This will piss people off
Talk about not eating your own food
Programmer's Quotes
# The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time…The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
# Once a new technology starts rolling, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.
# Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
# The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we’ve finished building it.
# The software isn’t finished until the last user is dead.
# All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors.
# Benchmarks don’t lie, but liars do benchmarks.
# Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over
MILITARY RULES OF CONDUCT
Marine Corps Rules:
1. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.
2. Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.
3. Have a plan.
4. Have a back-up plan, because the first one probably won't work.
5. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
6. Do not attend a gunfight with a handgun whose caliber does not start with a '4.'
7. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
8. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend. (Lateral & diagonal preferred.)
9. Use cover and concealment as much as possible.
10. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours.
11. Always cheat; always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.
12. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics. They will only remember who lived.
13. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating your intention to shoot.
Navy SEALS Rules:
1. Look very cool in sunglasses.
2. Kill every living thing within view.
3. Adjust speedo.
4. Check hair in mirror.
US Army Rangers Rules:
1. Walk 50 miles wearing 75 pound rucksack while starving.
2. Locate individuals requiring killing.
3. Request permission via radio from 'Higher' to perform killing.
4. Curse bitterly when mission is aborted.
5. Walk out 50 miles wearing a 75 pound rucksack while starving.
US Army Rules:
1. Curse bitterly when receiving operational order.
2. Make sure there is extra ammo and extra coffee.
3. Curse bitterly.
4. Curse bitterly.
5. Do not listen to 2nd LTs; it can get you killed.
6. Curse bitterly.
US Air Force Rules:
1. Have a cocktail.
2. Adjust temperature on air-conditioner..
3. See what's on HBO.
4. Ask 'What is a gunfight?'
5. Request more funding from Congress with a 'killer' Power Point presentation.
6. Wine & dine ''key' Congressmen, invite DOD & defense industry executives.
7. Receive funding, set up new command and assemble assets.
8. Declare the assets 'strategic' and never deploy them operationally.
9. Hurry to make 13:45 tee-time.
10. Make sure the base is as far as possible from the conflict but close enough to have tax exemption.
US Navy Rules:
1. Go to Sea.
2. Drink Coffee.
3. Deploy Marines
Overheard at airport
Overheard at airport:
Posted on: July 30, 2009 7:21 PM, by Greg Laden
"Here," dad to girl, "Get your ID out and have it with your ticket."
"Excuse me, sir," said the TSA officer, pointing to the young female, "She does not need to have her ID out, she's a minor."
Dad: "How do you know she's a minor if you don't look at her ID?"
.... (silence as everyone waits for answer)....
Dad again: "Kind of a hole in the system, isn't it?"
TSA Officer, voice lowered ... "There are a LOT of holes in the system, sir." ... walks away.
Young girl, "Good one, dad. Now tell her our name is LADEN and see what happens!"
Amish virus
You have just received the Amish virus. Since we have no electricity or
computers, you are on the honor system. Please forward this message to
everyone in your address book and then delete all files on your hard
drive.
Thank you.
Woman sues College because she can't get a job
If this doesn't highlight the sense of entitlement that alot of Americans feel I don't know what does. I mean 2.7 GPA and 2 job interviews. My GPA is higher and I have had only one interview in the last 6 months. I did get the job, but that was becaused I interviewed well. With this lawsuit no company will get within a mile of her and I don't blame them. She sound like a high maintenace whinner who is looking for easy money.
The Seven Types of Employees You Meet at Best Buy
The link
[Read More]Travel complaints
from the Grey Monk
I really cannot resist sharing this as widely as possible. It says everything you need to know about the Labour voting masses that now regularly travel and ruin everyone else's holiday ....
Thomas Cook Holiday complaints
(Survey by Thomas Cook and ABTA)
"I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."
"It's lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time - this should be banned."
"On my holiday to Goa in India , I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food at all."
"We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels."
A tourist at a top African game lodge overlooking a waterhole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel "inadequate".
A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she'd been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the "do not disturb" sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.
"The beach was too sandy."
"We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white."
A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time.
"Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday was ruined as my husband spent all day looking at other women."
"We bought 'Ray-Ban' sunglasses for five Euros (£3.50) from a street trader, only to find out they were fake."
"No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled."
"It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England it only took the Americans three hours to get home."
"I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends' three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller."
"The brochure stated: 'No hairdressers at the accommodation' We're trainee hairdressers - will we be OK staying here?"
"There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners."
"We had to queue outside with no air conditioning."
"It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel."
"I was bitten by a mosquito - no-one said they could bite."
"My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked."
As I said .....
Mathematician and physicist
A mathematician and a physicist were asked the following question: Suppose you walked by a burning house and saw a hydrant and a hose not connected to the hydrant. What would you do?
P: I would attach the hose to the hydrant, turn on the water, and put out the fire.
M: I would attach the hose to the hydrant, turn on the water, and put out the fire.
Then they were asked this question: Suppose you walked by a house and saw a hose connected to a hydrant. What would you do?
P: I would keep walking, as there is no problem to solve.
M: I would disconnect the hose from the hydrant and set the house on fire, reducing the problem to a previously solved form.
My geek score
Created by OnePlusYou - Free Dating Site
I guess I am a righty
Brain Lateralization Test Results |
| Right Brain (60%) The right hemisphere is the visual, figurative, artistic, and intuitive side of the brain. Left Brain (40%) The left hemisphere is the logical, articulate, assertive, and practical side of the brain |
personality tests by similarminds.com
Real rock stars
The latest intel add. This is pretty good, I just wish I had saved the ones for internal use only.
Carrie Fisher on George Lucas
If Philosophers Were Programmers
http://developeronline.blogspot.com/2009/04/if-philosophers-were-programmers.html
If Philosophers Were Programmers
Although not obvious, philosophy actually has a strong relation with programming, at least for me. If you think about it, software code reflects much of how the developer perceives the problem and its solution. Before starting to program, developers spend some time thinking over the problem, identifying important properties and their underlying connections, a process that reveals their philosophy as the way they perceive real-word situations. Likewise, philosophers are constantly trying to identify the most important properties of the issues they reflect on, like life, conscience or God.
Under this perspective one might be able to make a consistent mapping of the ideas behind programming languages and the ideas that philosophers have come up over the years. It is perfectly reasonable to consider the programming languages as the different philosophies of a virtual world, in which entities do exist and interact with each other. To this respect, even the fundamental philosophical questions receive an interesting transformation: For example "What is self-conscience?" can be rephrased as "What is reflection?".
To the fun part, one might ask: "What if philosophers were programmers? What programming language they would use?". Well, here are my answers!
Socrates : The Hardcore Assembly Programmer
Socrates was one of the founders of philosophy but this is not where the connection ends. Socrates had devised a clever methodology to win every debate. He kept asking questions until a contradiction was reached. So, when someone would claim "morality is important", Socrates would ask "How do you define morality?".
In a similar manner, everything in Assembly begs for a question. There is nothing pre-assumed (at least in pure Assembly, not the distros filled with pre-processed libraries and other junk) and everything has to be as succinct as possible to have a meaning. If you were to work with the programmer Socrates and shared something like "var x = null;", your partner would start by asking "What is var?" !
Aristotle : The Influential C Programmer
Aristotle had a huge impact on Western philosophy, founding many scientific areas, from physics to biology. He was the first to closely examine real entities as the real essence of everything, in contrast to Plato's abstractions. His philosophy is driven by the golden mean as the key to reaching morality or understanding life (matter and form).
The C programming language was equally influential to the design of all other "programming philosophies", most obviously in the syntactical level. In addition, by the time of its writing in the early 70's, C was supposed to be the golden mean between the so-called high-level languages and the Assembly language, combining the capability to write machine-independent code combined with the power of low-level access.
Plato : The Idealistic C++ Evangelist
Plato is a huge figure in philosophy, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle. That said, I owe you an explanation about the obvious anomaly: How come that C++ is coming after C? Let me explain. Plato is famous for his Forms or Ideas, that refer to the archetypical versions of the things around us. So, the cup in your desk has is a shadow of a similar oval-shaped archetype in the world of Ideas. In programming words, it is an instance of the Cup class.
Similarly, C++ , as an extension of C, is the first language that tries to capture this idea of forms by giving the developers the capability to abstract the problem before doing anything else. This is a major step by itself, since even if no actual code solving the problem is provided, the classification and the problem modelling are evident and valuable to others. You might wonder, why Plato would not program in Java. Well he could, but there is another parameter to the story: Plato is not so confident how symbols can represent his Forms, and clearly prefers the spoken dialogue (as mentioned in Phaedrus). In a similar manner, C++, not entirely confident in its direction, remains a superset of C, being fully backwards-compatible with the more non-ideal syntax of C.
Stoics : The Happy Perl Community
Stoics and their philosophy (Stoicism) had silently, a far-reaching impact not only to Western philosophy but to the philosophy and the global culture as a whole. Interestingly enough, there is no single man behind it, but it was actually a collaborative intellectual achievement. Stoicism denies anything immaterial and tries to explain the world through propositional logic. So, Stoics reject everything Ideal and concenrate in morality, in which they call us to get free from anything we can't control, but rather appreciate the freedom to self-introspect and reach true wisdom. Stoicism rejects political systems and other formalities, and promotes Socrates' citizen of the world for everyone. People are meant to be brothers, away from distinctions, aiming to contribute happily to a society of friendship and love (jus commune gentium). You should already notice the influences to most widespread religions, like Christianism and Buddism.
Most interestingly, Perl was created in the 80's, a decade in which finally logic/functional programming had found its place in the programming languages world. However, the Perl community (and language) shares much more striking similarites with the Stoics and their philosophy. Perl as a language is to the best possible extent, free of form. Actually the most common phrase in the Perl world is "there is more than one way to do it" or TIMTOADY for short. The philosophy behind Perl rejects syntactical constraints, giving the freedom to its programmers to code in their style, but at the same time encouraging sharing and contribution to the community. Perl's power lies to a great extent to the existence of CPAN, the archive of modules and software happily shared by Perl programmers all around the globe. The language's influence to the programming world has been silent, but much more far-reaching than what is immediately observable. One could mention its strong influence to scripting, dynamic typing and functional programming, but it could be summarized to a joke which is familiar to Perl fans: The next market's crash will be triggered by a bug in someone's Perl script.
Rene Descartes : The True Java Guru
Descartes was the first philosopher of the Western culture to stand up against the Classical Ancient Greek philosophy. His core philosophy as mentioned in his famous Article 7 of the "Les principles de la philosophie" is based on the concept of cogito (=intellectual ego). Descartes believes that doubt is a proof of existence, and cogito is the cause of doubt, arriving to the famous "cogito ergo sum" (=I think therefore I exist). The cogito is not just another process we do, but actually all we do. So, what we want, imagine or feel is directly accessible through it. Descartes nearly 'proves' the existence of God, by the fact that we are able to think about the necessity of his existence. In fact any Ideal or Form can be directly accessible by our cogito. Descartes also marks another landmark in the history of philosophy: Beginning from his work, philosophy is trying to avoid confusing abstractions and to establish a succinct, almost geometrical form. Descartes presents his ideas nearly in the form of theorems.
Descartes would be the perfect Java guru. Java was the first strongly-typed language, in which everything must have a type (or share a Form) before it is being used, matching perfectly the Descartes' efforts to be always exact for what he is talking about. Descarte's cogito is in fact a revisit of Plato's Forms, with a slight variation in which ideals exist because we think about them and not in another universe. To that respect, his philosophy is purely object-oriented, as the solutions in which we arrive, are direct products of our intellects.
Immanuel Kant: The First Python Programmer
Kant found the 'easy' way to the pantheon of philosophy by rejecting two prevailing and opposing methodologies, Descarte's cogito and the empiricism, by shouting 'It's both!'. Kant investigated how humans reason, claiming that experience offers the truth, but which has already been filtered by intellectual judgement (a priori). At his mature years, he examined aesthetics, and the theory trying to explaining the way we perceive beauty. Kant was an extremely concise personality, being obsessed with tideness and exactness, doing the same things, exactly at the same time every day, to the extent that his acquaintances were 'using' him to calculate time!
Similarly, Python is a programming language that tries to combine different solutions and promote it as a new one. As a language it accepts multiple programming paradigms, from object-oriented to contract-based programming. Python programmers reject the free formats of languages such as Perl, and although they borrow several features from it, they emphasize on simple and explicit code. Python becomes so 'obsessive' that imposes whitespace identation as delimiters for code blocks to its users. In the "Zen of Python", the first out of the 19 commandments, the first one is "Beatiful is better than ugly". Kant's obsession to beauty and aesthetics, makes him triumphly the first Python programmer ever.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Natural Born Haskell Programmer
Wittgenstein reformed Western philosophy going as deep as to examine Socrates' 'recipe' for debate success. His monumental work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, can be compared to a hard graduate mathematical book in Logic. Wittgenstein identifies the semantic and symbolic forms as the root of all philosophical problems, leaving the rest that can be explicitly defined as the subject of science. Using pure logic, he deducts that language inherent ambiguity is what makes philosophy repeat itself, and closing his book with the famous 'What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence', claims to have solved,..., all philosophical problems.
Wittgenstein is a natural born Haskell programmer. Haskell was not the first functional programming language in town, but from late 80's and onwards, it has prevailed as the most important among the group. Haskell is not meant to be accesible by anyone, and just like the austere and succinct Tractatus, as Wikipedia states, it has a strict mathematical and logical form. Haskell, being purely functional, goes as deep as redefining the way we treat abstract data types, the same way Wittgenstein goes back to Socrates' dialectic to reform modern philosophy.
These all may sound weird, but for programmers, it is easy to realize these deeper connections like this blog post titled "Plato and Turing walk into a bar..". I am not quite sure if the same holds for philosophers. Anyway, at least by now, it should make much more sense why in every article in Wikipedia, presenting a programming language, there is special section named "Language philosophy".
