The article made a big deal about him breaking the sound barrier without a vehicle protecting him as if he were the first. Not only has that other skydiver that everybody's mentioned done it but there was that guy they strapped to a rocket sled out in New Mexico in the 50's too. I think his name was Halloran if I remember correctly.
The pressure messed him up pretty badly. His eyes popped out of their sockets even. But then again, that was with no protective suit at all and he was close to sea level.
Overinflated sense of self-importance anybody?
on
The Hacker Ethic
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· Score: 3
Is there really a social revolution being started by hackers? I seriously doubt it. People have been collaborating on projects without a paycheck motivator since long before the PC. It was just a lot harder in the past to do so. Yet people did it anyhow. Scientists and inventors even collaborated by mail and through journals. Does anybody really think that every prior invention was created to turn a buck and created by one person?
What we're really seeing now is a revolution in the ease with which people are able to communicate. Yes, hackers have had a huge hand in this but so have normal shirt-and-tie professionals working in cubicles and offices.
How have hackers changed the lives and perceptions of normal everyday Joes outside of their contributions to the net? Not a bit as far as I can tell from looking out my window.
My god! Do they know what the key signature for that looks like?!? No WAY I'm playing in a key with 8 sharps.
Re:C++ is NOT a horrible introductory language
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
Am I the only person who thinks C++ is a great language to start with?
I started with C++ and I feel that it better prepared me for other languages partially due to it's "hodgepodge of different programming paradigms". After learning C++, every other language I've learned has been cake because you can pick nearly any feature of nearly any other language and draw a correlation to a feature in C++. It gives you a point of reference. As for the extremely complicated symantics, I don't know what you're talking about. I'd like an example of what you mean because I think it's very simple and elegant.
As for learning C++, I think the "Pascal - C - C++" route is a horrible idea. I've always hated seeing C++ taught that way. It get's people used to procedural programming with Pascal, then teaches them a real procedural language - so far so good. But then it gives them an object oriented language that looks like their procedural language so you end up with a bunch of "C+" programmers who write procedural code using only objects from the C++ standard libraries. I've even seen programmers who were taught this way using printf and scanf in their "C++" programs because they refused to learn the iostream objects. There is nothing wrong with teaching somebody object oriented programming from the start. It's not like they won't understand straight procedural programs when they see them.
Learning Java first? I'm not touching that with a ten foot pole - I haven't the faintest clue whether or not that would be better.
My mother's friend Jerry decided to move to Phoenix and live with my mother until she could get settled. Jerry was a registered nurse but hadn't been working for a few years. She was staying home taking care of her children I believe. When she moved out to Phoenix, she started applying for nursing positions with various hospitals. At almost every hospital she applied at, she would go through an interview, sign some paperwork, including a release for a background check, and never hear back from them. The wouldn't accept phone calls from her and wouldn't tell her why she hadn't been contacted.
Finally one of the hospitals she applied at informed her that they were unable to hire her because of her felony conviction. It turns out that somebody had been arrested for manslaughter after assuming her identity. This person had also just been released from prison. The problem was, he had been using her social security number, birth date, the whole nine yards. Plus, he was actually arrested and stood trial under that information. The only thing that allowed it all to be cleared up in a reasonable amount of time was the fact that she was obviously not male. Were it not for this fact, it may have taken her months to get it cleared up.
When it comes to liability here, it turns out that the person assuming her identity was the responsibly party and she had no legal recourse against the background check company or the city that she had lived in. She was pretty much SOL.
I'm willing to bet she would have had some recourse against the prospective employers that didn't tell here why she was not hired but she didn't want to alienate too many possible future employers.
Apogee's new licensing agreement for their trademarks is ridiculous. Here's how seriously I take it- Throughout the rest of this post I've attempted to highlight the areas where I've violated their agreement. Any lawyers who try to enforce this is going to need all the help they can get.
Duke Nukem is stale and was a crappy game to begin with.
What the hell is Bombshell anyhow? It's probably crappier than Duke Nukem.
Dr. Proton was... who's Dr. Proton again? Oh, I guess I don't know because Apogee sucks.
General Phil Graves - clueless again.
Come get some more crap.
Hail to the king um... This is a registered trademark? If I created a character that says "Hello baby" in a video game, can I trademark that and charge licensing fees to Hollywood everytime a screenwriter adds it to a movie?
King of action - King of crap
King of carnage - King of more crap
The yellow "Duke Nukem" title logo - I'll have to deface this later and plaster it all over my web site.
The yellow nuke symbol - Maybe this should be their legitimate trademark. Let's associate their games with things that will make you get cancer and die.
Planet of the Babes - Ok, I really need to get back to work. I'll simply violate the rest of their trademarks with one word.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Do everything you can to separate the program logic (the code) and the HTML layout. Why: The people who originally build, or later fix, the HTML may very well be different than the people who work with the code. The skill sets are almost completely different, but if you let the two comingle, you will require the maintainers be proficient in both skill sets.
Exactly, this will limit the number of people capable of replacing you.
If the look of your site changes but the code and the HTML are entangled, it can be very easy to break program logic while trying to make visual changes.
Sucks to be the next guy... that's what he gets for trying to take your job.
I say try to make even the smallest function a separate script - write them all in separate languages and have them redirect the browser from script to script. Next, after you have the site working, remove all the whitespace that you can - especially those pesky newline characters that make everything fit on the screen. Get a job for life where you set your own salary! You deserve it!
The right tool for every job
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 1
Why is it that we software developers fall into these holy wars so easily? Every project is different. Even projects that appear identical will differ in subtle ways. Every tool is different. Even tools that appear identical will differ in subtle ways. You pick the BEST MATCH and go from there. The best match isn't always the most robust, sophisticated tool - though many times it is.
Why do we get emotionally attached to the tool that we used for the last job? Why do we suddenly hate tools that we passed over because they didn't support the features that we required for the last job? Everybody needs to step back a few if you ask me.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer so if there are any lawyers out there, correct me if I'm wrong.
There are tons of posts here talking about how this court desicion violates Mitnick's first amendment rights. I was under the impression that when you were convicted of a crime, your rights were forfeit for the duration of your sentance/probation. Given this, I'm pretty sure that it is completely legal for the courts the pass this sort of judgement. I doubt that Kevin Mitnick will have much ground to fight this ruling on.
Having said this, I should also note that I don't agree with the court's decision and that I feel it is very heavy-handed as well as being short-sighted. But what do I know?
Re:3dfx is basically gone
on
ATI Radeon 256
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· Score: 1
"Anyway, the ATI Radeon can do 1.5 gigatexels per second. The Voodoo 5 can only do 667 megatexels. So, the Radeon will far outperform a V5. And it has T&L! What a deal! The funny thing is that 3dfx is hyping the V5 based on its fill rate... "
"... One thing that I know for sure, however, is that 3dfx is not in the running. Their only hope right now is to drop their prices very low. I would not like to be working at 3dfx right now. "
I think that it's a bit early to mourn 3dfx. High fill rates alone don't make a card. I've owned cards from all the major players including ATI and nVidia and here's what I've found personally.
1. 3dfx cards have been extremely reliable for me under Win95/98, MacOS and Linux. I can't say the same for ATI or nVidia.
2. 3dfx will support T&L via software. It's really hard to say how much of a performance hit this will be until the card hits the market. It might not be bad if the T&L software just wraps existing hardware functions.
3. The Voodoo 4/5 supports real-time anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is a big deal. Having done a considerable amount of graphic design, I feel that this going to have an increadible impact on the graphics quality. Anti-aliasing could potentially make 800x600 look better than 1280x1024.
4. I've been unhappy with every ATI product that I've owned. I have an ATI card in my Macintosh that is broken by QuickTime 4. QuickTime 4 was already released when I purchased this card. To this day they have failed to release a driver fixing the issue.
5. Most of my friends are ditching their GeForce cards for Voodoo 3's right now because they have been having so many problems with them.
I still think it's hard to go wrong with Voodoo...
I heard Matt Groening on NPR's "Fresh Air" before the release of Futurama and he said a Simpsons movie was unlikely largely due to the contract he has with FOX. He said that if he were to make a Simpsons movie, FOX would make a bundle and he wouldn't take home jack. In fact, it sounded like one of the major reasons he started Futurama was to have a show where he was more in control of the product licensing and was getting a bigger piece of the pie.
Frankly, I don't see Transmeta as being a competitor with AMD or Intel for the big picture right now. The Crusoe is a mobile chip designed to capture a specific market.
(I have few doubts that it will do just that - Intel's mobile chips are a joke compared to the Crusoe if it lives up to it's specs. It also should spank the K6's which are AMD's mobile chips.)
However, I can't imagine why anybody would want to put a Crusoe in a desktop. The Athlon or PIII would easily outperform it. The Crusoe wasn't intended to compete in the desktop market.
Slashdot Mirror
The article made a big deal about him breaking the sound barrier without a vehicle protecting him as if he were the first. Not only has that other skydiver that everybody's mentioned done it but there was that guy they strapped to a rocket sled out in New Mexico in the 50's too. I think his name was Halloran if I remember correctly. The pressure messed him up pretty badly. His eyes popped out of their sockets even. But then again, that was with no protective suit at all and he was close to sea level.
What we're really seeing now is a revolution in the ease with which people are able to communicate. Yes, hackers have had a huge hand in this but so have normal shirt-and-tie professionals working in cubicles and offices.
How have hackers changed the lives and perceptions of normal everyday Joes outside of their contributions to the net? Not a bit as far as I can tell from looking out my window.
And no, I'm not a wind player. If I were, I would throw a whining fit over one sharp :)
Doh! Well there's still no WAY I'm playing in a key with 8 sharps.
My god! Do they know what the key signature for that looks like?!? No WAY I'm playing in a key with 8 sharps.
I started with C++ and I feel that it better prepared me for other languages partially due to it's "hodgepodge of different programming paradigms". After learning C++, every other language I've learned has been cake because you can pick nearly any feature of nearly any other language and draw a correlation to a feature in C++. It gives you a point of reference. As for the extremely complicated symantics, I don't know what you're talking about. I'd like an example of what you mean because I think it's very simple and elegant.
As for learning C++, I think the "Pascal - C - C++" route is a horrible idea. I've always hated seeing C++ taught that way. It get's people used to procedural programming with Pascal, then teaches them a real procedural language - so far so good. But then it gives them an object oriented language that looks like their procedural language so you end up with a bunch of "C+" programmers who write procedural code using only objects from the C++ standard libraries. I've even seen programmers who were taught this way using printf and scanf in their "C++" programs because they refused to learn the iostream objects. There is nothing wrong with teaching somebody object oriented programming from the start. It's not like they won't understand straight procedural programs when they see them.
Learning Java first? I'm not touching that with a ten foot pole - I haven't the faintest clue whether or not that would be better.
In cases of identity theft, this can be nastier.
My mother's friend Jerry decided to move to Phoenix and live with my mother until she could get settled. Jerry was a registered nurse but hadn't been working for a few years. She was staying home taking care of her children I believe. When she moved out to Phoenix, she started applying for nursing positions with various hospitals. At almost every hospital she applied at, she would go through an interview, sign some paperwork, including a release for a background check, and never hear back from them. The wouldn't accept phone calls from her and wouldn't tell her why she hadn't been contacted.
Finally one of the hospitals she applied at informed her that they were unable to hire her because of her felony conviction. It turns out that somebody had been arrested for manslaughter after assuming her identity. This person had also just been released from prison. The problem was, he had been using her social security number, birth date, the whole nine yards. Plus, he was actually arrested and stood trial under that information. The only thing that allowed it all to be cleared up in a reasonable amount of time was the fact that she was obviously not male. Were it not for this fact, it may have taken her months to get it cleared up.
When it comes to liability here, it turns out that the person assuming her identity was the responsibly party and she had no legal recourse against the background check company or the city that she had lived in. She was pretty much SOL.
I'm willing to bet she would have had some recourse against the prospective employers that didn't tell here why she was not hired but she didn't want to alienate too many possible future employers.
Wow. I finally found the perfect definition of lawyer. Thanks.
Duke Nukem is stale and was a crappy game to begin with.
What the hell is Bombshell anyhow? It's probably crappier than Duke Nukem.
Dr. Proton was... who's Dr. Proton again? Oh, I guess I don't know because Apogee sucks.
General Phil Graves - clueless again.
Come get some more crap.
Hail to the king um... This is a registered trademark? If I created a character that says "Hello baby" in a video game, can I trademark that and charge licensing fees to Hollywood everytime a screenwriter adds it to a movie?
King of action - King of crap
King of carnage - King of more crap
The yellow "Duke Nukem" title logo - I'll have to deface this later and plaster it all over my web site.
The yellow nuke symbol - Maybe this should be their legitimate trademark. Let's associate their games with things that will make you get cancer and die.
Planet of the Babes - Ok, I really need to get back to work. I'll simply violate the rest of their trademarks with one word.
Time to Kill - sucks
Zero Hour - sucks
Max Payne - sucks
Talon Brave - sucks
Prey - sucks
Shadow Warrior - sucks
Lo Wang - sucks
Pinball Wizards - sucks
Balls of Steel - sucks
http://www.gamefoo.org
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Do everything you can to separate the program logic (the code) and the HTML layout. Why: The people who originally build, or later fix, the HTML may very well be different than the people who work with the code. The skill sets are almost completely different, but if you let the two comingle, you will require the maintainers be proficient in both skill sets.
Exactly, this will limit the number of people capable of replacing you.
If the look of your site changes but the code and the HTML are entangled, it can be very easy to break program logic while trying to make visual changes.
Sucks to be the next guy... that's what he gets for trying to take your job.
I say try to make even the smallest function a separate script - write them all in separate languages and have them redirect the browser from script to script. Next, after you have the site working, remove all the whitespace that you can - especially those pesky newline characters that make everything fit on the screen. Get a job for life where you set your own salary! You deserve it!
Why do we get emotionally attached to the tool that we used for the last job? Why do we suddenly hate tools that we passed over because they didn't support the features that we required for the last job? Everybody needs to step back a few if you ask me.
Anybody have better specs on this thing than what's listed on the page?
However, couldn't a prison legally prevent an inmate from writing for a newspaper if they chose to do so?
There are tons of posts here talking about how this court desicion violates Mitnick's first amendment rights. I was under the impression that when you were convicted of a crime, your rights were forfeit for the duration of your sentance/probation. Given this, I'm pretty sure that it is completely legal for the courts the pass this sort of judgement. I doubt that Kevin Mitnick will have much ground to fight this ruling on.
Having said this, I should also note that I don't agree with the court's decision and that I feel it is very heavy-handed as well as being short-sighted. But what do I know?
"... One thing that I know for sure, however, is that 3dfx is not in the running. Their only hope right now is to drop their prices very low. I would not like to be working at 3dfx right now. "
I think that it's a bit early to mourn 3dfx. High fill rates alone don't make a card. I've owned cards from all the major players including ATI and nVidia and here's what I've found personally.
1. 3dfx cards have been extremely reliable for me under Win95/98, MacOS and Linux. I can't say the same for ATI or nVidia.
2. 3dfx will support T&L via software. It's really hard to say how much of a performance hit this will be until the card hits the market. It might not be bad if the T&L software just wraps existing hardware functions.
3. The Voodoo 4/5 supports real-time anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing is a big deal. Having done a considerable amount of graphic design, I feel that this going to have an increadible impact on the graphics quality. Anti-aliasing could potentially make 800x600 look better than 1280x1024.
4. I've been unhappy with every ATI product that I've owned. I have an ATI card in my Macintosh that is broken by QuickTime 4. QuickTime 4 was already released when I purchased this card. To this day they have failed to release a driver fixing the issue.
5. Most of my friends are ditching their GeForce cards for Voodoo 3's right now because they have been having so many problems with them.
I still think it's hard to go wrong with Voodoo...
I heard Matt Groening on NPR's "Fresh Air" before the release of Futurama and he said a Simpsons movie was unlikely largely due to the contract he has with FOX. He said that if he were to make a Simpsons movie, FOX would make a bundle and he wouldn't take home jack. In fact, it sounded like one of the major reasons he started Futurama was to have a show where he was more in control of the product licensing and was getting a bigger piece of the pie.
(I have few doubts that it will do just that - Intel's mobile chips are a joke compared to the Crusoe if it lives up to it's specs. It also should spank the K6's which are AMD's mobile chips.)
However, I can't imagine why anybody would want to put a Crusoe in a desktop. The Athlon or PIII would easily outperform it. The Crusoe wasn't intended to compete in the desktop market.