Redundancy IS storage-inefficient. My original question was, is this tradeoff worth it? What do you use Freenet for? Somebody, please answer the question!!
I don't mean this to be a troll or anything. I do realize that there are ideals behind it -- free speech for everyone, censorship is the devil, etc. That's dandy. But seriously. Why Freenet? It's such a tremendous effort, for something that so few will use. In fact, does anyone actually use it for getting work done? Heck, does anyone use it for anything? (I honestly want to know!)
A year or two ago there was a presentation at my college about Freenet. One of the CS guys here was "on the development team" (whatever that means). I never did hear a real reason, other than ideals, for doing it. (In fact the kid that was talking about it was mentioning an effort to try moving it onto packet radio, thus freeing it from even the censorship of ISPs. This threw a huge red flag for me that he didn't know what he was talking about: this is blatantly illegal by FCC regulations, and anyone who tries it will lose their ham license! No encryption is allowed, in any form whatsoever. You can't even legally come up with a substitution cypher, like "beans" means "meet me in the parking lot" and "chicken" means "9:30pm". NOTHING. And the encryption issue is just the tip of it. Read up on it, get your ham radio license, it'll be immediately clear that doing anything even remotely resembling this is just not feasible on the ham bands in the US.)
So yeah, I'm veering off-topic. Anyway. Let me reiterate: I'm not telling anyone NOT to do work on something they're devoted to. I do appreciate the ideals that Freenet stands for. But seriously, what's going to make it succeed? What makes it worth the horrible inefficiencies designed into the protocol? Is it actually useful to anyone? Alright, enough from me. I hope someone can answer these, I'm very curious. Somebody give me a reason to help the development effort!
I think it's more appropriate to start out with the highest level language you can find
I feel the opposite. (I do appreciate all of your points, of course.) While I'd agree that trying to teach a non-programmer to write compact, efficient assembly language for a particular processor would be difficult to say the least, there is something that is, in my mind, absolutely wonderful about assembly, and to a certain degree C: simplicity. Java is great because it will do everything for you. But for a learning language it seems absolutely awful. It's such a hideously complex language. "Hello, World" takes a page of code! Everything is so abstracted away, and there is so much theory behind everything. Whereas with assembly language, C, and to a point Scheme, they all have very small fundamental parts. And once you understand these, you are good to go. You can learn more about the inner workings of them, but you know all you need to know with just some basic knowledge. As I see it, Python has this same problem. It's great in that it'll do everything for you. But nothing is fundamental. There are so many special cases it's ridiculous. So for a more advanced programmer it's wonderful. Just not for learning, IMHO.
I'd tend to agree with you on this one. I understand his points, and perhaps another language should be used at the very beginning. I started out on HyperTalk (the scripting language of HyperCard -- that was the coolest toy I had as a kid), learned Pascal (because that was what they taught)... and then FINALLY learned C. This may sound silly but it was a breath of fresh air to me. Everything made sense, everything could be explained in terms of this. The special cases were all gone. Sure, some things were more work, but I learned so much from C in that 10th grade class. I really feel it has helped me have an edge over many of my college peers. Heck, I would've loved to learn assembly language first. I'm having a blast with it now, in embedded systems. It's doing the same thing that C once did for me, simplifying it down to what's REALLY going on, deep down on the metal, so that I truly understand it. One architecture may go out of date, but you can learn just as much from PDP-11 assembly as you can from Lisp today, they're just in different fields. My fifteen cents..;)
And further (to continue my last reply), it's not like I have any free time in my schedule. Because I don't. And it drives me absolutely crazy that I don't have time to do this stuff. I do it on weekends after I get off work at 9pm, in the odd few moments between homework and trying to get enough food, or any other time I can. You can make time for what you love. (Maybe not very much time, but you can make time.) And if you can't make time, perhaps you have bigger problems to deal with than what to get on your resume. (And anyway, I don't know what you're complaining about, it's not like they won't see that internship on your resume.)
It seems as though you have forgotten what it is like to be a college student... particularly at a liberal arts college
I find that statement hilarious. I haven't forgotten anything. I am a college student at a liberal arts college.
6:30 am Get up
etc etc etc
Cry me a river. So your schedule sucks. What can I do about it? You could have done something about it, that's for sure. So you haven't got time for any big projects. Do you expect, then, that you can pick up some open source project, work on it in the 5 free minutes that you say you don't even have, and expect it to look great on your resume? Because, after all, that's what we're talking about here.
Sorry if this message was rude, I just don't see the relevance of what you said.
Many would like to have something concrete to
put down on their resume or application to graduate school.
Great! Better get working then, eh?
However, starting their own project is
a hard and time-consuming task.
Hard and time-consuming.. Hmmmm.. that sounds like precisely the kind of thing they might like to see on a resume. So how about starting your own projects?
I know the original comment didn't intend to ask, "We are lazy, what can we do that is easy but looks good?" But this is something I run into SOOOOO often, it's crazy. I have many hobbies. I take 3D photos. I render scenes in POV-Ray. I build robots and various other gadgets, etc etc. And you know what the first question is that I hear, whenever I show these to people? They say, "COOL!!" Followed by, "What class is this for?" To which I reply.. "Umm... it's... for fun." Seems to be a concept few people understand. (Although lately I've resorted to saying, "It's for the Robotics Club", which seems to make it all "normal" again in most peoples' eyes. They no longer question the fact that I'm doing work because I want to, because I enjoy it immensely. Good thing I never mention that I founded the club. They'd never understand that.)
Again, no disrespect meant to anybody. I just find it a bit odd that here I am, a Junior in college, and any time I do anything fun (or hard), it's immediately assumed that I'm doing it for credit. How about finding something you love to do, and WORKING YOUR BUTT OFF ON IT, and putting THAT on your resume? (Says the guy who'll probably NEVER find a career..;)
I do agree with much of what you said. It was very well-put. However, as another person who has also lived in various parts of the world, I do not believe that the majority of the people mentioned in the article watch this station because of some underlyi ng hunger for knowledge and truth. I think it's because the TV that they've got stinks, and they want better channels (in their own language). I do agree that American media is horribly biased and often downright untrustable, but I don't believe that the two situations are immediately comparable. Anyone that wants to can hop on a pro KKK website and get everything they want to see. Alternative viewpoints are there, and they're accessible, it's just that most people are pretty content with the Oprah/MTV world corporate American hands them. People li ke to believe they are different enough to be cool, but not different enough to be weird, and I think that's why America loves corporate control. (Another boy band?! AWESOME!!!!) But these people mentioned in the article have very little to choose from, aside from the extremely dull state-sponsored crap that I'm sure is on their TVs. I don't even know what I'm talking about or if I had a point anymore. Anyway. Your thoughts are well-spoken!
(Yeesh.. Slashcode is wonderful. It's inserted all sorts of characters all over my text that I never put there. Splendid.)a
Hey, wow, that's great to hear!:) (Now I just wish I had more cool stuff on the site!) I'm glad you liked the pics. Thanks, that comment helped brighten up an otherwise bleh day.:)
I tried using two (disposable) cameras side by side.. Digital would have been much nicer, but I found that I really prefer the superstereo effect, so I'd try and mount the cameras in a way that you could adjust the distance between them.
It's a way to show people a place that doesn't exist any more, for example...
It's not the best, but there's always stereo photography. Yeah, it doesn't extract depth information, that's all left up to the human eye. (There are ways to extract the info, but I haven't gotten into that yet. Gonna start soon, hopefully.) But it can be done incredibly inexpensively.
Buy a pack of anaglyph 3D glasses online (get the red/cyan ones, not the red/blue ones) for about $0.50 a pair from Berezin, Rainbow Symphony, or any other company that sells them. Then start taking pictures! Take one picture, then very carefully shift the camera to one side 2.5 inches (or more, for superstereo -- this is what makes my pictures look much better than those taken by standard stereo cameras, even though I use whatever normal camera I can borrow) and take another. A tripod helps, but a little practice and you won't need one. The scene has to be perfectly still, but it works most of the time. Then you just bring the pics into any paint program that lets you access the separate color channels. Open up the image taken from the right, remove its red color channel, and replace it with the red channel from the left image. Do a little tweaking to make your chosen point of focus more clear (shift the red channel up, down, left and right until the thing you want to focus on looks normal when viewing all 3 channels at once), and voila! This is one of my hobbies, and it's pretty rewarding while still being inexpensive (especially with a digital camera). And best of all, you can easily make large cheap color photocopies of them and give them to your friends. (You can even get very cheap photographic prints made of the digital images. I tried dotphoto.com, but they seem to have applied some color correction which didn't make my latest pics turn out great. Gotta see if they can turn that off...) Try it, it's a blast.
Or the crosseye method (two pictures side by side, cross your eyes to see them). I could be wrong, but I believe I've made the only existing stereograms of The Matrix. (Too bad I don't have a DVD, so the captures suck!) Here they are, just cross your eyes until the two images merge: http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/stereograms/
I can't find the story for the life of me, but I know it was on Slashdot a long time ago. (Does anybody else think Slashdot's search engine is a pile of crap?!?!? Of course Google wasn't much help either, this time.) Anyway, the last article was actually about using printers to play music (remember now?) but either in the story or the comments, it was also mentioned that it could be done with hard drives (and had been done for years). Pretty cool, yeah.. What about picking up the Van Eck signals from your monitor on an AM radio? That was pretty cool. Anyway. Yeah. I do some tinkering with robotics, and if you pick a bad frequency for PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), your motors will scream and whine as they act like speakers. You can use frequency modulation to make them play music and stuff too. Useless, but kinda fun to show people that don't know squat about electronics...;)
It's been a few years since I lived in Cairo, but that taxi ride ought to be more in the ballpark of $20, methinks. ("You don't want to haggle? What do you mean you don't want to haggle?!")
Amazing that there's even a person to whom it would occur to create such a monstrosity. It's wrong! Slinkies were never meant to be this long!
Wow, something is screwy here. At the time of this writing, there was only one moderation made on the parent post (+1, Funny, what irony), and yet on my screen it says its score is 5. Now there is some fine work. Taco must be a beta tester for that system mentioned in the "Quantum Programming in Perl" article... Fascinating stuff, that quantum programming.
It never ceases to amaze me how many utterly stupid jokes a bunch of geeks can come up with when given a good seed. This has got to be some kind of record. The number of "Funny" ratings is staggering (and yet the number of genuinely funny posts is nearly nonexistant). Someone needs to study this phenomenon.
To get back on-topic.. (because we can't STAND to read a post that's not on the topic of burnt PDAs in a burnt PDA article.. that would be a waste of TIME!) Yeah, I think burnt PDAs are really cool. Hey, I could.. make a.. ummmm.. burnt PDA.. sandwich. Hahahahaha. Imagine a beowulf cluster of those. roflol.
I'm always saying I wish I could program punchcards. I think this day and age is bloody incredible... The technology involved in a mere hard drive is simply mind-blowing. But still, somehow, I feel a little bit cheated by not living "back in the day". I've had some great learning experiences thanks to being alive when I am, but I still wish I could program on punch cards once or twice just to say I've done it. I still wish I'd been around to code a 6502 blitter for my computer in asm. I tinker with some embedded programming (with the IU Robotics Club), so this stuff is incredibly cool to me.
Anyway, sorry for my waxing nostalgic about things I never experienced, I don't feel like registering to read the article, and my browser doesn't seem to like the page anyway. But it's kinda like.... it would be cool to live in Medieval times (alchemy, knights, people saying "Ni! Ni!"..), provided I wouldn't have to give up my indoor plumbing and cable modem. Or something.
I know I'll probably get modded down for this, but... where's the editing? Granted, I only read the C advocacy article mentioned. But if these people want to be taken seriously as a magazine, don't you think they should do a little proofreading of the articles?
Of course, there's nothing actually impossible about perpetual motion or a self-sustaining machine. What's impossible is going over-unity, and giving off excess power. If I throw a baseball in a perfect orbit around the moon, that thing won't come down until something external interferes. Of course for any practical purposes I can think of, this is useless, but I'm just pointing out that it is incorrect to say things like "perpetual motion is impossible".
Also, I thought Michael's whole "the media is retarded, I am a genius" thing was a little overboard. Did we really need a page and a half of his reasons not to read the article? Alright, enough from me..
Three 100 Watt light bulbs created a drain of 4500 Watts, according to the nameless inventor. That would be an impressive feat all by itself, except that it's total nonsense.
I agree that the overall story seems fairly certain to be nonsense. But there's nothing nonsensical about three 100 Watt lightbulbs draining 4500 Watts of power. It simply means he's not running it at 120 volts.
Interesting, I didn't know the original machines were hardwired. (Really? In the "Pong is born" section of the article, it claims, "Bushnell hires Al Alcorn to program games." Says he wrote Pong as an exercise. Hm. At any rate, not important..) Change my comment to "the Atari 2600" and it's pretty much valid, I think.;) (I wasn't referring to the Z80 specifically, just saying it was comparable in power, which I believe it is. Feel free to correct me on that, I'm not really up on this stuff, just interested.)
Maybe the fail to notice that the x86 instruction set architecture is several years older than the 68k
Slashdot Mirror
Redundancy IS storage-inefficient. My original question was, is this tradeoff worth it? What do you use Freenet for? Somebody, please answer the question!!
Having a zillion copies of everything, scattered across the globe like dust particles, isn't inefficient?
A year or two ago there was a presentation at my college about Freenet. One of the CS guys here was "on the development team" (whatever that means). I never did hear a real reason, other than ideals, for doing it. (In fact the kid that was talking about it was mentioning an effort to try moving it onto packet radio, thus freeing it from even the censorship of ISPs. This threw a huge red flag for me that he didn't know what he was talking about: this is blatantly illegal by FCC regulations, and anyone who tries it will lose their ham license! No encryption is allowed, in any form whatsoever. You can't even legally come up with a substitution cypher, like "beans" means "meet me in the parking lot" and "chicken" means "9:30pm". NOTHING. And the encryption issue is just the tip of it. Read up on it, get your ham radio license, it'll be immediately clear that doing anything even remotely resembling this is just not feasible on the ham bands in the US.)
So yeah, I'm veering off-topic. Anyway. Let me reiterate: I'm not telling anyone NOT to do work on something they're devoted to. I do appreciate the ideals that Freenet stands for. But seriously, what's going to make it succeed? What makes it worth the horrible inefficiencies designed into the protocol? Is it actually useful to anyone? Alright, enough from me. I hope someone can answer these, I'm very curious. Somebody give me a reason to help the development effort!
I'd tend to agree with you on this one. I understand his points, and perhaps another language should be used at the very beginning. I started out on HyperTalk (the scripting language of HyperCard -- that was the coolest toy I had as a kid), learned Pascal (because that was what they taught)... and then FINALLY learned C. This may sound silly but it was a breath of fresh air to me. Everything made sense, everything could be explained in terms of this. The special cases were all gone. Sure, some things were more work, but I learned so much from C in that 10th grade class. I really feel it has helped me have an edge over many of my college peers. Heck, I would've loved to learn assembly language first. I'm having a blast with it now, in embedded systems. It's doing the same thing that C once did for me, simplifying it down to what's REALLY going on, deep down on the metal, so that I truly understand it. One architecture may go out of date, but you can learn just as much from PDP-11 assembly as you can from Lisp today, they're just in different fields. My fifteen cents.. ;)
Agree with you totally. :)
And further (to continue my last reply), it's not like I have any free time in my schedule. Because I don't. And it drives me absolutely crazy that I don't have time to do this stuff. I do it on weekends after I get off work at 9pm, in the odd few moments between homework and trying to get enough food, or any other time I can. You can make time for what you love. (Maybe not very much time, but you can make time.) And if you can't make time, perhaps you have bigger problems to deal with than what to get on your resume. (And anyway, I don't know what you're complaining about, it's not like they won't see that internship on your resume.)
Sorry if this message was rude, I just don't see the relevance of what you said.
I know the original comment didn't intend to ask, "We are lazy, what can we do that is easy but looks good?" But this is something I run into SOOOOO often, it's crazy. I have many hobbies. I take 3D photos. I render scenes in POV-Ray. I build robots and various other gadgets, etc etc. And you know what the first question is that I hear, whenever I show these to people? They say, "COOL!!" Followed by, "What class is this for?" To which I reply.. "Umm... it's... for fun." Seems to be a concept few people understand. (Although lately I've resorted to saying, "It's for the Robotics Club", which seems to make it all "normal" again in most peoples' eyes. They no longer question the fact that I'm doing work because I want to, because I enjoy it immensely. Good thing I never mention that I founded the club. They'd never understand that.)
Again, no disrespect meant to anybody. I just find it a bit odd that here I am, a Junior in college, and any time I do anything fun (or hard), it's immediately assumed that I'm doing it for credit. How about finding something you love to do, and WORKING YOUR BUTT OFF ON IT, and putting THAT on your resume? (Says the guy who'll probably NEVER find a career.. ;)
(Yeesh.. Slashcode is wonderful. It's inserted all sorts of characters all over my text that I never put there. Splendid.)a
I tried using two (disposable) cameras side by side.. Digital would have been much nicer, but I found that I really prefer the superstereo effect, so I'd try and mount the cameras in a way that you could adjust the distance between them.
Buy a pack of anaglyph 3D glasses online (get the red/cyan ones, not the red/blue ones) for about $0.50 a pair from Berezin, Rainbow Symphony, or any other company that sells them. Then start taking pictures! Take one picture, then very carefully shift the camera to one side 2.5 inches (or more, for superstereo -- this is what makes my pictures look much better than those taken by standard stereo cameras, even though I use whatever normal camera I can borrow) and take another. A tripod helps, but a little practice and you won't need one. The scene has to be perfectly still, but it works most of the time. Then you just bring the pics into any paint program that lets you access the separate color channels. Open up the image taken from the right, remove its red color channel, and replace it with the red channel from the left image. Do a little tweaking to make your chosen point of focus more clear (shift the red channel up, down, left and right until the thing you want to focus on looks normal when viewing all 3 channels at once), and voila! This is one of my hobbies, and it's pretty rewarding while still being inexpensive (especially with a digital camera). And best of all, you can easily make large cheap color photocopies of them and give them to your friends. (You can even get very cheap photographic prints made of the digital images. I tried dotphoto.com, but they seem to have applied some color correction which didn't make my latest pics turn out great. Gotta see if they can turn that off...) Try it, it's a blast.
http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/anaglyphs
Or the crosseye method (two pictures side by side, cross your eyes to see them). I could be wrong, but I believe I've made the only existing stereograms of The Matrix. (Too bad I don't have a DVD, so the captures suck!) Here they are, just cross your eyes until the two images merge: http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/stereograms/
Enjoy!
I can't find the story for the life of me, but I know it was on Slashdot a long time ago. (Does anybody else think Slashdot's search engine is a pile of crap?!?!? Of course Google wasn't much help either, this time.) Anyway, the last article was actually about using printers to play music (remember now?) but either in the story or the comments, it was also mentioned that it could be done with hard drives (and had been done for years). Pretty cool, yeah.. What about picking up the Van Eck signals from your monitor on an AM radio? That was pretty cool. Anyway. Yeah. I do some tinkering with robotics, and if you pick a bad frequency for PWM (Pulse Width Modulation), your motors will scream and whine as they act like speakers. You can use frequency modulation to make them play music and stuff too. Useless, but kinda fun to show people that don't know squat about electronics... ;)
(What the heck?!?!?)
Amazing that there's even a person to whom it would occur to create such a monstrosity. It's wrong! Slinkies were never meant to be this long!
Wow, something is screwy here. At the time of this writing, there was only one moderation made on the parent post (+1, Funny, what irony), and yet on my screen it says its score is 5. Now there is some fine work. Taco must be a beta tester for that system mentioned in the "Quantum Programming in Perl" article... Fascinating stuff, that quantum programming.
To get back on-topic.. (because we can't STAND to read a post that's not on the topic of burnt PDAs in a burnt PDA article.. that would be a waste of TIME!) Yeah, I think burnt PDAs are really cool. Hey, I could.. make a.. ummmm.. burnt PDA.. sandwich. Hahahahaha. Imagine a beowulf cluster of those. roflol.
Oi..... Son of the bloody monkey.
Right.... but I'm mainly talking about punch cards. I program 8-bit microcontrollers already, not much new there.
I'm always saying I wish I could program punchcards. I think this day and age is bloody incredible... The technology involved in a mere hard drive is simply mind-blowing. But still, somehow, I feel a little bit cheated by not living "back in the day". I've had some great learning experiences thanks to being alive when I am, but I still wish I could program on punch cards once or twice just to say I've done it. I still wish I'd been around to code a 6502 blitter for my computer in asm. I tinker with some embedded programming (with the IU Robotics Club), so this stuff is incredibly cool to me. Anyway, sorry for my waxing nostalgic about things I never experienced, I don't feel like registering to read the article, and my browser doesn't seem to like the page anyway. But it's kinda like.... it would be cool to live in Medieval times (alchemy, knights, people saying "Ni! Ni!"..), provided I wouldn't have to give up my indoor plumbing and cable modem. Or something.
Hey, yunno what? I really like gravity. I mean... I really like it. That Isaac Newton guy? He deserves a medal or something.
I know I'll probably get modded down for this, but... where's the editing? Granted, I only read the C advocacy article mentioned. But if these people want to be taken seriously as a magazine, don't you think they should do a little proofreading of the articles?
Also, I thought Michael's whole "the media is retarded, I am a genius" thing was a little overboard. Did we really need a page and a half of his reasons not to read the article? Alright, enough from me..