I've used Python a bit to write scripts for Blender. Maybe I've been programming in C for too long, and maybe because Blender's editor sucks and deals with tabs differently than my external editor, but any language that is whitespace delimited just drives me insane. I could tolerate it for the purpose of elegance except for one thing:
Tabs and spaces are treated differently!
This means that I can write code that looks right, but the parser chokes on it. If I edit some else's code and they use spaces but I use tabs, everything gets screwed up. This, to me, defeats the entire purpose - "enforced readabiliy" far too easily easily gets transformed into "obfuscated syntax errors".
This is the same reason makefiles make my head hurt. To me, it's a glaring user interface / usability problem, in an otherwise very cool language.
Just as a joke, I thought I would search for me... I ran a tiny little (pathetic) BBS for a couple of years on my only computer. Much of the time it was just on my one phone line (i.e. my primary voice line). It would answer after like 3 or 4 rings if I wasn't there, or I would manually answer if I happened to answer the phone and it seemed nobody was there.
Can you believe it? I'm on the list! I can't even begin to imagine where my number might have been listed, since I only gave it out to a small number of people. That is the funniest thing I've seen for a while. Creepy, when you consider just how much obscure information is floating out there on the web, but this is still cool.:-)
There is lots of other good advice posted, but here is my story/opinion:
I'm a game programmer. I started programming on my Commodore 64 in about 1986 while I was in high school. I didn't get too far on most of my early games, but I learned the basics of programming and assembly language. After high school I was lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depends on your point of view) to get a couple of jobs making games at a couple of small companies. I worked very hard and accomplished little there, and ended up going to university.
I finally got a degree in Computer Science. I found some of the courses a bit redundant since I had been programming for several years already, but the whole experience was good as a maturing process. I'm much more organized and methodical about software development, and that's mostly what I was missing before university. There's more to programming than understanding the syntax of the language, in the same way that not everyone who speaks English can speak eloquently.
Since then, I developed a game out of my basement (on contract). This is really where I got "legitimized" in the games industry - once you've shipped a game, you get a lot more respect. This got me into a position at Electronic Arts, where I am currently.
The main thing to remember about game programming: it's not all fun and games. Games are usually extremely complex for the size of the teams developing them, schedules are extremely tight and the pressure can be enormous. You can't always just go on to something else or forget about that hard-to-find bug when it's your job. Most games get done through hard work and sheer will-power, and usually require some very smart and talented people around as well.
So, the only advice to give (and this applies to people looking at design / production / art) is really: make something on your own time! This is easiest for programmers (it's hard to make a functioning game without code) so it might be necessary to team up with a programmer (or two, or more). Game ideas are a dime a dozen, so most people in production work their way up from QA, starting off by proving they are organized and can design games a little bit at a time. You might be better off trying to manage a project with a few people and go from there - design is 10% good idea, 90% convincing everyone else it's a good idea. Artists can show their skills by drawing, but it's more important to show what you can do with a modelling package. Making something on your own shows that you have some talent, that you are motivated, and that you would give up some of your free time to make something.
Don't think of game programming as a job - it's a way of life. You could get by doing 9 to 5, but there are people (like me) who live and breathe programming, and you won't move up very quickly. I wake up in the morning with elegant solutions to complex problems spinning in my head. Some people might think that's a bit weird / obsessive / pathetic, but the fact is: I love programming. I can work long hours, but I still come home and play computer games and even prototype my own game ideas. If everybody did something they love as much, the world would be a much more pleasant place.
I do agree with you on the principle of boycotting the MPAA's movies - they have literally lost (failed to receive) hundreds of the dollars I would usually have spent, and I giggle every time I hear about the financial troubles of some of the mega-theatres have been having (hoping that a few of us are having some impact).
But...
I'm not really sure how relevant that is to discussion on/. This whole thing is only really an issue because movies are actually important to us. The movie industry is big because we made it a part of our culture. Discussing them is just something we do.
I think it's important that the/. community continue to discuss movies. I think it would be in bad taste if the editors were to ask us to end any boycotts we are personally committed to. I also don't really want them to go on a holy war trying to get all of us to boycott movies. Let's just talk about the movies we like, or wish we could see, and hope things get better before we lose this part of our culture...
Why hairtrigger? This would work best to hurt an enemy state without being concerned about retaliation - it would look like an accident (or act of God, if you prefer).
I always found the most curious thing about sites generating revenue through advertising was the huge inner loops with no external source of revenue.
That is, company A and B advertise on each other's site, but both A and B derive their income entirely from advertising revenue... which only moves money around, doesn't make more. Since expenses are non-zero, and even the cost of moving the money around is non-zero, it's just a recipe for disaster.
I always wondered where the traditional advertisers were. Brand name recognition, like Coke or Pepsi, is the only thing web advertising is REALLY good for. People can only read one page at a time (even if they have several windows open) and are, in general, looking for a piece of information. Click-through advertising relies on the reader to disrupt their search and chain of thought.
I don't know anyone who would impulse buy a web server, which is what click-through really measures. Checking revenue before and after advertising is introduced is probably the best way to determine its success... unless nobody wants the service you are offering, which would cause TV advertising to fail miserably as well.
And if I punch the stupid monkey, I'm going to need to buy a new monitor. But, hey! This is the web! When I need something, I'll go find it! I don't need to be advertised to about it!
The ultimate point is - advertising in interactive media cannot divert the users attention away from the task they originally arrived at the site to complete. The Web is not TV, if you need a cliche.
Advertising is not yet powerful enough to cause everyone who sees/hears the ad to spontaneously buy the product. From that perspective, the dotcom crash is actually a victory for capitalism - the consumers have chosen, and no amount of marketing could change that.
Hackers complain about movies being inaccurate, but do they (or anyone else) really want to watch people take apart their computers and code on the big screen? I doubt it.
I think the main difference is between "remotely plausible" and "just totally wrong." For a lot of shows, it seems the margin of error wrt computers is like doctors on ER healing people with magic powers. Granted, the realities of software development would probably make for a pretty mind-numbing film... but then why even bother to put it in?
Speculating how the world might be if we could suddenly break any encryption or solve otherwise uncomputable problems can be fun. Throwing in silliness because you don't know any better, just to look "with the times" or cool, seems kind of lame.
I wish I knew more about technology to notice the same discrepancies in these movies that everyone else seems to care so much about.
Technical people probably get a bit more upset about technology errors than most other groups too. Most technology (especially computers) require a high degree of precision to get them to work at all. I think that's part of why the geek crowd cares about accuracy - people naturally drawn to the logical world of programming have the tendency exaggerated by the necessity of precision to get anything to work.
That, and tech is cool now, but real tech is more in the Doing and Creating than it is the Save The World In Six Keystrokes that keeps people's attention. I'd love to see a book outlining reasonable plot devices for writers... why can no movie character ever get a bug in their program that takes 2 days to work out? Guess that would be kind of dull.:-)
The accurate representation of technology / hacking in most movies and TV shows is so bad it's usually just too annoying for me to watch. But most people don't notice (or don't care) and probably go away with vastly confused understandings of technology, I have to wonder:
How many shows are vastly confused in other areas as well?
I'm thinking about things like medical or law enfocement (court room / police) dramas. Can doctors, lawyers and police officers find these types of shows as painful as I find "hacker" misconceptions? Just how inaccurate are they (certainly to some degree)?
Well, at least somebody got my point, thanks. My point being, of course, that it IS just a movie, the venom is uncalled for (or, more likely, a sign of deep psychological problems), and that George is not necessarily the Epitome Of All That Is Evil. Control freak, quite likely. EOATIE, I don't think so.
I was actually wondering that as well. The problem with DeCSS isn't that it decrypts the data though. Owning it isn't illegal. Giving it to others is illegal, and that's what all of the cases have been about, as far as I know.
Now, we do run into a weird situation where we XOR together a Linux CD image and a Windows CD image. Techincally, you could claim that you had encrypted your Linux distribution and you should be able to distribute it because it's Linux, only encrypted. Getting Windows out of the image because you already have Linux is just a side effect...
You could probably argue something similar - that you encrypted Free File X using Copyrighted File Y as the key - and claim that it's not your fault that the key is so easy to reverse engineer.:-)
This is all hypothetical of course, I actually support copyright in general, although with fair use principles enforced (not simply allowed to be worked around).
And one man is not "forcing" the marketing crap on the rest of the world. Companies are begging to pay millions (billions?) to get the rights to sell it. If people were banging down my door to give me money, I'd take it too.
No need to attack me personally BTW, just trying to generate discussion.
Everbody's always whining about George's use of digital everything. I find the whole uproar rather confusing (but then, I liked Episode 1, and thought Jar-Jar was kind of amusing, so please feel free to flame away).
I find the whole thing rather confusing because George is just a HACKER, albeit using film and with a great deal more money than any of us, but a hacker none the less. He's exploring what is possible, pushing boundaries, and he's doing it because he wants to. Damn it, he's having fun. He's a geek and you're trying to bullying him, which is pretty sad when you think about it.
Some people seem to think he has a "responsibility" to Star Wars fans. I always thought that attitude was a little odd. Don't tell me that he owes us because he's rich from our money. We each paid for what we got, expecting nothing more - a movie pass, an action figure or a t-shirt. Although some of us (including myself) have something of an "attachment" to Star Wars, and in making it a part of ourselves believe we have some sort of ownership over it, that's not really true (at least under current copyright law).
That's really the whole music sharing argument though - the RIAA is successful because their product became part of our culture (or they bought pieces of our culture, either way...) If something is that deeply ingrained into who we are, why should we have no control over it whatsoever?
Which leads me to the conclusion that popular media is so ingrained into our definitions of ourselves that we can't even separate the two, we have a couple of options. First, anything which becomes wildly popular should become public domain. Second, we could just get un-brainwashed and stop buying this crap. Those two options are complete opposites, but maybe try to do one or the other instead of just whining about it.
When I first read this I laughed at the concept of a stream of numbers being copyrightable.
Umm... ALL software in binary form is just a stream of numbers number, and programs distributed as such have been successfully copyrighted for decades..mp3's are just a series of numbers which was not even created by the copyright holder, but that's not saving Napster.
I always wondered if that would be a suitably confusing defense of copyright violation. "No your honor, I didn't 'pirate' this [item]. I merely copied a large series of seemingly random numbers, [refers to printout in binary form] see? It's just a bunch of 1's and 0's, not [item]." The counter arguments would just degenerate into semantics and the whole thing would just get ugly.:-)
That gets even more weird when you consider that the zipped form of the binary data in no way represents what was originally placed under copyright.
So, let's say you burn that to a CD. It's just a bunch of invisible pits on a disc. That's copyrighted? Even if you use the proper "device" (i.e. computer) to convert it into "human readable" form, it's still not the copyrighted material. You have to apply a second process to convert the data out of comressed form.
So, from one perspective (it's just a bunch of pits on a disc!) copyright seems silly. From another (I can see on a computer screen, using data extracted from those pits, an image which says 'Copyright (C) 2000 Microsoft (R)') it seems more reasonable, since you're actually producing order out of what would otherwise be random or imperceivable.
I wonder what happens if you use the Linux kernel as the XOR "key" to encrypt Windows? <ow, brain hurt>
Well, after reviewing all of the articles, I disagree with the distinction less. I think my point was a) I'm a programmer by trade but b) I'm a Computer Science graduate, so the two aren't mutually exclusive.
On the other hand, the "dot com incident" (I think I'll start using that phrase exclusively now, it's slightly catchy and vaguely derogatory:-) probably generated/attracted many talentless hacks calling themselves programmers / computer scientists. Although Evans says his comment isn't disparaging, my interpretation certainly is - a talented programmer IS a computer scientist, and untalented one is not.
OK, now THIS was flamebait. My previous message was not. <shrug>
University of Calgary. I only really took a couple of courses that would fit into the "pure theory" category - "Computability" (theory of computation) and an algorithms course.
For the rest, I guess it depends on how you want to look at it - assignments were almost exclusively an actual implementation, but that doesn't mean that 90% of your time wasn't spent absorbing theory... That, and I was programming long before I got to university because that's just what I love to do, so I did much more programming outside of my assignments than in them, so I WAS actually programming 90% of the time, not that it was because of the course content.:-)
Mostly I figure the whole argument is just semantics though anyway - if you're applying principles of furthering knowledge, then whether the equipment is a pencil and paper or a Cray, it's still science.
In defence of the original article, I would say that Computer Scientists can be programmers, but not all programmers are Computer Scientists, and the "dot com" incident (for lack of a better phrase) probably generated a lot of the latter.
On a related note, not directed to you personally, how the hell is my original post flamebait? That's the second time today I've been modded down for being relevant and on topic. Sheesh.
Isn't that kind of like saying people who actually perform physics experiments are not physicists? That only theoretical physicists are really physicists?
I have a degree in computer science... 90% of what I did at university and 90% of what I do now is bang out code.
Theory is important, I would even say the cornerstone, of everything we do, but there's more to it than that...
Re:Retro games are more popular than you'd think
on
Leisure Suit Unix
·
· Score: 1
My first reaction is to wonder why someone would be so happy about the porting of such old games to linux, when they've been played so much on other platforms. But retro games are more popular than you'd think.
Hmm... I'd have to say that, given the current state of gaming on Linux, the old Sierra games are better than 99% of the "modern" games already. With the current absense of good adventures on ANY platform or OS (The Longest Journey notwithstanding, and maybe Escape From Monkey Island) this is actually very interesting, to me anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
...was created so that Intel could have an enforcable trademark on their chip name (unlike 386 or 486).
:-) Time to roll out the Sexium.
So now, because marketing got so attached to the name "Pentium," AMD can again match version numbers in their product names.
That's hilarious. Heads are gonna roll.
I've used Python a bit to write scripts for Blender. Maybe I've been programming in C for too long, and maybe because Blender's editor sucks and deals with tabs differently than my external editor, but any language that is whitespace delimited just drives me insane. I could tolerate it for the purpose of elegance except for one thing:
Tabs and spaces are treated differently!
This means that I can write code that looks right, but the parser chokes on it. If I edit some else's code and they use spaces but I use tabs, everything gets screwed up. This, to me, defeats the entire purpose - "enforced readabiliy" far too easily easily gets transformed into "obfuscated syntax errors".
This is the same reason makefiles make my head hurt. To me, it's a glaring user interface / usability problem, in an otherwise very cool language.
Holy CRAP!
:-)
:-) :-) :-)
Just as a joke, I thought I would search for me... I ran a tiny little (pathetic) BBS for a couple of years on my only computer. Much of the time it was just on my one phone line (i.e. my primary voice line). It would answer after like 3 or 4 rings if I wasn't there, or I would manually answer if I happened to answer the phone and it seemed nobody was there.
Can you believe it? I'm on the list! I can't even begin to imagine where my number might have been listed, since I only gave it out to a small number of people. That is the funniest thing I've seen for a while. Creepy, when you consider just how much obscure information is floating out there on the web, but this is still cool.
Thanks, you've just made my day.
There is lots of other good advice posted, but here is my story/opinion:
I'm a game programmer. I started programming on my Commodore 64 in about 1986 while I was in high school. I didn't get too far on most of my early games, but I learned the basics of programming and assembly language. After high school I was lucky enough (or unlucky enough, depends on your point of view) to get a couple of jobs making games at a couple of small companies. I worked very hard and accomplished little there, and ended up going to university.
I finally got a degree in Computer Science. I found some of the courses a bit redundant since I had been programming for several years already, but the whole experience was good as a maturing process. I'm much more organized and methodical about software development, and that's mostly what I was missing before university. There's more to programming than understanding the syntax of the language, in the same way that not everyone who speaks English can speak eloquently.
Since then, I developed a game out of my basement (on contract). This is really where I got "legitimized" in the games industry - once you've shipped a game, you get a lot more respect. This got me into a position at Electronic Arts, where I am currently.
The main thing to remember about game programming: it's not all fun and games. Games are usually extremely complex for the size of the teams developing them, schedules are extremely tight and the pressure can be enormous. You can't always just go on to something else or forget about that hard-to-find bug when it's your job. Most games get done through hard work and sheer will-power, and usually require some very smart and talented people around as well.
So, the only advice to give (and this applies to people looking at design / production / art) is really: make something on your own time! This is easiest for programmers (it's hard to make a functioning game without code) so it might be necessary to team up with a programmer (or two, or more). Game ideas are a dime a dozen, so most people in production work their way up from QA, starting off by proving they are organized and can design games a little bit at a time. You might be better off trying to manage a project with a few people and go from there - design is 10% good idea, 90% convincing everyone else it's a good idea. Artists can show their skills by drawing, but it's more important to show what you can do with a modelling package. Making something on your own shows that you have some talent, that you are motivated, and that you would give up some of your free time to make something.
Don't think of game programming as a job - it's a way of life. You could get by doing 9 to 5, but there are people (like me) who live and breathe programming, and you won't move up very quickly. I wake up in the morning with elegant solutions to complex problems spinning in my head. Some people might think that's a bit weird / obsessive / pathetic, but the fact is: I love programming. I can work long hours, but I still come home and play computer games and even prototype my own game ideas. If everybody did something they love as much, the world would be a much more pleasant place.
I do agree with you on the principle of boycotting the MPAA's movies - they have literally lost (failed to receive) hundreds of the dollars I would usually have spent, and I giggle every time I hear about the financial troubles of some of the mega-theatres have been having (hoping that a few of us are having some impact).
/. This whole thing is only really an issue because movies are actually important to us. The movie industry is big because we made it a part of our culture. Discussing them is just something we do.
/. community continue to discuss movies. I think it would be in bad taste if the editors were to ask us to end any boycotts we are personally committed to. I also don't really want them to go on a holy war trying to get all of us to boycott movies. Let's just talk about the movies we like, or wish we could see, and hope things get better before we lose this part of our culture...
But...
I'm not really sure how relevant that is to discussion on
I think it's important that the
Why hairtrigger? This would work best to hurt an enemy state without being concerned about retaliation - it would look like an accident (or act of God, if you prefer).
I always found the most curious thing about sites generating revenue through advertising was the huge inner loops with no external source of revenue.
That is, company A and B advertise on each other's site, but both A and B derive their income entirely from advertising revenue... which only moves money around, doesn't make more. Since expenses are non-zero, and even the cost of moving the money around is non-zero, it's just a recipe for disaster.
I always wondered where the traditional advertisers were. Brand name recognition, like Coke or Pepsi, is the only thing web advertising is REALLY good for. People can only read one page at a time (even if they have several windows open) and are, in general, looking for a piece of information. Click-through advertising relies on the reader to disrupt their search and chain of thought.
I don't know anyone who would impulse buy a web server, which is what click-through really measures. Checking revenue before and after advertising is introduced is probably the best way to determine its success... unless nobody wants the service you are offering, which would cause TV advertising to fail miserably as well.
And if I punch the stupid monkey, I'm going to need to buy a new monitor. But, hey! This is the web! When I need something, I'll go find it! I don't need to be advertised to about it!
The ultimate point is - advertising in interactive media cannot divert the users attention away from the task they originally arrived at the site to complete. The Web is not TV, if you need a cliche.
Advertising is not yet powerful enough to cause everyone who sees/hears the ad to spontaneously buy the product. From that perspective, the dotcom crash is actually a victory for capitalism - the consumers have chosen, and no amount of marketing could change that.
Hackers complain about movies being inaccurate, but do they (or anyone else) really want to watch people take apart their computers and code on the big screen? I doubt it.
I think the main difference is between "remotely plausible" and "just totally wrong." For a lot of shows, it seems the margin of error wrt computers is like doctors on ER healing people with magic powers. Granted, the realities of software development would probably make for a pretty mind-numbing film... but then why even bother to put it in?
Speculating how the world might be if we could suddenly break any encryption or solve otherwise uncomputable problems can be fun. Throwing in silliness because you don't know any better, just to look "with the times" or cool, seems kind of lame.
I don't mean to diminish what Linus has done, but RMS has done a boatload more for the "revolution" than Linus did.
????? There can only be one revolutionary? When did this turn into The Highlander?
I wish I knew more about technology to notice the same discrepancies in these movies that everyone else seems to care so much about.
:-)
Technical people probably get a bit more upset about technology errors than most other groups too. Most technology (especially computers) require a high degree of precision to get them to work at all. I think that's part of why the geek crowd cares about accuracy - people naturally drawn to the logical world of programming have the tendency exaggerated by the necessity of precision to get anything to work.
That, and tech is cool now, but real tech is more in the Doing and Creating than it is the Save The World In Six Keystrokes that keeps people's attention. I'd love to see a book outlining reasonable plot devices for writers... why can no movie character ever get a bug in their program that takes 2 days to work out? Guess that would be kind of dull.
The accurate representation of technology / hacking in most movies and TV shows is so bad it's usually just too annoying for me to watch. But most people don't notice (or don't care) and probably go away with vastly confused understandings of technology, I have to wonder:
How many shows are vastly confused in other areas as well?
I'm thinking about things like medical or law enfocement (court room / police) dramas. Can doctors, lawyers and police officers find these types of shows as painful as I find "hacker" misconceptions? Just how inaccurate are they (certainly to some degree)?
We're going to melt the thing, cut it out guys. :-)
/. effect. Grim or cool? I can't decide.
First house fire caused by the
All your base are belong to us?
/. on this thing too!
:-)
Hey! You can read
Now I'm impressed.
Despite the internet hype, everything necessary can be done over the phone or even by post, without ever touching a computer!
So, it's back to punch cards, is it?
:-)
Well, at least somebody got my point, thanks. My point being, of course, that it IS just a movie, the venom is uncalled for (or, more likely, a sign of deep psychological problems), and that George is not necessarily the Epitome Of All That Is Evil. Control freak, quite likely. EOATIE, I don't think so.
I was actually wondering that as well. The problem with DeCSS isn't that it decrypts the data though. Owning it isn't illegal. Giving it to others is illegal, and that's what all of the cases have been about, as far as I know.
:-)
Now, we do run into a weird situation where we XOR together a Linux CD image and a Windows CD image. Techincally, you could claim that you had encrypted your Linux distribution and you should be able to distribute it because it's Linux, only encrypted. Getting Windows out of the image because you already have Linux is just a side effect...
You could probably argue something similar - that you encrypted Free File X using Copyrighted File Y as the key - and claim that it's not your fault that the key is so easy to reverse engineer.
This is all hypothetical of course, I actually support copyright in general, although with fair use principles enforced (not simply allowed to be worked around).
Heh.
So, question: why do you care?
And one man is not "forcing" the marketing crap on the rest of the world. Companies are begging to pay millions (billions?) to get the rights to sell it. If people were banging down my door to give me money, I'd take it too.
No need to attack me personally BTW, just trying to generate discussion.
Everbody's always whining about George's use of digital everything. I find the whole uproar rather confusing (but then, I liked Episode 1, and thought Jar-Jar was kind of amusing, so please feel free to flame away).
I find the whole thing rather confusing because George is just a HACKER, albeit using film and with a great deal more money than any of us, but a hacker none the less. He's exploring what is possible, pushing boundaries, and he's doing it because he wants to. Damn it, he's having fun. He's a geek and you're trying to bullying him, which is pretty sad when you think about it.
Some people seem to think he has a "responsibility" to Star Wars fans. I always thought that attitude was a little odd. Don't tell me that he owes us because he's rich from our money. We each paid for what we got, expecting nothing more - a movie pass, an action figure or a t-shirt. Although some of us (including myself) have something of an "attachment" to Star Wars, and in making it a part of ourselves believe we have some sort of ownership over it, that's not really true (at least under current copyright law).
That's really the whole music sharing argument though - the RIAA is successful because their product became part of our culture (or they bought pieces of our culture, either way...) If something is that deeply ingrained into who we are, why should we have no control over it whatsoever?
Which leads me to the conclusion that popular media is so ingrained into our definitions of ourselves that we can't even separate the two, we have a couple of options. First, anything which becomes wildly popular should become public domain. Second, we could just get un-brainwashed and stop buying this crap. Those two options are complete opposites, but maybe try to do one or the other instead of just whining about it.
When I first read this I laughed at the concept of a stream of numbers being copyrightable.
.mp3's are just a series of numbers which was not even created by the copyright holder, but that's not saving Napster.
:-)
Umm... ALL software in binary form is just a stream of numbers number, and programs distributed as such have been successfully copyrighted for decades.
I always wondered if that would be a suitably confusing defense of copyright violation. "No your honor, I didn't 'pirate' this [item]. I merely copied a large series of seemingly random numbers, [refers to printout in binary form] see? It's just a bunch of 1's and 0's, not [item]." The counter arguments would just degenerate into semantics and the whole thing would just get ugly.
That gets even more weird when you consider that the zipped form of the binary data in no way represents what was originally placed under copyright.
So, let's say you burn that to a CD. It's just a bunch of invisible pits on a disc. That's copyrighted? Even if you use the proper "device" (i.e. computer) to convert it into "human readable" form, it's still not the copyrighted material. You have to apply a second process to convert the data out of comressed form.
So, from one perspective (it's just a bunch of pits on a disc!) copyright seems silly. From another (I can see on a computer screen, using data extracted from those pits, an image which says 'Copyright (C) 2000 Microsoft (R)') it seems more reasonable, since you're actually producing order out of what would otherwise be random or imperceivable.
I wonder what happens if you use the Linux kernel as the XOR "key" to encrypt Windows? <ow, brain hurt>
Well, after reviewing all of the articles, I disagree with the distinction less. I think my point was a) I'm a programmer by trade but b) I'm a Computer Science graduate, so the two aren't mutually exclusive.
:-) probably generated /attracted many talentless hacks calling themselves programmers / computer scientists. Although Evans says his comment isn't disparaging, my interpretation certainly is - a talented programmer IS a computer scientist, and untalented one is not.
On the other hand, the "dot com incident" (I think I'll start using that phrase exclusively now, it's slightly catchy and vaguely derogatory
OK, now THIS was flamebait. My previous message was not. <shrug>
where'd you go to school
:-)
University of Calgary. I only really took a couple of courses that would fit into the "pure theory" category - "Computability" (theory of computation) and an algorithms course.
For the rest, I guess it depends on how you want to look at it - assignments were almost exclusively an actual implementation, but that doesn't mean that 90% of your time wasn't spent absorbing theory... That, and I was programming long before I got to university because that's just what I love to do, so I did much more programming outside of my assignments than in them, so I WAS actually programming 90% of the time, not that it was because of the course content.
Mostly I figure the whole argument is just semantics though anyway - if you're applying principles of furthering knowledge, then whether the equipment is a pencil and paper or a Cray, it's still science.
In defence of the original article, I would say that Computer Scientists can be programmers, but not all programmers are Computer Scientists, and the "dot com" incident (for lack of a better phrase) probably generated a lot of the latter.
On a related note, not directed to you personally, how the hell is my original post flamebait? That's the second time today I've been modded down for being relevant and on topic. Sheesh.
Isn't that kind of like saying people who actually perform physics experiments are not physicists? That only theoretical physicists are really physicists?
I have a degree in computer science... 90% of what I did at university and 90% of what I do now is bang out code.
Theory is important, I would even say the cornerstone, of everything we do, but there's more to it than that...
Way WAY too much prior art, unfortunately...
Their stock declined 26% today.
Hehe. Ouch.
My first reaction is to wonder why someone would be so happy about the porting of such old games to linux, when they've been played so much on other platforms. But retro games are more popular than you'd think.
Hmm... I'd have to say that, given the current state of gaming on Linux, the old Sierra games are better than 99% of the "modern" games already. With the current absense of good adventures on ANY platform or OS (The Longest Journey notwithstanding, and maybe Escape From Monkey Island) this is actually very interesting, to me anyway.