One of the first times I noticed "realistic"-looking code/console output in a movie was the scene in Robocop when they first "boot" Murphy. (It looked like he/it was booting MS-DOS or CP/M.) But who in the world thinks that that code should be realistic? Nobody's going to consider walking out of a movie after saying "Hey! That doesn't look like robotic control source code!" So "debunk"? Geez get a life. (Of course shortly I'll be off to that web site to see what movie source code they're writing about today.)
Jeebus! You've got to be some special kind of lazy to think that it's oh so much trouble to get to a cycling shop or a big box sporting goods store to pick up a helmut. It's not like you're going to be doing this more than once a year (if that) unless you're the type who crashes every other time you get on the bike. My advise to such people might just be that they really should give up cycling. If you so effin' lazy that it's too much trouble to buy a helmut, you probably won't be bothered to learn and employ safe cycling practices and just get yourself killed, helmut or not.
``The Chicago Tribune reports that "at least three other well-known U.S. retailers" suffered breaches this holiday season as well.''
So how/why was the Tribune sworn to secrecy regarding the names of the other three companies that were hacked? They were ``well-known''. Well, gosh, thanks a pile for narrowing it down for us consumers. Now your readers have to wait until they discover themselves that they're a victim of these hacks.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that the business-friendly Tribune would conceal the names of the other hacked retailers. God-forbid that one of their advertisers see a drop in customers fearful that shopping at one of these three stores might result in financial headaches while they sort out the fraud with their credit card companies.
How can he say that ``we know when you break the law (I'm assuming he means the speed limit) and when you're doing it'' and ``We don't track you without your concent''?
Mr. CEO... one of statements makes you an effin' liar.
Sorry. GPS satellites have 12 hour orbits, geostationary satellites have 24hr orbits. I.e., GPS satellites are not geostationary. If they were, they'd be all but useless in many (most?) locations on earth (where PDOP would be outrageously high). Imagine you were near the equator using a GPS comprised of geostationary satellites. You'd know your longitude very well but you wouldn't have any pseudorange data to let you determine latitude worth a damn.
... Viagra coverage for men, too. Only seems fair. If you can't get it up, it must be part of His plan.
Frankly, I've never understood the Church's fanaticism about birth control and sex without conception. I guess their `thinking' is along the lines of what comedian Chris Rush said when he joked (paraphrasing): "Don't you know that when you masturbate you're murdering millions of potential Christians?"
I use those directly from the application's CLI or write 'scripts' that I redirect into the application or `source' from the app's CLI. I'm sure I could think of others but those are the ones that quickly come to mind.
The OP must be coming from Windows World where CLIs are relatively few and far between. Wonder what they'd think about writing Expect scripts to drive CLI applications on UNIX/Linux? That's the sort of thing I would suggest to Windows folks to watch their heads explode.
Not to mention that the refined products will be exported to other countries. So American land/water is put at risk for the benefit of oil refiners loading their product onto ships destined for overseas sales. But that's not a problem, I guess. When the aquifers are messed up from oil spills and rendered unusable for drinking or irrigation, I suppose we can buy our water and food from China.
Thanks for at least attempting to clarify the term though it seems that Obama bashers simply will not be denied their opportunity to, well, bash.
I wish I could remember the name of the politician (from Wisconsin, if memory serves) who showed up for work -- the day after he lost his bid for re-election and only had a couple of months left to serve -- wearing a duck costume with crutches. I recall the humorless press lambasting the guy for not having the correct amount of gravitas for the office. (Like that was going to allow him to get anything important accomplished in those few weeks.)
It was years ago but I seem to recall that one of the things you needed to do -- along with the normal completion of additional courses -- in order to maintain your project mgmt. certification was to promote the idea of project management certification, i.e., become a PMI evangelist. Seemed too much like a cult. (Plus I hadn't met anyone with such a certification that could manage a project worth a damn -- or at least not any better than most people without that piece of paper.) I'm sure there are some damned good project managers out there that have taken the time and forked over their hard-earned money to receive a certification. My gut tells me, though, that the vast majority of those people would be managing projects just as well without that certification as they do with it. Because they are folks with exceptional organizational skills, eye for detail, etc. Things that they didn't learn in a class.
``Of course, the core issue is whether CMMI does what it's supposed to. I have no idea, but will note that governments tend to love all sorts of mandatory "certification,"..
Q: Does the CMMI certification require that all individuals that work on projects have some kind of certification? It's one thing for an organization to be certified but if they use that certification to win a contract but then staff it with a bunch of grunts that aren't capable of producing a usable product then there's a serious problem. I have no idea if this is what happened with CGI and the ACA web site but, obviously, something went seriously awry with the process. It wouldn't be the first time a company used their ace team to win a contract only to bring in green staffers to perform the work (and perform badly) after the first few weeks.
Good grief! At least I don't keep my old 11/70 core memory board in my living room; I keep it downstairs hanging on the wall next to all the other computers. The missus would kill me if I insisted on having it upstairs.
(Psst... you want a Q-bus wirewrap prototype board?)
I've seen readable Perl and I've seen Perl that looked like regular expressions written while on acid. You don't have to write unintelligible Perl yet that's the kind that seems to get all the attention. Not sure why you think it isn't well suited for doing systems work. It's been doing just fine in that area for me for years.
``included a dash of both coincidence and fast teamwork''
Hmm... interesting description. It's not as though they went to the moon for a single orbit (there were ten) and then came right back. Did they manage to miss the Earth rise until their last orbit and had to act quickly? No, it was on the fourth orbit. If they missed it, they'd get another chance in two hours. From the transcript, I found the most interesting thing was that they had a list of things they were supposed to photograph, that Earth doesn't appear to have been on the list, and that there seems to been a bit of a disagreement as to whether they should even be snapping that photo. Sure the photo schedule they had was driven by the scientific information they were collection for the planetary scientists and for the planners of the future Apollo missions but you'd think they could have contacted Capcom and told them "Hey we've got a great PR opportunity here...". It's sort of funny nowadays that many, if not most, unmanned missions seem to have a view of Earth built into their photographic schedule. Keeps the general public interested, I guess.
(No... haven't seen the video yet; bandwidth starved at the my location. The above is based on the transcript.)
It certainly is somewhat surprising that the security community and the State Department didn't foresee something like this happening as a result of the spying. How large their blinders must be to have missed this.
Sorry... I'm not a civil engineer. I just thought it curious to be digging that large of a tunnel at that shallow of a depth and wondered if it wouldn't have been easier to merely excavate a trench that you fill in later once the tunnel is complete. As I recall that's how some of the early subways were constructed. But I guess that you are a CE so I'll defer to your expertise. Finally, I realize this is/. and there's no firm requirement for someone to answer a post with a thoughtful correction but it's too bad that you felt it was it necessary to be a douchebag about it. Jeebus... Usenet groups were more civil.
... having a 57.5ft tunnel with only 45ft of material above it. Aren't they worried about a cave-in? Unless they're plowing through heavily clay-laden (damned near bunker-buster-proof) soil like we have around where I live, surely the vibrations will have an effect on that 45ft of soil overhead if they decide to proceed and Bertha begins grinding its way through The Object.
I can recall an incident where a number of Ph.D. dissertations were called into question because of a bug that had been discovered in a mainframe statistical package they had used. If memory serves, the University was contacting graduates and asking them to revisit their results to ensure that the bug didn't adversely affect the content of their work. Perhaps, nowadays, the University wouldn't care so much though I'd hope they would if for no other reason than to maintain the school's reputation.
I wouldn't call pseudo-code a reliable indication of what actually processed the data. It's pretty much the same thing as writing a specification and getting a faulty interpretation of that spec. We've all had an idea of what we wanted a piece of code do only to find that it didn't quite live up to our expectation due to some subtle bug (round-off error, etc.). I've spotted weird coding in other colleagues' code that introduced problems in the results. Perhaps that experience is why I'd still like to see the code. YMMV
Ah... but you see HR screeners will deem your learning experience inadequate because you didn't attend `training' classes and cough up $2,500 each (more and more on your dime, of course) for the Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced programming courses. Pursuing something on your own, devouring a couple of texts on a language (that might set you back a whopping $45 each), and fully immersing yourself in it to complete a project that you care about doesn't count. Not a bit. At least not any any place I've ever worked.
Remember when your college instructors told you about the importance of lifelong learning? How, if the college experience was in any way successful, you'd be learning how to teach yourself? Well, most business folks don't seem to believe that. (My guess is that they never had to learn anything new once they graduated.)
Most of us here would not find anything wrong at all about the term `hobbyist'. However, in the business world, it really seems to have a distinctly negative connotation.
``because a lot of research code is throwaway stuff''
Another recent/. post (about scientific data loss) makes me think that little, if any, research code is really `throwaway'. That code -- along with the data it processed -- represents part of the work effort leading to the published results. Data without that code is almost useless because the next researcher who wants to built upon his predecessor's work will likely want to know how you went from the data to your result. Without the code all they can assume is that some magic was involved. Or, if they go through the process of re-processing the raw data and get different results draw the conclusion may be that the original results were faked.
Well, at least today it is. I prefer my units of measurement to be in wavelengths of an excited atom or, at the very least, the distance between two scratches on a platinum bar.
(I think the point folks have been trying to make it that it would have been much more informative to say a ``N millimeter'' coin/object/whatever. Much of the world has probably never seen -- or ever will see -- a Euro coin except, maybe, in a photograph.)
``the raw data isn't usually very useful to anyone without context or knowledge of subtle and poorly documented technicalities''
Wouldn't documenting your experimental method be part of your job? There's really no reason why raw data should be this mysterious entity that nobody can possibly understand unless they were there when it was collected. IMHO, your results -- whatever they are (I only hope it doesn't have anything to do with a drug that physicians might be prescribing to patients) -- are highly questionable if the experiment cannot be reproduced. On the positive side, at least you admit that your documentation efforts were inadequate.
Some years ago I picked up a copy of "Dark Ages II -- When the Digital Data Die" by Bryan Bergeron (2002) but only now have gotten around to finishing reading (for some reason I never got past the first chapter at the time). When I bought it I had just had my own experience with the not-so-long life of digital data (some CDs I'd burned a few years earlier were already unreadable). The book's a bit dated (it says that there are many people out there with Zip drives connected to their PCs) as, obviously technology marches on, leaving older media in the dust but that's the point of the book and the ideas are still relevant. Worth looking for at your public library if you're still of the mind that a digital format is superior to everything else for long-term storage. Personally, I think we're looking at trouble if everything's converted to bits thinking that it'll always be available. Continued access to one of those aforementioned 8" CPM floppies is a good example. My failed CD-Rs are another.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the first times I noticed "realistic"-looking code/console output in a movie was the scene in Robocop when they first "boot" Murphy. (It looked like he/it was booting MS-DOS or CP/M.) But who in the world thinks that that code should be realistic? Nobody's going to consider walking out of a movie after saying "Hey! That doesn't look like robotic control source code!" So "debunk"? Geez get a life. (Of course shortly I'll be off to that web site to see what movie source code they're writing about today.)
Jeebus! You've got to be some special kind of lazy to think that it's oh so much trouble to get to a cycling shop or a big box sporting goods store to pick up a helmut. It's not like you're going to be doing this more than once a year (if that) unless you're the type who crashes every other time you get on the bike. My advise to such people might just be that they really should give up cycling. If you so effin' lazy that it's too much trouble to buy a helmut, you probably won't be bothered to learn and employ safe cycling practices and just get yourself killed, helmut or not.
So how/why was the Tribune sworn to secrecy regarding the names of the other three companies that were hacked? They were ``well-known''. Well, gosh, thanks a pile for narrowing it down for us consumers. Now your readers have to wait until they discover themselves that they're a victim of these hacks.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that the business-friendly Tribune would conceal the names of the other hacked retailers. God-forbid that one of their advertisers see a drop in customers fearful that shopping at one of these three stores might result in financial headaches while they sort out the fraud with their credit card companies.
How can he say that ``we know when you break the law (I'm assuming he means the speed limit) and when you're doing it'' and ``We don't track you without your concent''?
Mr. CEO... one of statements makes you an effin' liar.
Boy oh boy... there are some days that this doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
Sorry. GPS satellites have 12 hour orbits, geostationary satellites have 24hr orbits. I.e., GPS satellites are not geostationary. If they were, they'd be all but useless in many (most?) locations on earth (where PDOP would be outrageously high). Imagine you were near the equator using a GPS comprised of geostationary satellites. You'd know your longitude very well but you wouldn't have any pseudorange data to let you determine latitude worth a damn.
... Viagra coverage for men, too. Only seems fair. If you can't get it up, it must be part of His plan.
Frankly, I've never understood the Church's fanaticism about birth control and sex without conception. I guess their `thinking' is along the lines of what comedian Chris Rush said when he joked (paraphrasing): "Don't you know that when you masturbate you're murdering millions of potential Christians?"
Gnuplot
R
I use those directly from the application's CLI or write 'scripts' that I redirect into the application or `source' from the app's CLI. I'm sure I could think of others but those are the ones that quickly come to mind.
The OP must be coming from Windows World where CLIs are relatively few and far between. Wonder what they'd think about writing Expect scripts to drive CLI applications on UNIX/Linux? That's the sort of thing I would suggest to Windows folks to watch their heads explode.
Not to mention that the refined products will be exported to other countries. So American land/water is put at risk for the benefit of oil refiners loading their product onto ships destined for overseas sales. But that's not a problem, I guess. When the aquifers are messed up from oil spills and rendered unusable for drinking or irrigation, I suppose we can buy our water and food from China.
Thanks for at least attempting to clarify the term though it seems that Obama bashers simply will not be denied their opportunity to, well, bash.
I wish I could remember the name of the politician (from Wisconsin, if memory serves) who showed up for work -- the day after he lost his bid for re-election and only had a couple of months left to serve -- wearing a duck costume with crutches. I recall the humorless press lambasting the guy for not having the correct amount of gravitas for the office. (Like that was going to allow him to get anything important accomplished in those few weeks.)
It was years ago but I seem to recall that one of the things you needed to do -- along with the normal completion of additional courses -- in order to maintain your project mgmt. certification was to promote the idea of project management certification, i.e., become a PMI evangelist. Seemed too much like a cult. (Plus I hadn't met anyone with such a certification that could manage a project worth a damn -- or at least not any better than most people without that piece of paper.) I'm sure there are some damned good project managers out there that have taken the time and forked over their hard-earned money to receive a certification. My gut tells me, though, that the vast majority of those people would be managing projects just as well without that certification as they do with it. Because they are folks with exceptional organizational skills, eye for detail, etc. Things that they didn't learn in a class.
Q: Does the CMMI certification require that all individuals that work on projects have some kind of certification? It's one thing for an organization to be certified but if they use that certification to win a contract but then staff it with a bunch of grunts that aren't capable of producing a usable product then there's a serious problem. I have no idea if this is what happened with CGI and the ACA web site but, obviously, something went seriously awry with the process. It wouldn't be the first time a company used their ace team to win a contract only to bring in green staffers to perform the work (and perform badly) after the first few weeks.
That makes me a real outlier adding a data point in support of your theory about that sigma being rather large.
Good grief! At least I don't keep my old 11/70 core memory board in my living room; I keep it downstairs hanging on the wall next to all the other computers. The missus would kill me if I insisted on having it upstairs.
(Psst... you want a Q-bus wirewrap prototype board?)
I've seen readable Perl and I've seen Perl that looked like regular expressions written while on acid. You don't have to write unintelligible Perl yet that's the kind that seems to get all the attention. Not sure why you think it isn't well suited for doing systems work. It's been doing just fine in that area for me for years.
Hmm... interesting description. It's not as though they went to the moon for a single orbit (there were ten) and then came right back. Did they manage to miss the Earth rise until their last orbit and had to act quickly? No, it was on the fourth orbit. If they missed it, they'd get another chance in two hours. From the transcript, I found the most interesting thing was that they had a list of things they were supposed to photograph, that Earth doesn't appear to have been on the list, and that there seems to been a bit of a disagreement as to whether they should even be snapping that photo. Sure the photo schedule they had was driven by the scientific information they were collection for the planetary scientists and for the planners of the future Apollo missions but you'd think they could have contacted Capcom and told them "Hey we've got a great PR opportunity here...". It's sort of funny nowadays that many, if not most, unmanned missions seem to have a view of Earth built into their photographic schedule. Keeps the general public interested, I guess.
(No... haven't seen the video yet; bandwidth starved at the my location. The above is based on the transcript.)
It certainly is somewhat surprising that the security community and the State Department didn't foresee something like this happening as a result of the spying. How large their blinders must be to have missed this.
Sorry... I'm not a civil engineer. I just thought it curious to be digging that large of a tunnel at that shallow of a depth and wondered if it wouldn't have been easier to merely excavate a trench that you fill in later once the tunnel is complete. As I recall that's how some of the early subways were constructed. But I guess that you are a CE so I'll defer to your expertise. Finally, I realize this is /. and there's no firm requirement for someone to answer a post with a thoughtful correction but it's too bad that you felt it was it necessary to be a douchebag about it. Jeebus... Usenet groups were more civil.
... having a 57.5ft tunnel with only 45ft of material above it. Aren't they worried about a cave-in? Unless they're plowing through heavily clay-laden (damned near bunker-buster-proof) soil like we have around where I live, surely the vibrations will have an effect on that 45ft of soil overhead if they decide to proceed and Bertha begins grinding its way through The Object.
I can recall an incident where a number of Ph.D. dissertations were called into question because of a bug that had been discovered in a mainframe statistical package they had used. If memory serves, the University was contacting graduates and asking them to revisit their results to ensure that the bug didn't adversely affect the content of their work. Perhaps, nowadays, the University wouldn't care so much though I'd hope they would if for no other reason than to maintain the school's reputation.
I wouldn't call pseudo-code a reliable indication of what actually processed the data. It's pretty much the same thing as writing a specification and getting a faulty interpretation of that spec. We've all had an idea of what we wanted a piece of code do only to find that it didn't quite live up to our expectation due to some subtle bug (round-off error, etc.). I've spotted weird coding in other colleagues' code that introduced problems in the results. Perhaps that experience is why I'd still like to see the code. YMMV
Ah... but you see HR screeners will deem your learning experience inadequate because you didn't attend `training' classes and cough up $2,500 each (more and more on your dime, of course) for the Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced programming courses. Pursuing something on your own, devouring a couple of texts on a language (that might set you back a whopping $45 each), and fully immersing yourself in it to complete a project that you care about doesn't count. Not a bit. At least not any any place I've ever worked.
Remember when your college instructors told you about the importance of lifelong learning? How, if the college experience was in any way successful, you'd be learning how to teach yourself? Well, most business folks don't seem to believe that. (My guess is that they never had to learn anything new once they graduated.)
Most of us here would not find anything wrong at all about the term `hobbyist'. However, in the business world, it really seems to have a distinctly negative connotation.
Another recent /. post (about scientific data loss) makes me think that little, if any, research code is really `throwaway'. That code -- along with the data it processed -- represents part of the work effort leading to the published results. Data without that code is almost useless because the next researcher who wants to built upon his predecessor's work will likely want to know how you went from the data to your result. Without the code all they can assume is that some magic was involved. Or, if they go through the process of re-processing the raw data and get different results draw the conclusion may be that the original results were faked.
Well, at least today it is. I prefer my units of measurement to be in wavelengths of an excited atom or, at the very least, the distance between two scratches on a platinum bar.
(I think the point folks have been trying to make it that it would have been much more informative to say a ``N millimeter'' coin/object/whatever. Much of the world has probably never seen -- or ever will see -- a Euro coin except, maybe, in a photograph.)
Wouldn't documenting your experimental method be part of your job? There's really no reason why raw data should be this mysterious entity that nobody can possibly understand unless they were there when it was collected. IMHO, your results -- whatever they are (I only hope it doesn't have anything to do with a drug that physicians might be prescribing to patients) -- are highly questionable if the experiment cannot be reproduced. On the positive side, at least you admit that your documentation efforts were inadequate.
Some years ago I picked up a copy of "Dark Ages II -- When the Digital Data Die" by Bryan Bergeron (2002) but only now have gotten around to finishing reading (for some reason I never got past the first chapter at the time). When I bought it I had just had my own experience with the not-so-long life of digital data (some CDs I'd burned a few years earlier were already unreadable). The book's a bit dated (it says that there are many people out there with Zip drives connected to their PCs) as, obviously technology marches on, leaving older media in the dust but that's the point of the book and the ideas are still relevant. Worth looking for at your public library if you're still of the mind that a digital format is superior to everything else for long-term storage. Personally, I think we're looking at trouble if everything's converted to bits thinking that it'll always be available. Continued access to one of those aforementioned 8" CPM floppies is a good example. My failed CD-Rs are another.