>"Next Generation Space Telescope"? When are people going to learn how to name things?
FWIW, I work at the Space Telescope Science Institute (The people who run the Hubble).
That won't be it's name in the long run. The Hubble wasn't called the Hubble when it was first launched. It was just the 'Space Telescope'. It was later named Hubble. Plans are to do the same thing for NGST... Launch it just called it NGST, then after it is up and working, give it a real name.
I've been led to understand by astronomers who work here that there is a reason that this is standard policy on many space missions. They don't want to name something after someone famous, then have it explode upon launch:) Better wait until it is up and working before naming it:)
But just curious, where do you draw the line? If you consider pure 'computer sex' to be adultery (not talking about a computer relationship, just talking to someone while masterbating)...
What about a computer program that 'talks to you'?
Or calling a late night 1-977-xxx-xxxx number?
Or looking at pornographic material?
I think most typical people's responses would be that neither of the last 3 are 'adultery', so then why does option 1 count?
>Fantasy in troubled individuals often leads to acts.
And so next they are going to ban all 1st person shooters right? Because of the above? At some point you have to draw the line that we can't cater to EVERYONE. If nothing 'Fantasy' is ever allowed because someone somewhere might copy it... then say goodbye to all movies, games, etc as we know them.
In fact, lock us all in boxes for our whole life, just in case we are the 1 in a million person who just can't stand seeing blue, and all those blue jeans are going to make us go on a killing spree.
New Hubble Website & Slashbox!
on
Hubble Turns 10
·
· Score: 2
Also in celebration of the 10th anniversary, STScI (the people who run the Hubble), have released a newly designed website hubble.site Plus Cowboyneal made a slashbox for hubble.site to show the most current pictures from Hubble!
I always record at least 40 on my timesheet. Sometimes more as I will work a little extra when a project is due, or the 'ok, leaving in 30 minutes' and 2 hours later finlly looking up at the clock and going: 'SHEESH, It's THAT late?'
But even given that, what isn't counted is all the time spent away from work that I am working, just like this article talks about. I check my work email at home while I check my home email. Probably at least once a night, twice on weekends. and I will spend time (1/2 - 1 hour) replying to work messages simply so that I don't have to worry about them otherwise.
It also doesn't count the time that I am thinking about code while in the shower. Which at least for me, is where most of my breakthroughs and new insights come from. Plus I take 30 minute showers every morning, so add that onto my workload.
The problem is that newer versions of web browsers RUINED the ALT tags by DISPLAYING them!!!
Now in every current copy of IE and Netscape when you hover over a graphic you get an ALT tag pop-up in your face.
Now while on a page with mostly text and a few graphics this may not be a problem...
But take that site given in the article. If you put ALT tags on the navigation, the pop-up text will appear over TOP of the other options, thus making the menu very hard to use.
We had the same problem back a while ago when making a site for kids, where we had ALT tags on the graphics, but the tags popping up when on the menu text, ended up hiding the actual roll-over text that we were putting in an adjacent image.
We had to take the tags out because of every single teacher we showed the site to calling it unuseable because of that problem.
If web browsers wouldn't do that pop-up thing, I would LOVE to put alt text everywhere!
There are a number of reasons that I use Perl day-in and day-out for writing my CGI programs... But the #1) reason is: REGEX... Let me list the reasons here:
1) REGEX (wait a minute, I said that already) - Most every CGI that I write spends 95% of it's time doing REGEX stuff. It's taking input from the user and parsing it, it's parsing text from files, and it's sticking it all back together. Yes, I know what you are going to say - You can use the GNU regex library to do regex in C/C++ as well. Yes you can, but not nearly as simply/nicely/easily/etc. If you have ever used those libraries, you know what I am talking about. Creating your regex, setting all the flags/options, compiling the regex, then calling for matches. It's a royal pain versus:/blah/... It even gets worse for replacing when you then have to start doing substring calls off of the index values returned to let you do a replace on the text within the block. Not nearly as nice as: s/blah/... And don't even mention trying to do a global search and replace. I had to write one search and replace program once that stripped all occurances of X from a web page and replaced it with Y (Where Y could be shorter, OR longer than X). I had to write this in C, because of security considerations. Well all of the code to do this ended up taking over 100 lines of code, error checking, buffer allocation, etc. In Perl this is: s/X/Y/g; SO much simpler, easier to debug, and to maintain.
2) Cross platform / Mirror sites. When you have mirror sites, Perl is a BIG BOON! Otherwise all of your mirrors will have to recompile your scripts for their machines every time you change them. And what if a certain C library has 'variations' on different platforms (A certain Solaris memory manipulation routine comes to mind). Heck, the ability to develop on Linux or NT, and then copy the program to Solaris and it 'just works' is great!
3) Maintainability - Yes, I said that - Perl is easier to maintain for me in a multiprogrammer situation. Now, not in the sense you are thinking, but in the sense of multiple people needing to be able to make changes. In Perl, your program IS your source code. You've got one file (or maybe a couple) sitting there, and they run. If a different programmer has to go make a change to the code, they can head right in, make the change, and know it will work. If you are programming in C, chances are that only your EXE is sitting in the CGI directory, and not the source. So they need to find the source. If you DO want to put the source right beside your EXE, then it looks horrible, because chances are that you will have a couple source files, plus unless you clean up some.o's laying around... and on top of that, if you want EVERYONE to be able to compile your program and not have to worry about if everyone has their environment set correctly, or knowing off hand what libraries need linked in, then you are going to have to make a Makefile, and make sure that it is working correctly, and keep it sitting around as well. Not nearly as clean as a couple of.pl files or so...
Ok, guess that's it for now, I could keep typing, but I better get back to the Perl script I am writing:)
Just as the question asks... it appears as if lots of your 'guest actors', meaning the famous people, Like Hemos and CmdrTaco, are taken directly from well known pictures of them, then drawn over to create a cartoon effect.
Known as rotoscoping in the cartoon business, it is how the infamous Lord of the Rings movie was made.
So I am curious if in fact this IS what you do, or if you are cleverly disguising your original drawings to LOOK like well known pictures... (Ah hah!)
The auxillary question if this is true, is what characters ARN'T... there are a few obvious ones, such as Relic and the main guy... but for example, what about the Techno-talking babes?
In your question you say that in your experience that all the highly skilled people are contractors. At least in my area of the country (Maryland/DC/VA) it seems to tip the other way.
Anyone can get a job as a contractor. When placing my resume around I have gotten carte blanc offers by the mail. A packet mailed to me saying: 'Fill out this skills survey sheet so that we know what types of contracts you will be best on and you will instantly be an employee of ours and we will call you with your first assignment within a week. Your pay rate will be $xxx an hour.'
Whereas getting a job through a company as an employee is a detailed process... going through the interviews, having yourself scrutinized over, etc. Only the 'best' get chosen.
Plus, alot of people (myself included), simply like the stability of a regular job... only having to work 40 hours a week, getting 5 weeks of vacation, having 10% of salary added to a 401k for you, good medical coverage... These kinds of things can only be had with a full-time position.
Sure I could make more money by going the contractor route, but money isn't everything, happiness is.
On the other side of the issue . . . every time in my current job as well as others I have held that we have needed a new employee... and we would look at contractors as well as hiring people...
Well...
Typically what would happen is if we brought in people for interviewing as an employee - 90% wouldn't be what we were looking for, but we were able to weed them out and find that 10% to choose from that were exactly what we needed.
When we got resumes from contracting firms of employees that they felt fit our needs, it wasn't even close. If we needed a 'web programmer' (HTML, Javascript, Shockwave, Flash, CGI, Perl, etc)... we would get tons of resumes of people who 'had made a web page once in college'. We would never end up finding a perfect match, and even when we thought that we had, they weren't, because they had 'bumped up' their resume with the contracting firm so that they would get more assignments... so they fact they claimed they could do Java simply meant that they had read the nutshell book once and did a sample program.
*sigh*
So personally, I reccomend employees over contractors... Unless you have a large batch of grunt work, that is clear and dry, spelled out perfectly, and couldn't get done 'wrong' because it is spelled out so well... In that case, sure, you can let a contractor come in, and finish it...
One thing you're forgetting -- generally when package maintainers (Linus, for instance) are reviewing a patch for inclusion in the distribution, they won't accept it unless they understand all the code involved.
This is true, but there are two points that you arn't considering...
First of all you are implicitly trusting the maintainers... and they could be the ones inserting (or leaving) the backdoor code in any product. (Not that I distrust them, but it COULD happen)
Secondly that not all code is 'maintained' as well as others. Someone may have written a really cool application that they released as open source just in case someone else wanted to add a new feature. The maintainer in this case may not look over the code as well as they should, and instead are sent back a new set of source files that compile fine and add lots new features, and start using them instead! Or again, the original creator of the program could have added said back doors in.
In any case... I'm not saying it would be easy to do at all, just that the possibility still exists, and with the level of brilliance that often exists in the programming world, I wouldn't put it past someone to be smart enough to completely hide something small.
If you don't know and don't care to find out what the three lines mean then why the hell are you even worring about how secureyour os is?? What are you going to do trust someone??? Yeah, and like 1000's of other people you get burnt just like them. If I can't see the code, I won't use it on my servers.
Ok, so you personally have looked at every line of code that Linux runs, and have personally verified every single bit of it? If so, I congratulate you... However I personally don't know anyone who does this.
In fact, the particular case that I was mentioning was if I had a piece of code (Lets say majordomo), and I just wanted to add one neat bit of functionality into it. I'm going to search through the code skimming it to find what looks like the area my code should fall, and insert it there. I'm not going to take the time to fully figure out what all of the program does, just to follow the flow enough to get where I am wanting to be, and I think that most other programmers I know work the same . . .
Ummm, sorry to burst your bubble but this COULD happen in Open Source software like Linux. Just because it is open source doesn't mean that something can't be hidden within it.
Now granted, the person who is doing the hiding has to be MUCH trickier about doing it... but still, how many times have you been looking at someone else's source code and said:
"What the @#$% do those 3 lines of code do? Hrmmm, oh well, doesn't look like the section I was trying to find anyway . .."
Because they are very obscure lines of code, that don't seem to be what you are looking for, so you don't take the time to 'play computer' and try to figure out what they are...
This is great, as it could replace the use of the more lethal weapons out there, and would also help curb police brutality...
Cops wouldn't have to be so worried about the other guy pulling a gun on them, that they instead overreact and become far too harse when the person was being compliant. Instead, if this is developed and has no sideeffects, the officer can simply stun the guy, handcuff them, and then wait for them to wake up.
No worries.
The idea of the ones that stop cars would also put an end to all those long dangerous car chases (although we would miss watching them on TV *smile*).
Plus it would just be too cool once someone makes one in a original star trek phaser style casing:)
(And yes, the SCA would be VERY interested in this *smile*)
>It would be nice to do an Altavista search where at least a simple >majority of the pages are on topic for your search!
Problem is that this goes too far. Sure it would be nice to see irrevelant terms removed. But this doesn't do that. It instead actually forces people to remove relevant terms!
Since your website which happens to be about a trademarked item, now can't mention that trademarked item in it's META tags.
This is just crazy. So now if I want to make a website for... oh... lets say the movie Braveheart. I can't put the word 'Braveheart' in the meta tag, because it is trademarked...
Same goes for anything. There goes the functionality of any search engine that relies on Meta Tags. Now a Fan site isn't allowed to say what they are a fan of!
Now of course they can use those trademarked terms in the body of the document... but not in the Meta Tags to describe what the body talks about...
Yup, a nice data port socket right behind my ear:) Walk up to any computer and just 'plug in'... Ahhhhh The cure for Carpal Tunnel, the ultimate in Multitasking....
Slashdot Mirror
>"Next Generation Space Telescope"? When are people going to learn how to name things?
... Launch it just called it NGST, then after it is up and working, give it a real name.
:) Better wait until it is up and working before naming it :)
FWIW, I work at the Space Telescope Science Institute (The people who run the Hubble).
That won't be it's name in the long run. The Hubble wasn't called the Hubble when it was first launched. It was just the 'Space Telescope'. It was later named Hubble. Plans are to do the same thing for NGST
I've been led to understand by astronomers who work here that there is a reason that this is standard policy on many space missions. They don't want to name something after someone famous, then have it explode upon launch
But just curious, where do you draw the line? If you consider pure 'computer sex' to be adultery (not talking about a computer relationship, just talking to someone while masterbating) ...
What about a computer program that 'talks to you'?
Or calling a late night 1-977-xxx-xxxx number?
Or looking at pornographic material?
I think most typical people's responses would be that neither of the last 3 are 'adultery', so then why does option 1 count?
Problem is any attempt at limiting someone from doing ANYTHING, makes said something much more inticing ... and makes one WANT to do it.
So I think it is a general statement that allowing something like this would HAVE to act more as a 'safe outlet' than an encouragement.
>Fantasy in troubled individuals often leads to acts.
... then say goodbye to all movies, games, etc as we know them.
And so next they are going to ban all 1st person shooters right? Because of the above? At some point you have to draw the line that we can't cater to EVERYONE. If nothing 'Fantasy' is ever allowed because someone somewhere might copy it
In fact, lock us all in boxes for our whole life, just in case we are the 1 in a million person who just can't stand seeing blue, and all those blue jeans are going to make us go on a killing spree.
Also in celebration of the 10th anniversary, STScI (the people who run the Hubble), have released a newly designed website hubble.site Plus Cowboyneal made a slashbox for hubble.site to show the most current pictures from Hubble!
I always record at least 40 on my timesheet. Sometimes more as I will work a little extra when a project is due, or the 'ok, leaving in 30 minutes' and 2 hours later finlly looking up at the clock and going: 'SHEESH, It's THAT late?'
But even given that, what isn't counted is all the time spent away from work that I am working, just like this article talks about. I check my work email at home while I check my home email. Probably at least once a night, twice on weekends. and I will spend time (1/2 - 1 hour) replying to work messages simply so that I don't have to worry about them otherwise.
It also doesn't count the time that I am thinking about code while in the shower. Which at least for me, is where most of my breakthroughs and new insights come from. Plus I take 30 minute showers every morning, so add that onto my workload.
The problem is that newer versions of web browsers RUINED the ALT tags by DISPLAYING them!!!
...
Now in every current copy of IE and Netscape when you hover over a graphic you get an ALT tag pop-up in your face.
Now while on a page with mostly text and a few graphics this may not be a problem
But take that site given in the article. If you put ALT tags on the navigation, the pop-up text will appear over TOP of the other options, thus making the menu very hard to use.
We had the same problem back a while ago when making a site for kids, where we had ALT tags on the graphics, but the tags popping up when on the menu text, ended up hiding the actual roll-over text that we were putting in an adjacent image.
We had to take the tags out because of every single teacher we showed the site to calling it unuseable because of that problem.
If web browsers wouldn't do that pop-up thing, I would LOVE to put alt text everywhere!
There are a number of reasons that I use Perl day-in and day-out for writing my CGI programs ... But the #1) reason is: REGEX ... Let me list the reasons here:
/blah/ ... It even gets worse for replacing when you then have to start doing substring calls off of the index values returned to let you do a replace on the text within the block. Not nearly as nice as: s/blah/ ... And don't even mention trying to do a global search and replace. I had to write one search and replace program once that stripped all occurances of X from a web page and replaced it with Y (Where Y could be shorter, OR longer than X). I had to write this in C, because of security considerations. Well all of the code to do this ended up taking over 100 lines of code, error checking, buffer allocation, etc. In Perl this is: s/X/Y/g; SO much simpler, easier to debug, and to maintain.
.o's laying around ... and on top of that, if you want EVERYONE to be able to compile your program and not have to worry about if everyone has their environment set correctly, or knowing off hand what libraries need linked in, then you are going to have to make a Makefile, and make sure that it is working correctly, and keep it sitting around as well. Not nearly as clean as a couple of .pl files or so ...
:)
1) REGEX (wait a minute, I said that already) - Most every CGI that I write spends 95% of it's time doing REGEX stuff. It's taking input from the user and parsing it, it's parsing text from files, and it's sticking it all back together. Yes, I know what you are going to say - You can use the GNU regex library to do regex in C/C++ as well. Yes you can, but not nearly as simply/nicely/easily/etc. If you have ever used those libraries, you know what I am talking about. Creating your regex, setting all the flags/options, compiling the regex, then calling for matches. It's a royal pain versus:
2) Cross platform / Mirror sites. When you have mirror sites, Perl is a BIG BOON! Otherwise all of your mirrors will have to recompile your scripts for their machines every time you change them. And what if a certain C library has 'variations' on different platforms (A certain Solaris memory manipulation routine comes to mind). Heck, the ability to develop on Linux or NT, and then copy the program to Solaris and it 'just works' is great!
3) Maintainability - Yes, I said that - Perl is easier to maintain for me in a multiprogrammer situation. Now, not in the sense you are thinking, but in the sense of multiple people needing to be able to make changes. In Perl, your program IS your source code. You've got one file (or maybe a couple) sitting there, and they run. If a different programmer has to go make a change to the code, they can head right in, make the change, and know it will work. If you are programming in C, chances are that only your EXE is sitting in the CGI directory, and not the source. So they need to find the source. If you DO want to put the source right beside your EXE, then it looks horrible, because chances are that you will have a couple source files, plus unless you clean up some
Ok, guess that's it for now, I could keep typing, but I better get back to the Perl script I am writing
Here are some URLs to see all the great pictures that the Hubble has taken:
Main Gallery - http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.htmle st-hits-gallery.html
Organized by Subject - http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/SubjectT.html
Hubble's Greatest Hits - http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/1998/18/great
Enjoy them! That's why we put them up there!
Just as the question asks ... it appears as if lots of your 'guest actors', meaning the famous people, Like Hemos and CmdrTaco, are taken directly from well known pictures of them, then drawn over to create a cartoon effect.
... (Ah hah!)
... there are a few obvious ones, such as Relic and the main guy ... but for example, what about the Techno-talking babes?
Known as rotoscoping in the cartoon business, it is how the infamous Lord of the Rings movie was made.
So I am curious if in fact this IS what you do, or if you are cleverly disguising your original drawings to LOOK like well known pictures
The auxillary question if this is true, is what characters ARN'T
In your question you say that in your experience that all the highly skilled people are contractors. At least in my area of the country (Maryland/DC/VA) it seems to tip the other way.
... going through the interviews, having yourself scrutinized over, etc. Only the 'best' get chosen.
... only having to work 40 hours a week, getting 5 weeks of vacation, having 10% of salary added to a 401k for you, good medical coverage ... These kinds of things can only be had with a full-time position.
... and we would look at contractors as well as hiring people ...
...
... we would get tons of resumes of people who 'had made a web page once in college'. We would never end up finding a perfect match, and even when we thought that we had, they weren't, because they had 'bumped up' their resume with the contracting firm so that they would get more assignments ... so they fact they claimed they could do Java simply meant that they had read the nutshell book once and did a sample program.
... Unless you have a large batch of grunt work, that is clear and dry, spelled out perfectly, and couldn't get done 'wrong' because it is spelled out so well ... In that case, sure, you can let a contractor come in, and finish it ...
Anyone can get a job as a contractor. When placing my resume around I have gotten carte blanc offers by the mail. A packet mailed to me saying: 'Fill out this skills survey sheet so that we know what types of contracts you will be best on and you will instantly be an employee of ours and we will call you with your first assignment within a week. Your pay rate will be $xxx an hour.'
Whereas getting a job through a company as an employee is a detailed process
Plus, alot of people (myself included), simply like the stability of a regular job
Sure I could make more money by going the contractor route, but money isn't everything, happiness is.
On the other side of the issue . . . every time in my current job as well as others I have held that we have needed a new employee
Well
Typically what would happen is if we brought in people for interviewing as an employee - 90% wouldn't be what we were looking for, but we were able to weed them out and find that 10% to choose from that were exactly what we needed.
When we got resumes from contracting firms of employees that they felt fit our needs, it wasn't even close. If we needed a 'web programmer' (HTML, Javascript, Shockwave, Flash, CGI, Perl, etc)
*sigh*
So personally, I reccomend employees over contractors
One thing you're forgetting -- generally when package maintainers (Linus, for instance) are reviewing a patch for inclusion in the distribution, they won't accept it unless they understand all the code involved.
...
... and they could be the ones inserting (or leaving) the backdoor code in any product. (Not that I distrust them, but it COULD happen)
... I'm not saying it would be easy to do at all, just that the possibility still exists, and with the level of brilliance that often exists in the programming world, I wouldn't put it past someone to be smart enough to completely hide something small.
This is true, but there are two points that you arn't considering
First of all you are implicitly trusting the maintainers
Secondly that not all code is 'maintained' as well as others. Someone may have written a really cool application that they released as open source just in case someone else wanted to add a new feature. The maintainer in this case may not look over the code as well as they should, and instead are sent back a new set of source files that compile fine and add lots new features, and start using them instead! Or again, the original creator of the program could have added said back doors in.
In any case
If you don't know and don't care to find out what the three lines mean then why the hell are you even worring about how secureyour os is?? What are you going to do trust someone??? Yeah, and like 1000's of other people you get burnt just like them. If I can't see the code, I won't use it on my servers.
... However I personally don't know anyone who does this.
Ok, so you personally have looked at every line of code that Linux runs, and have personally verified every single bit of it? If so, I congratulate you
In fact, the particular case that I was mentioning was if I had a piece of code (Lets say majordomo), and I just wanted to add one neat bit of functionality into it. I'm going to search through the code skimming it to find what looks like the area my code should fall, and insert it there. I'm not going to take the time to fully figure out what all of the program does, just to follow the flow enough to get where I am wanting to be, and I think that most other programmers I know work the same . . .
Ummm, sorry to burst your bubble but this COULD happen in Open Source software like Linux. Just because it is open source doesn't mean that something can't be hidden within it.
... but still, how many times have you been looking at someone else's source code and said:
."
...
Now granted, the person who is doing the hiding has to be MUCH trickier about doing it
"What the @#$% do those 3 lines of code do? Hrmmm, oh well, doesn't look like the section I was trying to find anyway . .
Because they are very obscure lines of code, that don't seem to be what you are looking for, so you don't take the time to 'play computer' and try to figure out what they are
This is great, as it could replace the use of the more lethal weapons out there, and would also help curb police brutality ...
:)
Cops wouldn't have to be so worried about the other guy pulling a gun on them, that they instead overreact and become far too harse when the person was being compliant. Instead, if this is developed and has no sideeffects, the officer can simply stun the guy, handcuff them, and then wait for them to wake up.
No worries.
The idea of the ones that stop cars would also put an end to all those long dangerous car chases (although we would miss watching them on TV *smile*).
Plus it would just be too cool once someone makes one in a original star trek phaser style casing
(And yes, the SCA would be VERY interested in this *smile*)
>It would be nice to do an Altavista search where at least a simple
>majority of the pages are on topic for your search!
Problem is that this goes too far. Sure it would be nice to see irrevelant terms removed. But this doesn't do that. It instead actually forces people to remove relevant terms!
Since your website which happens to be about a trademarked item, now can't mention that trademarked item in it's META tags.
This is just crazy. So now if I want to make a website for ... oh ... lets say the movie Braveheart. I can't put the word 'Braveheart' in the meta tag, because it is trademarked ...
... but not in the Meta Tags to describe what the body talks about ...
Same goes for anything. There goes the functionality of any search engine that relies on Meta Tags. Now a Fan site isn't allowed to say what they are a fan of!
Now of course they can use those trademarked terms in the body of the document
*sigh*
Yup, a nice data port socket right behind my ear :) Walk up to any computer and just 'plug in' ... Ahhhhh The cure for Carpal Tunnel, the ultimate in Multitasking ....
....
Someday