sasha-dv

While governments are cutting down their budgets for scientific research and basically accepting the status quo regarding the spaceflight, there's this guy from Africa doing something extraordinary and you see no innovation or courage?

If you describe what happened today as "there was this thing that came close to some robotic arm or something, and then the arm slowly captured it, and ... that's about it.", then I agree with you - that is boring. But, that's not what happened today.

Today we saw one guy's insane vision becoming reality. And if that is not something I don't know what is. And what's even more exciting about it is that this is just the beginning.

Governments can, with care, be kept under control. However bad corruption gets, democratic governments will always be bound to the electorate. Corporations - no.

Aren't corporations regulated by the laws made by the governments elected by the electorate?

Bitch please!

Indeed. Sexy times!

Captured dragon: http://imgur.com/Vmnzj and http://imgur.com/mQU91

NASA (and Roscosmos) should delegate to private companies all of the operations in LEO. They should focus their efforts on sending humans deeper into space.

I want to see a day when docking at the ISS is considered a boring affair.

But, I think, doing dangerous stunts like that is just a small part of their daily duties.

You can say that Knuth went of the grid to accomplish something extraordinary, but I did it once I've realized that my life is actually mine to live and that the world would not end if I'm not reachable. I quit being Atlas and the sky didn't fall.

That would be me.

I don't own a cellphone since 2004. I've got tired of being constantly available (and disrupted), so I ditched the damn thing. It may not be practical for everybody, but it works for me. The world has its own pace and I have mine.

For me, the biggest inconvenience of not having a cellphone are those businesses (websites) that insist on a "cellphone #" being a required field during a sign-up or when requesting a quote.

Disclaimer: I run my own show.

... and an inspiration!

I'm done with CRUD-ing my life away. It's time to tackle some hard problems.

It seams to me that in a post named X-vs-Y you should arrive at some sort of conclusion. Say, X is the way to go or something like that.

I'm not a db geek and I'm not pro-NOSQL or pro-RDBMS. Having no horse in the race, and a very modest knowledge of DBMS, I wonder what would be the best choice in this specific use case (building mailman archive)?

The hatred dates well before the 1990ies. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp. The more you know, the less you want to know.

Don't be so sure.

During the recent war they burned his memorial house and destroyed the monument in front of it. They also demolished his monument in the nearby town of Gospic at the beginning of the recent war and it appears they don't want it back: http://bit.ly/JnSQkg

DISCLAIMER: This reply contains a slightly modified implementation of RFC 1097.

I agree.

That's why we formed the PreCrime police force, but were forced to shut it down because of that movie with Tom Cruise ... Minority Consort or something like that.

Damn you Hollywood liberals!

Listen to what people are complaining about. Can you do something about it?

Let me give you an example of an average end user.

This guy calls the customer support (via skype) and complains that he has no internet. He says that skype is working, uTorrent is working, but he has no internet. Obviously, his network connection is OK, but he's not stopping with "there's no internet!"

Can you guess what's the problem?

The guy who sold him the computer also explained to him how to use skype and how to pirate movies (that was what he cited as his reason for buying it in the first place). So far so good. One thing he also did was to setup yahoo.com as the homepage for this guy.

Searching for porn and free goodies, our customer installed some malware that hijacked his browser and change his homepage from yahoo.com to something else. And suddenly, "my internet is not working". This guy is asking us what button he needs to click on to get his internet back. For him, internet is having yahoo.com as the homepage.

I'm not making fun of this guy. I've met a ton of similar cases. What I've learned is that people are not interested in how it works, they just want it to work so that they can use it for pirating movies or any other thing they use their computers for. They want you to hide a complex functionality behind a simple button they need to click on.

Same disinterest I've encountered while developing custom software. The customers simply don't want to mess around with the software. They want to enter some data and click on the button. For anything else they prefer to call you so that you can make that button do something else. This may be anecdotal evidence, but I'm yet to encounter a customer who wants me to build the kind of software you're describing.

Horizontal scrolling - a possible bug?

Screen resolution: 1024×768.

UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0

Sometimes, I wonder if we live on the same planet - me

I'm not trying to be a dick, but that "quote" at the beginning of the article is just absurd. The "end users" would form an angry mob, drag that programmer out of his Ivory Tower, and kick his ass.

I think you seriously overestimate the interest of the end users in programming. End users want that the damn thing do what it is supposed to do, and go home to their lives. They don't want an interactive programming environment - they want a button to push and be done with it.

(Not that I want to shoot you :)

edit: an elaboration

I'm trying to figure out what exactly Jeff wrote that you hate so much. You don't even consider his arguments, you just have "a guess about Jeff, and a general message about other people who feel the same way."

Jeff wouldn't write something like this:

"Don't listen to the hipsters who claim that coding is as vital as reading, and who claim that for the first time in the history you can learn to code, because now we have an online JavaScript course that we call "Code Year" or something like that.

But that is what I've got from his post. He's not against people learning to code, he's against making it into something that it simply isn't - a vital life skill.

Jeff's post: Please Don't Learn to Code

Zed's books: Learn To Code The Hard Way

Sure, it's not true for any of them, even Python, but it's meaningful for any language including Java, Perl, C, C++,...

It's easy to forget that computing is a huge field and that hackers diverse in their tastes and fetishes.

I was just pointing out that what you said about Python I could say about Ruby or Perl, some other guy about C++, ...

For example, I hate significant white space and if I had to use Python I would be miserable, but for you it's the best language in the world.

Sure, we can argue about what percent of the total users of a given language would use it if they had a freedom to choose a different one.

edit: I can't reply to your reply so here it is:

My point is that People who write Python choose to write Python. is as true as People who write X choose to write X.

My claim is not that "Everybody who writes X chooses to write X"

People who write X choose to write X.

There's virtually no language that can't fit the bill. It may surprise some, but there are people who choose to write Java, Perl, C, and even C++.

edit: Didn't realize that people who choose a language different than Python aren't actually people.

Are you sure about it?

What if he suddenly starts thinking that he actually knows what goes into building software?

I have this horror scene in my mind where Bloombergs of this world are terrorizing their developers, with their "deep knowledge" of computers that they picked up by doing an online JavaScript course, I mean "code year".

Democratization of programming is a lofty ideal, but in the reality anybody who wants to learn to code will do so if he has a computer. This latest fad is nothing more than a trivialization of a complex skill and an attempt by some non-technical hipsters to be even more hip. If plumbing was cool we would see the same people vowing to learn how to plumb this year.