In general, people are not trying to patent entire pieces of software. Indeed, it's difficult to understand how such a large work could reduce to mathematics. Rather, people are trying to patent very specific algorithms and methods that can be used to make a larger piece of software, and it's easier to see that those do reduce to mathematics.
I always ask that question and twice have received answers along the lines of "well...I'm not really that good at programming." These people should have been screened out by the hiring managers, but weren't. Their honest answer allowed me to send them home politely, cancel the remaining interviews for this candidate by my coworkers, and avoid wasting any more of the companies time on them.
I'm told it was the only viable way to save the building. It was going to be torn down. It's a beautiful place - I'd rather see it turned into a classy brew house than razed.
Now, if they turned it into a strip club - THAT would be creepy.
My project advisor once gave me a piece of advice that changed everything I've written since for the better. After apologizing for the forthcoming crudeness, she passed on this gem:
You're writing "Mary was fucked by John." You /should/ be writing "John fucked Mary."
I can say what I need to say in half the words now.
Somewhere along the line I learned that you make science writing objective by using the passive voice. I would draft "I analysed the data and found that murder causes death." Then I re-wrote mechanically to "The data was analysed and it was found that murder causes death."
Such a waste! I should have dropped myself from the story but stuck with the active voice and written "The data show that murder causes death." Notice the jarring effect of such forthright prose. Do the data really show that murder causes death? Atleast the writing lives up to the ideal of scientific objectivity: the focus is on what the data do or do not show.
I know you're trying to be correct but using data in this way is annoying - "the data shows", not because it is necessarily right (it depends) but because it sounds right. If it helps then just consider data the singular noun for a block of information.
"The data shows murder causes death" sounds fine to me, nothing jarring about that except that it's probably not true "the data shows murder is a cause of death" (murder doesn't cause all deaths usually depending on the locus).
Are you making the claim that the word "data" is singular? It's not. And when you use a collective noun, you use the singular form (datum, in this case).
Along this line, though, what does sound jarring to me is the recent trend among the tech lit (and maybe others) to use company names as plural, as in, "Microsoft are keeping quiet about their new product." This is totally non-standard. First of all, Microsoft is a singular entity, identified by its articles of incorporation. What these authors are doing is using a lazy shorthand for, "Members of Microsoft management are keeping quiet about their new product."
To pile on the pedantry: "data" is one of those words that can be used in either a singular or plural construction. The OED has references going as far back as this one, from 1807:
W. IRVING Salmag. xviii. 366 My grandfather..took a data from his own excellent heart.
I agree that it's a tough game to standardize usage, especially when different "experts" don't agree (I would guess that you could find writing by other authors circa 1807 that used "data" as a plural). Currently, you find the use of "gender" confused with the use of "sex." Over time "gender" will probably come be used generally for male/female, and sex for reproductive references. But the first such uses were non-standard.
Perhaps it's best to leave it at, "know your audience."
Strunk & White devote a lot of time to misrepresenting grammar and presenting rules that don't mean much. Both of these distract an author from writing with irrelevant questions of passive voices and adjectives.
The problem with The Elements of Style is that White flagrantly, persistently and delightfully violates his own rules. Given that his writing is unfailingly charming and enjoyable to read, I have to wonder about value of those rules.
The Elements of Style (which I personally dislike) isn't written for professional writers, it's written for non-professionals.
In today's culture people are barely capable of writing a sentence without losing half the vowels along the way, and god forbid you're American because you already lost half your U's before you were even born. Forget about adequate grammar, or even half-decent spelling.
White is a professional writers, and with everything there's one key thing to being talented and that's knowing when to break the rules. Breaking the rules when you know what you're doing can be amazing and produce awe-inspiring works, however breaking the rules because you're too ignorant to know they even exist certainly doesn't make you amazing and the only awe you'll inspire is stupidity.
The rules are very valuable, but any half-decent writer has already figured out the rules merely by reading.
> Btw, any piece about spelling contains at least one spelling error, yours is no exception ;)
I know! It's the irony of the world. No matter what, when you complain about a general lack of spelling there is always a spelling mistake, but you won't notice it until 5 hours later. It's like there's a frigging anti-spelling Nazi out there who hijacks your post just to screw with you.
God damn gremlins always plaguing English people :(
I constantly have the opposite problem -- for some reason freetards just luurve en_GB. If you really want superfluously coloured language, set your locale!
As someone mired in academia, I absolutely love that piece by Orwell. It's a good reminder that the writing I'm surrounded by isn't the type of writing I should emulate.
I keep a folder in my bookmarks of writing tips that I think are insightful. Here are a few:
Maybe it's my cheap little speakers (or my ears), but the audio is horrible. The reverb drowns out what he's saying when turned up loud enough to hear his voice. Anyone know any ways to improve the quality a bit?
I watched the first few minutes and his talk seems quite good. I'd like to be able to watch the whole thing, but it's such a chore to hear what he's saying.
Yes, but then you should go back and fix it. One can only hope that there were more "ugly hacks" that have since been fixed.
The measure of a good programmer is not whether he or she recognizes when they're writing bad code, but whether the final result is free of bad code, and thus more maintainable.
I would argue that someone commenting known bad code, but leaving it there in perpetuity is no better than someone unknowingly writing bad code (although the comments could serve as signposts to help someone else find and fix your bad code - but how often has that ever actually happened?).
Yeah, that would be great, but I don't see it happening. In 1982, little geeks like me wanted to spend time playing with their computers, but there was almost nothing you could do with them, so you /had/ to become a hacker to have any fun. And the hardware was more accessible. We wrote code in real mode with no protections, and the peripherals were simpler. I wrote my own banner printer when I learned I could control the pins of my dot matrix printer individually. Now you have to learn postscript or something comparable just print "Hello World," or you have to write a kernel driver to talk to the thing directly.
The bar to get the machine to do interesting things is too high, and the distractions are too many. You can spend weeks with your computer without running out of websites to explore.
P.S. If anyone does figure this out, please be sure not to implant damage that must be undone later. The mental leap from line-numbered BASIC to structured programming was a big one.
Other: To make a better place to work. Not just for myself, but for everyone that works for me. We're programmers - we know how to write software. I've done my time working for people who don't. I'd like to never have to do it again. Almost any kind of software can be an interesting challenge to write in a good environment.
Knuth argued well against patenting that: http://progfree.org/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt