Your advice is excellent, though. College fundamentally is what you make of it. Get involved as much as you can in any projects that interest you, or lacking that, make a new project that you do in your spare time and beg the university for publicity or any support you need.
I did an internship at IBM my Sophomore year in college. While I didn't necessarily enjoy my job, it was an experience that I'll treasure. I learned that I don't want to work for IBM! In all seriousness, though - I saw people being mismanaged, project heads who didn't understand the problem space as well as those they managed, and projects that were allowed to fall into disrepair and obscurity at the hands of the inept. Also, I saw a lot of busy people. Not effective, just busy.
Back to the point, you have to direct your efforts. Perhaps we should be instead listing things that are important to learn or that helped us...?
The language is hardly important. In fact, picking one single language is almost a hinderance. Teaching the specifics of any one given language is trivial compared to the task of trying to teach someone how to solve problems in software. I agree that taking so long to catch up to Object Oriented Programming is pretty lame. But I don't think stretching your argument to Java is appropriate. Granted, Java is a quick and dirty way to get people working with Event-driven programming, but as a fundamental language for teaching, Java is horrible. I've met people who basically learned how to code in Java - and guess what? They can't deallocate memory in C to save their lives. They don't get it. They lack the basic understanding of pointers required to do anything in C/C++ under the Windows environment, anyway. They're catching up, but they shouldn't have to catch up!
People still use Bubble Sort! Think about it, it's not as if finding source code to sort a list requires a lot of knowledge - but when Computer Science departments don't effectively teach people about the resources available - or how to distinguish between good and bad - it's a shame.
How you code is way more important than what you code in. Granted, there are some interesting languages that do bizarre things, and take some serious mental adjustments to use. Most of those languages are very special purpose, though. They should branch off of a curiculum, not be central to it. Teach someone how to survive in the real world of programming, since that's where most of them are going to end up. Then, if they're interested, teach them how to apply their skills in weird environments.
I agree that it's too bad people can't find what they want, and universities are often deaf when it comes to hearing those pleas. But, I disagree that the "latest and greatest" languages are vital to an education. If universities jumped ship every time there was media hype, we'd all be trying to train neural networks to make income tax forms in VRML under Netscape on a BeOS machine that people had to use a force-feedback PowerGlove to use. Sure, that sounds interesting, but you have to agree that there are often easier, more conventional ways, of accomplishing the same thing.
That's absurd. Physics should be a branch of applied mathematics, by your argument. Hell, let's go all the way back to the root of things - everything which isn't Agriculture or ASTROLOGY or Ship Building or Carpentry should be Philosophy. Or applied Philosophy. Think about it, you can get a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) in just about any field - let's be honest and call things what they really are. Math, too.</sarcasm>
So, I download and install their software on a fresh Windows install on a brand new 80G hard drive. Then, I proceed to pay for an unlimited play license for every album in the Billboard 200. So far, InTether is happy, the music-copyright-owners are happy, everybody's happy.
Then, I make a physical copy of my hard-drive using some handy-dandy sector-copying tools that don't run under Windows. Onto a brand new 80G hard drive. Which I then sell to someone for the cost of the hard drive plus a small fraction of the cost I paid for the music. Repeat a million times.
Granted, I live on Sealand and eat only cans of beans for food, and have all sorts of friends I stay in touch with via my shortwave radio... I mean, sure - it's still ILLEGAL - but it's technically POSSIBLE.
Morons should be punished. And these guys are standing in line. The only thing that protects them from my proposal is that it's inconvenient to reinstall Windows. TYPICALLY people don't want to throw away their files with a new install. But the problem is that nothing prevents the files from being PHYSICALLY COPIED. And as long as the system doesn't protect itself further, these guys are screwed.
They'd have to 1) Register me with a unique ID in their system. 2) Encrypt each file authorized for me with my unique ID. 3) Authorize me to use the file, via the internet, EVERY time I wanted to use the file. Sounds like they're not doing any of those things. Sounds like they're nowhere NEAR as secure as they pretend.
The article itself quotes Bruce Schneier beautifully, "Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet."
You obviously don't know much about Scientology. Science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, who wrote such jems as "Battlefield Earth", started it. Like, in the late 1970s.
Coincidentally, if I'm not mistaken, Scientologists would argue with my use of the word "fiction" in describing Battlefield Earth. If I'm not mistaken, they believe that all of L. Ron's works are historical documents - kind of like in Galaxy Quest. Scary, huh?
Understanding is a good thing (too bad for you)
on
More on the GeForce 3
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· Score: 1
"Absolute fortune" - interresting phrase you use to descirbe these things. Typically, after about a month, they start to drop in price rapidly. You can get a nice GeForce2 MX for about $120. If they didn't develop the GeForce3, prices would never drop. Don't cry about how it's all insane, when you have a Voodoo 3 - you're benefitting from the graphics nuts who always want the best card in the world. The second best card in the world has to sell cheaper. Lower prices mean better cards for everyone. If people listened to arguments like yours, we'd all still be driving Model T's.
"Noone can tell the difference between 30fps and 200fps anyway" Okay, for starters, you're wrong. Any one of the people I play Quake 3 : Team Arena with can easily tell the difference. Also, as every Quake player will tell you, it's not the maximum fps that you feel - it's the lowest fps that you might ever feel in the game. If maxing out at 200fps means that your minimum performance is 100fps as opposed to 10fps, that's a gigantic difference in the game. Also, the less time you have to spend rendering a frame (1/200th of a second, by your argument), the more time you can spend in the processor doing things like Artificial Intelligence for the bot opponents, deformable maps, cool stuff that people "ooh" and "aah" over.
"Performance is becoming optimal"Well, I wish that were true. Listen, "optimality" is going to be when you can't tell the difference between the effects in the latest $100 Million movie and the effects you get from your $100 video card. Until then, we're pretty far from "optimal".
"There are 768,000 pixels on a screen (a 1024x768 screen that is)" Actually, it's 786,432. Also, you're saying that you'd never want to play at 1280x1024? 1920x1200? Things do look better at higher resolutions. Also, such things as anti-aliasing make an enormous difference to the perceived quality.
Also, making more than one rendering pass is a good thing.
"70kbit sampling rates are perfect to the human ear." This is great, you quote numbers all over the place, and you really don't have any idea, do you? I can tell the difference all the way up to 128kb pretty easily, and I have friends who can tell up to around 256kb. Where did you get this 70kb number?
Look, faster, better video cards are a good thing. You're essentially arguing, "Hey, let's never upgrade anything ever again! Computers are good enough!" Just because you're not upgrade hungry doesn't mean nobody should be. Also, there wouldn't be a "cheap card from yesteryear" unless people like us bought the expensive cards of today! Why mock us and attack us with fake numbers and flawed logic?
Yup, millions of dollars in free advertising spouting about how good the "Old" Coke was. People cheered when they brought back "Classic Coke." Absolute brilliance. How often are people excited to have the SAME OLD PRODUCT THEY'VE ALWAYS HAD!? "Now Classic Windows 98! The same as old Windows 98!" YAY!
1. Motion blurring - if you have four times as many frames per second as your monitor can display, then you can motion-blur those frames together for a MUCH more realistic-looking effect. See the difference between Toy Story and early computer animation? The early stuff looks like stop-motion photography, because that's essentially what it is.
2. Latency - If you can render twice as fast as the monitor can display, then you can hold off rendering until the last possible instant before the monitor needs to display something. That means that you're out of synch with the monitor by half as much as a scene that had to be frozen in time twice as long ago and rendered. The distance between Start Render and Display being reduced means that the difference between Display and Interact (moving the mouse for instance) feels less laggy.
3. AI - everyone in the gaming industry has read about how great T&L (Texture & Lighting) hardware is, mainly because it frees up your processor to work on other things - like physics and game AI. This is not just smoke and mirrors, folks - the more capable the graphics hardware gets, the more freedom the game has to do fancy math in the background. This includes collision-detection and other kinds of physics, AI including path planning and other realism details...
4. Stereo - if you can double the frame-rate, that means that you can theoretically render a stereo view in the same time. With flickering glasses, or any other technology. Strongly related to the latency question above. (Of corse the monitor needs to be good.)
5. Reflections - the more times you can render a scene in a given amount of time (one vertical monitor painting) the more reflections of images you can incorporate into a scene. If you can render twice as fast as you need to, then you can display a reflection of the current scene in the mirror on the wall, or the polished hard-wood floor, or even the reflections off the metal of your gun. These effects add strongly to realism. I'm going to also count realistic shadows in this category.
6. Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing - render at four times the resolution your monitor can display, and use interpolation to display the best looking color at each pixel you can. Or nine times. Or 25 times.
If you give me 50 times the memory and 200 times the frame-rate, I'll use it - no lie!
Not to mention the fact that it was recently shown by someone at SGI that you can render a scene in OpenGL with multi-pass texture operations that looks IDENTICAL to the same scene drawn in RenderMan (PRMan) - the tool that Pixar uses to render. The math is the same, it's just done in a different way. The point is that you get closer to being able to render A Bug's Life in real-time. That's a good thing. A very good thing.
By Ted Bridis and Rebecca Buckman
The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - Microsoft Corp. is reporting that they are not their Operating System is not the only one whose source code has been stolen. While investigating the recent intrusions into the internal secured Microsoft network, the Redmond software giant has uncovered an even greater hacker risk. Hackers around the world have had copies of the source code to the Linux Operating System for weeks, possibly even months.
"This is unbelievable! I mean, people thought that we were unsecure - but look at Linus Torvalds; people have been stealing his source code for a lot longer!" said Microsoft exec Steve Balmer. Sources close to the Swedish coder said that he has known about the security hole for months, possibly years.
MOTIVE UNKNOWN
The motive behind the copying of the Linux source code is not known, but industry experts speculated it could be an early phase of a "free software" case, in which hackers threaten private corporations' rights to publish horrible software at inflated prices. "These hackers must be stopped!" said Balmer, a sentiment echoed throughout the corporate offices of Microsoft. "I mean, if they can steal our customers, what are they going to steal next?"
WELL-REGARDED SECURITY
Computer security at Torvalds' house generally was well-regarded until this latest incident. The Linux software is used to run Internet servers around the world. This latest hacker exploit could endanger the very foundation of the Internet, said Microsoft. The hackers, whose identities are unknown, are believed to have had access to the Linux software codes for three months, possibly even longer.
EMBARASSEMENT
"This is an outright embarassement for Mr. Torvalds," said Balmer, "and I would not be surprised to see people flock in hoards to the new Microsoft 2000 Advance Servers, now available at your local software resellers!" Sources report that the software is available at most software stores, and even installs on several computer platforms - sometimes successfully. "Microsoft 2000 is the most secure software on the planet! OUR source code only got stollen three months ago, while Mr. Torvalds code has been available on the black market for years!" raved Balmer.
Here is how experts believe Linus Torvalds' Linux software was hacked: o - He released it for free on the Internet. o - People downloaded it.
-Gary Fields did not contribute to this article. Neither did Ted Bridis or Rebecca Buckman.
Which single response to a question during the Republican and Democratic Presidential Debates did you find most obejectionable? Put another way, which single issue do you think most differentiates you from the two "main" candidates for President? (If you are one of the "main" candidates, which single issue most differentiates your view from the other "main" candidate?)
I hereby lay claim to the idea of Encrypted Machine Code (tm) (R) (C) 2000 by Encrypted Machine Code Corporation, Inc.
It has been shown that any sufficiently stubborn hacker may determine the underlying algorithm in any current executable program file, because fundamentally, all executable files contain machine-executable instructions that the processor must be able to understand.
Therefore, this patent covers the process of taking the machine-executable instructions in an executable program file and encrypting them in such a way that even the processor can't understand them!
By these means, even the most able hacker will be incapable of producing a human-readable version, because not even the computer itself can understand the instructions!
For Christmas, I would love an
http://www.eco-sphere.com/. It's one of those self-contained glass globes with shrimp, algae and bacteria inside. All you have to do is add light and they should last for a few years. Very cool. Price ranges from $79 to $489, depending on the size (from 3.25" diameter sphere to 9" diameter sphere).
I've been programming in Pascal in one form or another since Turbo Pascal 3.0 from Borland came out. Recently, I've crossed the line back into C++, for the work I'm doing. And I hate it.
I was under the assumption that the tight-nit Delphi group (see the Delphi Super Page) existed as a support group for Delphi programmers to be able to keep up with what was going on in the C++ community. I could not have been more wrong.
Clumsily traipsing into the MSVC++ environment, I thought that the best thing to do would be to use the classes that were available - surely they followed the "standards" of the C++ community, and they would be the best tools to use. So, I innocently wrote all my tools based on CFile, CStdioFile, CString, and the like. What a frickin mistake.
CString is its own abomination, not available anywhere else on any platform, as far as I can tell. I was astounded to learn that the string library that MSVC++ pushes on people is not portable. Until I remembered that the "MS" is Microsoft. Of course they want you to use classes that can't be ported! Duh!
CFile crashes in situations that I've never seen fopen crash. How stupid is that?
Anyway, the thing that, on reflection, impresses me the most about Delphi is that when you pick a tool to use, you're probably using the right one. No, Borland doesn't subscribe to the ANSI Pascal standard - but I've never met anyone who prefered ANSI Pascal over the latest and greatest Borland product.
Yes, it'd be better if Delphi (read Kylix) were standard, free, portable, and already ported to every system on the planet. But I'll be happy with it, when it comes out. It'll instantly make me a/competent/ Linux application developer. Not necessarily a great one, but I'll be competent, instantly. Unlike my situation in C++. If I took my MSVC++ smarts, and tried to use them to code in gcc, I'd be lost. Completely lost. I'd essentially have to start over, and re-learn all the tools I thought I knew how to use. And I've seen the same thing happen the other way, too. Linux / gcc coders scrambling to get anything to work in MSVC++.
When a newcomer uses Delphi to code Windows applications, they are a lot more competent a lot more quickly than someone in the same situation, using MSVC++. I hope, hope, hope that the situation is the same with Kylix on Linux.
Sorry,
I didn't realize you were being cute.:)
Well, it's simple - first you adjust the Heisenberg Compensators - then it's a simple matter of constructing an inverse tacheon field...
From their web page, it renders a 256^3 space in real-time. Okay... Is that only a color sample at each point? Or does each point get a normal, a diffuse, ambient, and specular lighting component - what? Because already, a 256^3 * RGB adds up to 48 Megs - which is not too small. What more are they going to do?
Nir Arbel seems to think that Events are "new," which is amazing to me. Especially since C# was designed by the main architect of Delphi - which has had both Properties and Events since Day One. (What - 1995?) You'd think someone that says they love new languages would have read about Delphi before proclaiming how revolutionary C# was, since it sounds to me more like C# is based on Delphi than even on C++, in design if not in interface.
Slashdot Mirror
Your advice is excellent, though. College fundamentally is what you make of it. Get involved as much as you can in any projects that interest you, or lacking that, make a new project that you do in your spare time and beg the university for publicity or any support you need.
I did an internship at IBM my Sophomore year in college. While I didn't necessarily enjoy my job, it was an experience that I'll treasure. I learned that I don't want to work for IBM! In all seriousness, though - I saw people being mismanaged, project heads who didn't understand the problem space as well as those they managed, and projects that were allowed to fall into disrepair and obscurity at the hands of the inept. Also, I saw a lot of busy people. Not effective, just busy.
Back to the point, you have to direct your efforts. Perhaps we should be instead listing things that are important to learn or that helped us...?
You're either sinister or hilarious. For the sake of the people mod'ing you up, I hope you're hilarious.
People still use Bubble Sort! Think about it, it's not as if finding source code to sort a list requires a lot of knowledge - but when Computer Science departments don't effectively teach people about the resources available - or how to distinguish between good and bad - it's a shame.
How you code is way more important than what you code in. Granted, there are some interesting languages that do bizarre things, and take some serious mental adjustments to use. Most of those languages are very special purpose, though. They should branch off of a curiculum, not be central to it. Teach someone how to survive in the real world of programming, since that's where most of them are going to end up. Then, if they're interested, teach them how to apply their skills in weird environments.
I agree that it's too bad people can't find what they want, and universities are often deaf when it comes to hearing those pleas. But, I disagree that the "latest and greatest" languages are vital to an education. If universities jumped ship every time there was media hype, we'd all be trying to train neural networks to make income tax forms in VRML under Netscape on a BeOS machine that people had to use a force-feedback PowerGlove to use. Sure, that sounds interesting, but you have to agree that there are often easier, more conventional ways, of accomplishing the same thing.
That's absurd. Physics should be a branch of applied mathematics, by your argument. Hell, let's go all the way back to the root of things - everything which isn't Agriculture or ASTROLOGY or Ship Building or Carpentry should be Philosophy. Or applied Philosophy. Think about it, you can get a PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) in just about any field - let's be honest and call things what they really are. Math, too.</sarcasm>
Then, I make a physical copy of my hard-drive using some handy-dandy sector-copying tools that don't run under Windows. Onto a brand new 80G hard drive. Which I then sell to someone for the cost of the hard drive plus a small fraction of the cost I paid for the music. Repeat a million times.
Granted, I live on Sealand and eat only cans of beans for food, and have all sorts of friends I stay in touch with via my shortwave radio... I mean, sure - it's still ILLEGAL - but it's technically POSSIBLE.
Morons should be punished. And these guys are standing in line. The only thing that protects them from my proposal is that it's inconvenient to reinstall Windows. TYPICALLY people don't want to throw away their files with a new install. But the problem is that nothing prevents the files from being PHYSICALLY COPIED. And as long as the system doesn't protect itself further, these guys are screwed.
They'd have to 1) Register me with a unique ID in their system. 2) Encrypt each file authorized for me with my unique ID. 3) Authorize me to use the file, via the internet, EVERY time I wanted to use the file. Sounds like they're not doing any of those things. Sounds like they're nowhere NEAR as secure as they pretend.
The article itself quotes Bruce Schneier beautifully, "Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet."
You obviously don't know much about Scientology. Science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, who wrote such jems as "Battlefield Earth", started it. Like, in the late 1970s.
Coincidentally, if I'm not mistaken, Scientologists would argue with my use of the word "fiction" in describing Battlefield Earth. If I'm not mistaken, they believe that all of L. Ron's works are historical documents - kind of like in Galaxy Quest. Scary, huh?
"Noone can tell the difference between 30fps and 200fps anyway" Okay, for starters, you're wrong. Any one of the people I play Quake 3 : Team Arena with can easily tell the difference. Also, as every Quake player will tell you, it's not the maximum fps that you feel - it's the lowest fps that you might ever feel in the game. If maxing out at 200fps means that your minimum performance is 100fps as opposed to 10fps, that's a gigantic difference in the game. Also, the less time you have to spend rendering a frame (1/200th of a second, by your argument), the more time you can spend in the processor doing things like Artificial Intelligence for the bot opponents, deformable maps, cool stuff that people "ooh" and "aah" over.
"Performance is becoming optimal"Well, I wish that were true. Listen, "optimality" is going to be when you can't tell the difference between the effects in the latest $100 Million movie and the effects you get from your $100 video card. Until then, we're pretty far from "optimal".
"There are 768,000 pixels on a screen (a 1024x768 screen that is)" Actually, it's 786,432. Also, you're saying that you'd never want to play at 1280x1024? 1920x1200? Things do look better at higher resolutions. Also, such things as anti-aliasing make an enormous difference to the perceived quality.
Also, making more than one rendering pass is a good thing.
"70kbit sampling rates are perfect to the human ear." This is great, you quote numbers all over the place, and you really don't have any idea, do you? I can tell the difference all the way up to 128kb pretty easily, and I have friends who can tell up to around 256kb. Where did you get this 70kb number?
Look, faster, better video cards are a good thing. You're essentially arguing, "Hey, let's never upgrade anything ever again! Computers are good enough!" Just because you're not upgrade hungry doesn't mean nobody should be. Also, there wouldn't be a "cheap card from yesteryear" unless people like us bought the expensive cards of today! Why mock us and attack us with fake numbers and flawed logic?
Yup, millions of dollars in free advertising spouting about how good the "Old" Coke was. People cheered when they brought back "Classic Coke." Absolute brilliance. How often are people excited to have the SAME OLD PRODUCT THEY'VE ALWAYS HAD!? "Now Classic Windows 98! The same as old Windows 98!" YAY!
Nobody likes the thought of a gun, but there's a distinctly warm and pleasant feeling associated with the thought my gun.
2. Latency - If you can render twice as fast as the monitor can display, then you can hold off rendering until the last possible instant before the monitor needs to display something. That means that you're out of synch with the monitor by half as much as a scene that had to be frozen in time twice as long ago and rendered. The distance between Start Render and Display being reduced means that the difference between Display and Interact (moving the mouse for instance) feels less laggy.
3. AI - everyone in the gaming industry has read about how great T&L (Texture & Lighting) hardware is, mainly because it frees up your processor to work on other things - like physics and game AI. This is not just smoke and mirrors, folks - the more capable the graphics hardware gets, the more freedom the game has to do fancy math in the background. This includes collision-detection and other kinds of physics, AI including path planning and other realism details...
4. Stereo - if you can double the frame-rate, that means that you can theoretically render a stereo view in the same time. With flickering glasses, or any other technology. Strongly related to the latency question above. (Of corse the monitor needs to be good.)
5. Reflections - the more times you can render a scene in a given amount of time (one vertical monitor painting) the more reflections of images you can incorporate into a scene. If you can render twice as fast as you need to, then you can display a reflection of the current scene in the mirror on the wall, or the polished hard-wood floor, or even the reflections off the metal of your gun. These effects add strongly to realism. I'm going to also count realistic shadows in this category.
6. Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing - render at four times the resolution your monitor can display, and use interpolation to display the best looking color at each pixel you can. Or nine times. Or 25 times.
If you give me 50 times the memory and 200 times the frame-rate, I'll use it - no lie!
Not to mention the fact that it was recently shown by someone at SGI that you can render a scene in OpenGL with multi-pass texture operations that looks IDENTICAL to the same scene drawn in RenderMan (PRMan) - the tool that Pixar uses to render. The math is the same, it's just done in a different way. The point is that you get closer to being able to render A Bug's Life in real-time. That's a good thing. A very good thing.
Another System's Source Code Stolen!
By Ted Bridis and Rebecca Buckman
The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - Microsoft Corp. is reporting that they are not their Operating System is not the only one whose source code has been stolen. While investigating the recent intrusions into the internal secured Microsoft network, the Redmond software giant has uncovered an even greater hacker risk. Hackers around the world have had copies of the source code to the Linux Operating System for weeks, possibly even months.
"This is unbelievable! I mean, people thought that we were unsecure - but look at Linus Torvalds; people have been stealing his source code for a lot longer!" said Microsoft exec Steve Balmer. Sources close to the Swedish coder said that he has known about the security hole for months, possibly years.
MOTIVE UNKNOWN
The motive behind the copying of the Linux source code is not known, but industry experts speculated it could be an early phase of a "free software" case, in which hackers threaten private corporations' rights to publish horrible software at inflated prices. "These hackers must be stopped!" said Balmer, a sentiment echoed throughout the corporate offices of Microsoft. "I mean, if they can steal our customers, what are they going to steal next?"
WELL-REGARDED SECURITY
Computer security at Torvalds' house generally was well-regarded until this latest incident. The Linux software is used to run Internet servers around the world. This latest hacker exploit could endanger the very foundation of the Internet, said Microsoft. The hackers, whose identities are unknown, are believed to have had access to the Linux software codes for three months, possibly even longer.
EMBARASSEMENT
"This is an outright embarassement for Mr. Torvalds," said Balmer, "and I would not be surprised to see people flock in hoards to the new Microsoft 2000 Advance Servers, now available at your local software resellers!" Sources report that the software is available at most software stores, and even installs on several computer platforms - sometimes successfully. "Microsoft 2000 is the most secure software on the planet! OUR source code only got stollen three months ago, while Mr. Torvalds code has been available on the black market for years!" raved Balmer.
Here is how experts believe Linus Torvalds' Linux software was hacked :
o - He released it for free on the Internet.
o - People downloaded it.
-Gary Fields did not contribute to this article. Neither did Ted Bridis or Rebecca Buckman.
Real link : Does the electoral college still work?
The "top 10%" has 98% of the wealth. So you're proposing that people with 2% of the wealth should pay 2/3 of all taxes?
Which single response to a question during the Republican and Democratic Presidential Debates did you find most obejectionable? Put another way, which single issue do you think most differentiates you from the two "main" candidates for President? (If you are one of the "main" candidates, which single issue most differentiates your view from the other "main" candidate?)
It has been shown that any sufficiently stubborn hacker may determine the underlying algorithm in any current executable program file, because fundamentally, all executable files contain machine-executable instructions that the processor must be able to understand.
Therefore, this patent covers the process of taking the machine-executable instructions in an executable program file and encrypting them in such a way that even the processor can't understand them!
By these means, even the most able hacker will be incapable of producing a human-readable version, because not even the computer itself can understand the instructions!
The prices are listed under the How To Order page.
For Christmas, I would love an http://www.eco-sphere.com/. It's one of those self-contained glass globes with shrimp, algae and bacteria inside. All you have to do is add light and they should last for a few years. Very cool. Price ranges from $79 to $489, depending on the size (from 3.25" diameter sphere to 9" diameter sphere).
I was under the assumption that the tight-nit Delphi group (see the Delphi Super Page) existed as a support group for Delphi programmers to be able to keep up with what was going on in the C++ community. I could not have been more wrong.
Clumsily traipsing into the MSVC++ environment, I thought that the best thing to do would be to use the classes that were available - surely they followed the "standards" of the C++ community, and they would be the best tools to use. So, I innocently wrote all my tools based on CFile, CStdioFile, CString, and the like. What a frickin mistake.
CString is its own abomination, not available anywhere else on any platform, as far as I can tell. I was astounded to learn that the string library that MSVC++ pushes on people is not portable. Until I remembered that the "MS" is Microsoft. Of course they want you to use classes that can't be ported! Duh!
CFile crashes in situations that I've never seen fopen crash. How stupid is that?
Anyway, the thing that, on reflection, impresses me the most about Delphi is that when you pick a tool to use, you're probably using the right one. No, Borland doesn't subscribe to the ANSI Pascal standard - but I've never met anyone who prefered ANSI Pascal over the latest and greatest Borland product.
Yes, it'd be better if Delphi (read Kylix) were standard, free, portable, and already ported to every system on the planet. But I'll be happy with it, when it comes out. It'll instantly make me a /competent/ Linux application developer. Not necessarily a great one, but I'll be competent, instantly. Unlike my situation in C++. If I took my MSVC++ smarts, and tried to use them to code in gcc, I'd be lost. Completely lost. I'd essentially have to start over, and re-learn all the tools I thought I knew how to use. And I've seen the same thing happen the other way, too. Linux / gcc coders scrambling to get anything to work in MSVC++.
When a newcomer uses Delphi to code Windows applications, they are a lot more competent a lot more quickly than someone in the same situation, using MSVC++. I hope, hope, hope that the situation is the same with Kylix on Linux.
Do you moderating idiots even bother to follow the links? Or do you just assume that because someone made a link that it's informative?
Sorry, I didn't realize you were being cute. :)
Well, it's simple - first you adjust the Heisenberg Compensators - then it's a simple matter of constructing an inverse tacheon field...
It's the other way around. You already have primes p and q, and you just multiply to find n.
*If Lightning Strikes
From their web page, it renders a 256^3 space in real-time. Okay... Is that only a color sample at each point? Or does each point get a normal, a diffuse, ambient, and specular lighting component - what? Because already, a 256^3 * RGB adds up to 48 Megs - which is not too small. What more are they going to do?
Nir Arbel seems to think that Events are "new," which is amazing to me. Especially since C# was designed by the main architect of Delphi - which has had both Properties and Events since Day One. (What - 1995?) You'd think someone that says they love new languages would have read about Delphi before proclaiming how revolutionary C# was, since it sounds to me more like C# is based on Delphi than even on C++, in design if not in interface.
Well, I can't find these new photos, but here is the original Hubble photo, and also a ground-based photo. (JPG and PDF available.)