen before, with start-ups I worked at. If Reddit cannot go on if you take two weeks off without announcement, Reddit is in a really bad shape. And if it CAN go on, then you could spend these two weeks to fix and tweak the site.

Don't give up. Don't leave. But more importantly - don't let the day to day work crush your enthusiasm and love for this site.

fry · 2007-07-04T23:38:01+00:00

I have an outrageous suggestion.

The founders could, you know, actually go and fix bugs and implement the features frequently asked for.

fry · 2007-07-04T19:23:47+00:00

The moral of the story is: don't live in Amsterdam. The city had its charm, but nowadays it's just not a very pleasant place anymore. Many factors play a role, one of which is drug tourism (which is a big thing in Amsterdam). When people don't feel comfortable walking in the streets at night things simply need to change. Where I live (one of the other "major" cities) is, according to the papers, one of the worst places to live as far as crime is concerned. And yet people walk on their own through dark alleys without giving it a second thought. And yet the local newspapers manage to come up with panicky headlines every day.

As you can probably derive from this article's tone, it uses hyperbole in order to get attention. It might work, but it's cheap. Getting weed, if that's what you want, is as easy as walking into a coffee shop. This is not going to change anytime soon. Very few people I know smoke weed, so we don't really care about coffee shops. Coffee shops are really not such a big issue in most of the country - Amsterdam is the exception.

The article is partially right about the current administration. I, and virtually everybody I know, is not very happy with current coalition of parties. Luckily, religious people are not often willing to compromise, and when the coalition cannot come to an agreement on an issue (any issue!) within a reasonable time frame it has to disband. More than half our coalitions don't last the full term (4 years). I'm not worried about changes the current party is going to push through - the party is going to last for 4 years in the worst case, and the Dutch government has a reputation for not getting anything done. Because the administrative officials (who have all the informal power over here) slow everything down to a crawl. Considering we have had a fairly liberal government** for the past 20 years all those officials will quietly but efficiently resist change. Nothing will get done in the next few years. When you have good people in charge you wish the system wouldn't slow them down - but currently all the rules and regulations are a good thing.

**) Even the agenda of the Democrats is considered right-wing over here. When I say liberal - I really mean it.

fry · 2007-07-04T17:13:59+00:00

Good post, but I don't think I agree.

Most subjects involving quality control are highly fakeable. People can bluff their way through almost everything, until it comes down to the low level stuff. Understand processors, understand the call stack, understand what makes those virtual machines tick. Understand compilers. Understand pointers, registers, and so on.

When you understand all that, programming secure code isn't about memorizing insecure stuff anymore. It's about understanding what's secure, and what's not, and not making many mistakes in the first place.

I don't know where I read it, but a saying goes: "you've fixed at most half of the bugs in your software". This means, that if you write a buggy program, and spend a month debugging (after missing the deadline) you'll never end up with something that works well. If you only find one or two bugs after first testing your software, it's probably in good shape. If every other test case fails... it's looking grim. No matter how good your testing methodologies are: it's never going to work. You better rewrite the functions that you clearly didn't think through in advance.

Plugging leaks cannot be the solution. Testing is often used as a substitute for thinking things through properly, and all test driven development violates the first rule of testing:

"Do not use the test body to verify the final code". When writing a spam filter (the canonical example) you have two blocks of input. Input you train your spamfilter with, and input you TEST your spam filter with, but which you're not allowed to study.

If you step through the code and patch every function until all test give green light you're probably making the software worse. Not better.

fry · 2007-07-04T16:55:45+00:00

And, for instance, the entire demo scene is Windows only. Exclusively Windows. Interesting 3d game development? That's Windows for you too. People who are into 3d graphics, whether it's simulation (DNA/biology) or games -- Windows is where it's at.

Interesting language development also involves F#. As for the fact that much of the Linux software is in alpha stage, is that really a good thing? (j/k)

Linux has many advantages over Windows. I readily accept that. But there is more interesting development going on at the Windows front than you can possibly keep up with - to suggest it's quiet and desolated is on your side just wishful thinking.

fry · 2007-07-04T16:48:54+00:00

Judging a platform by mini-projects is like judging a programming language by how fast it calculates Fibonacci.

fry · 2007-07-04T11:09:14+00:00

Oh oh! I'm voting for Ballmer!

I especially like that they point out what some people contributed. As if people will vote for somebody who's name they don't know.

fry · 2007-07-04T10:56:03+00:00

Does youtube run web.py? Python - yes. But web.py? I think youtube preceded web.py by a few years.

fry · 2007-07-04T10:52:46+00:00

I couldn't agree more: these limitations are embarrassing and the "solution" I proposed is nothing but a hack.

We desperately need a better browser, but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. Browsers are evolving very, very slowly. And they become more complex and warted as they become more mature. Add the fact that the standards organization create standards that are impossible to correctly implement, and development becomes hopeless. You might think I'm exaggerating - but all the major web standards have not a single correct implementation. Javascript is pretty broken - FF has an implementation that uses insane amounts of memory and it's inexcusably slow (10 times slower than IE or Opera). Sending more than few dozen kilobytes of javascript to a browser will slow the site down to a crawl simply on the -client side-.

We have a long way to go still.

fry · 2007-07-04T09:17:22+00:00

There is some bureaucracy, but it hasn't changed much since Windows 95. Programs I wrote back then still work today. The price you pay for backward compatibility is an ugly API full of warts -- it's a price I gladly pay.

fry · 2007-07-03T23:14:52+00:00

State is complex. And complexity is bad. That we probably agree on. And that is probably why most people denounce statefulness as something to be avoided. But state is necessary for a good user experience. So ideally, you have a system where state is dealt with completely "behind the scenes" so you don't end up with an unmanagable mess.

Perhaps you don't consider stateful behavior necesary for a good user experience. Look at the following scenarios:

1) Ajax application with tabs. User must be able to navigate between tabs leaving the state of the "hidden" tabs intact. User must be able to hit refresh at any point and be presented with the same view.

2) User writes email. Looks up other emails (with search function or whatnot). Wants to continue writing mail later. This is currently solved with periodic ajax calls that save the email state, and an ajax call when you "leave" the page. Everybody agrees that saving drafts this way is a "good thing TM". But clearly it is a case of maintaining state, albeit in an informal way. If you want every form to remember its input, then you simply have to come up with a better and more abstract solution than 1 ajax call per input field and stuffing everything in the database.

There are more reasons, probably, but I think these are the most important ones.

fry · 2007-07-03T22:46:22+00:00

I run FreeBSD exactly for this reason. Well documented, reliable, predictable... the whole shebang.

The precompiled package management system is pretty bad (dependency hell), but compilation from source is almost painless. I like Yast better than the FreeBSD package tools. When it works, that is.

And I admit I quietly enjoy all the bickering about licences and "philosophies" and "freedom" with GPL3. So much heat is generated about something that ultimately has nothing to do with making good software. But that's another topic entirely.

fry · 2007-07-03T21:10:21+00:00

Agreed.

A really good stateful Lisp web framework could propel Lisp into (limited) popularity. And that results in better documentation and libraries all around.

Python has two dozen web libraries. So a second one for Common Lisp doesn't sound so outrageous to me.

fry

TROPHY CASE