Right; Strings are special not because of effeciency, but because they reflect how we think.
In fact, I think he's looking for a 3rd type of effeciency, that forcing programmers to use lists when they want to be thinking strings is some kind of efficiency from simplicity, from flattening the model. This is another example of false economy in my book...new good languages have to chart a middle course between having a lot of features, so that there's too much to keep track of and learn, and too little, so you have to write everything yourself.
so what cool things would we get from a room temperature superconductor? All I can think of is maglev trains, but I know that's betraying a huge lack of knowledge.
Does a lot depend on how cheap we can mine or manufacture these diamonds?
I don't know if it was a flop per se, or if it just died when they stopped using styrofoam.
I guess they could've switched to a double carboard box, though the just paper wrappers they often use now (IIRC, it's been a while) would squish the tomato and lettuce.
Sometimes these lettuce on other burgers does seem pretty warm and wilty...I go to Wendy's and the Caesar Side Salad and Chili for $2. It ain't healthfood, but it's not too bad.
To explain: If you are programming in assembly language, any programming error is likely to cause a simple failure of the system. Something goes wrong at a low level, so the higher-level thing that the system is meant to do just doesn't happen.
Not true. The lowest level programming I've tried is on the Atari 2600, and if you happened to have a conditional branch where the target was on a different memory page, weird, though obvious, behaviors would result in my protogame.
The (at this point small) potential for trouble is when writing software is less like engineering and more like breeding or gardening.
If we were able to get someting like a neural net to make complicated decisions, and 99/100 it made the decisions we could see the logic of, we still might not have any idea what's going on in that 1 out of 100 case. And such a system may or may not be able to provide a rational sounding train of argument. Humans make a LOT of decisions without going through anything resembling a formal logical process. We're super good at making up logical sounding reasons post facto, but it's mostly smoke and mirrors (as experiments with people who have seperation of the lobes of the brain will show.)
Similarly, they've been using genetic algorithm type of processes to breed physical circuits, breeding to get a specific result in the minimum number of gates. Unfortunately so far these systems tend to be very non-robust, only working in the precise environments they were bred in. One amusing example is they tried to breed the minimal circuit capable of producing pulses at steady intervals, and ended up accidentally breeding a small "radio", since it was evolutionarily easier to pick up the RF from some surrounding computers than to make the pulse itself.
The same kind of process, where we create systems that breed or grow the final system, could easily result in seemingly intelligent systems that we just can't understand, with the possibility that it will seem neurotic to us. It's still a long way off from practical applications, but it's interesting to think about now.
Assuming this isn't just a Fool's gag (and given that the link was from a December article, I'm likely to give it the benefit of the doubt)...well, this seems like a more practical version of "the robots use the humans as batteries" in the Matrix...they don't use our 'bioelectricity', but they need us for oil! Greasy acne-ridden geeks especially.
Though, as with the hydrogen as fuel issue, you have to make sure that the process to turn turkey remains into fuel doesn't take too much energy itself...in which case, you've only won half your battles.
Heh...if this takes off I see a market for "VEGAN ENERGY"...animal-friendly fuel generation.
Tekken 4 has a mode very similar to the old beat 'em ups, where you start at one end of the level and have to work you're way to the other side, fighting all the way. As in the beat-em-ups of old, most of the enemies have low health relative to you. Definately in the spirit of Double Dragon and Final Fight and River City Ransom.
I agree that the regular mode of Tekken isn't "beat-em-up", the history of that kind of fighter goes back through Street Fighter to, I dunno, Karate Champ and Yie-Ar Kung Fu?
Yeah, when I read that I came up with: * Worms Blast (I just bought this, kind of an odd puzzle bobble clone) * Zoocube * Does that upcoming GC puzzle release, with 4 player "Tetris Attack", Dr. Mario, and Yoshi's Cookie count?
That being said, I hate the lack of variable resolution on LCD's. Can't have everything, I guess.
If you're a videophile, it's probably not good enough, but personally I've been very impressed with newer LCDs' ability to support various resolutions by something resembling on-the-fly "resize" in Photoshop...my wife's 2000 laptop has that awful double-some-pixels effect, but my "Cornea" desktop LCD and my Dell laptop handle it pretty gracefully. (Good thing to...the Dell with its 1600x1200 laptop screen is too fine a resolution for my eyes to deal with, but makes the lower resolutions look almost native.)
I think the most important thing to come from Wind95 is the taskbar. Unfortunately, it took away animated icon art, but hey. Being able to see all your running programs at a glance makes a lot of sense--something it took Mac a long time to figure out (you used to have to use the mouse to click on the task list to see it) and I think the dock mixes shortcuts and running program icons in a way that is counter-intuitive to me. (I've heard the arguments for the dock, that you shouldn't care what's an open task and what's not, but in pracice, I care a lot.)
I wonder what % of people use a Console as their main DVD player...the original poster said "I wouldn't believe it" and that might be true, 'cause to me it seems pretty small. I think DVDs made big inroads to the popular market before PS2 was around.
DVDs look cooler on a shelf and take less room, tend to sell for a low price, let you jump around with scene select, seem less prone to wearing down, often have bonus material, and have great picture especially when pausing. I think all of these have more to do with DVD's stomping over VHS. (Though its funny, recently when I was forced to rent VHS, I had to admit that the picture quality wasn't as bad as I expected.)
'Course what do I know, I'm a big Nintendo fanboy anyway. I have a PS2, and currently the only game that has really excited me and I can't get for GC is GTA3 and VC.
We'll switch the chips with M$-approved valves, they may be bulky, heavy, hot, requte 200 MW generator strapped to your back, explode for no apparent reason whatsoever, but they sure as hell are immune to EMP pulse Untill the gun BSOD's).
Heh. Sounds like something right outta the RPG "Paranoia"!
Hmm, MAME has a facility for hacking/cheating games, kind of like Game Genie / Gameshark for console systems. I wonder if the protaganist considered looking for some cheat codes to help get through that level...
The TTT is interesting. I'm not sure if I'd do that well on it... Wired, a videogame mag, a book of quotes. But most of my techie reading tends to be a smaller number of larger books, or online.
I'd hope this interview would also get into how much decent coding I do on my own time for my own projects, not just what i read.
Heck, I have a method for How to Crash and Burn your Java project that fits on one line. Two words, in fact:
Use EJBs
Seriously, I have heard of 4 or 5 major failures and no major successes with these things. Entity Beans are about *the* most complicated and complex way of doing O/R mapping, there's very little you can do with Session Beans that can't be done with static functions (stateless) or regular objects (stateful), and the best practices with business delegates and facades gives you like 5 or 6 layers for anything you want to do. And benefits like clustering? Hell, everything goes back to a single RDB anyway.
Seriously, I can't see any benefit to EJBs that you can't get with regular Java and a good understanding of the more common patterns.
Reviewer: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?"
Reviewee: "Your boss."
Reviewer: "Right, ok that will be all."
If you're smart, you'd say "still reporting directly to you...but you're the president of the company". That way, you shouw you're politically smart and not just ambitious.
So we're just looking at hydrogen as a storage mechanism? Well, that sucks. The Wired article talked about the different options for carrying hydrogen around, from (very pressurized) gas, to liquid, to solid. Are any of those that much better than batteries?
I remember there was some talk that flywheels might be one way of storing electricity kinetically, and then powering our cars with that...carefully counterbalanced to counter any nasty gyroscopic effect I'd imagine. And then there's the what happens when there's a crash factor. I imagine car accidents could get a lot more interesting, if something stops the flywheel from rotating relative to the car, then I guess the car relative to everything else might be in for a spin.
Frankly, he could have studied basket weaving in college and still learned enough to be a good programmer from on-the-job experience.
God, I think I've worked with too many people like this. Or maybe there's some other reason, but there are so many bad programmers out there. About 1 in 3 I'd say tend to be sharp...the rest are the reason why Offshore coders in India look so good. They tend to be even less than 1 in 3 sharp, but at least they're cheap.
What year are you? I was very fortunate in getting some terrific work experience on-campus; (I was at Tufts 1992-1996.) I started as a "PC Lab User Consultant" and parlayed that into being the student manager of the PC lab--I just showed a little ambition and smarts. (When I asked why I got it over some of the other UCs they were interviewing, they said I was the only who seemed to really want it.) I also got some terrific programming experience at the "Curricular Software Studio", an on-campus program that had student programmers working with various faculty members on interesting software projects (usually dependent on grant money-- that gave me 2 summers programming Win32 code by the time I graduated. I also got some small change as an undergrad TA for the entry level Comp Sci classes (I kind of accidentally made the decision to lean towards the general user labs rather than the academics, so I mighta missed out on some good sysadmin chances.) And also Tufts has this program called the "X-college" (as in experimental) that lets undergrads design a for-credit (but graded pass-fail) course; I taught one in Visual Basic, which was still kind of a novelty on campus in the mid-90s.
Some of these opportunities were probably unique to my time and place, but don't overlook the academic environment as a place to get solid experience. I had a kickass resume when I graduated, and only left campus for fun.
(Hell, IIRC I think NPR this morning mentioned schools in Massachusetts were one area that increased # of jobs)
Well, it's been too long since I've played for me to sensibly comment much further. But it points out how non-cinematic space combat would likely be...hugely long distance beaming or missile-ing at fanastic velocities...
Take the aforementioned example: Elite 2. Have you played it recently? The gameplay is STILL rock solid after all this time. The graphics engine is dated, sure, but what other game gives you such an open-ended experience? You could do almost ANYTHING you wanted! The universe was open to you.
If memory serves, the actual spaceship combat (a big draw for the original) wasn't that much fun...it was too realistic for a game, hyper fast speeds, long distance zapping with beams.
But yeah, it was a hell of a universe to be able to fit onto a 1.4 floppy!
Slashdot Mirror
Right; Strings are special not because of effeciency, but because they reflect how we think.
In fact, I think he's looking for a 3rd type of effeciency, that forcing programmers to use lists when they want to be thinking strings is some kind of efficiency from simplicity, from flattening the model. This is another example of false economy in my book...new good languages have to chart a middle course between having a lot of features, so that there's too much to keep track of and learn, and too little, so you have to write everything yourself.
This ties ito perl's More Than One Way To Do It.
so what cool things would we get from a room temperature superconductor? All I can think of is maglev trains, but I know that's betraying a huge lack of knowledge.
Does a lot depend on how cheap we can mine or manufacture these diamonds?
I don't know if it was a flop per se, or if it just died when they stopped using styrofoam.
I guess they could've switched to a double carboard box, though the just paper wrappers they often use now (IIRC, it's been a while) would squish the tomato and lettuce.
Sometimes these lettuce on other burgers does seem pretty warm and wilty...I go to Wendy's and the Caesar Side Salad and Chili for $2. It ain't healthfood, but it's not too bad.
To explain: If you are programming in assembly language, any programming error is likely to cause a simple failure of the system. Something goes wrong at a low level, so the higher-level thing that the system is meant to do just doesn't happen.
Not true. The lowest level programming I've tried is on the Atari 2600, and if you happened to have a conditional branch where the target was on a different memory page, weird, though obvious, behaviors would result in my protogame.
The (at this point small) potential for trouble is when writing software is less like engineering and more like breeding or gardening.
If we were able to get someting like a neural net to make complicated decisions, and 99/100 it made the decisions we could see the logic of, we still might not have any idea what's going on in that 1 out of 100 case. And such a system may or may not be able to provide a rational sounding train of argument. Humans make a LOT of decisions without going through anything resembling a formal logical process. We're super good at making up logical sounding reasons post facto, but it's mostly smoke and mirrors (as experiments with people who have seperation of the lobes of the brain will show.)
Similarly, they've been using genetic algorithm type of processes to breed physical circuits, breeding to get a specific result in the minimum number of gates. Unfortunately so far these systems tend to be very non-robust, only working in the precise environments they were bred in. One amusing example is they tried to breed the minimal circuit capable of producing pulses at steady intervals, and ended up accidentally breeding a small "radio", since it was evolutionarily easier to pick up the RF from some surrounding computers than to make the pulse itself.
The same kind of process, where we create systems that breed or grow the final system, could easily result in seemingly intelligent systems that we just can't understand, with the possibility that it will seem neurotic to us. It's still a long way off from practical applications, but it's interesting to think about now.
Yeah, I can never hear "Republican Guard" without thinking of Crimson Guard, whether it's Iran or Iraq.
I posted about that , tracked down a picture, on my site a month ago.
Assuming this isn't just a Fool's gag (and given that the link was from a December article, I'm likely to give it the benefit of the doubt)...well, this seems like a more practical version of "the robots use the humans as batteries" in the Matrix...they don't use our 'bioelectricity', but they need us for oil! Greasy acne-ridden geeks especially.
Though, as with the hydrogen as fuel issue, you have to make sure that the process to turn turkey remains into fuel doesn't take too much energy itself...in which case, you've only won half your battles.
Heh...if this takes off I see a market for "VEGAN ENERGY"...animal-friendly fuel generation.
I just played this last night, on a DC emu.
Was it a mis-emulation, or was the action kind of slow?
Anyway, we got stuck on this one section, beat up everyone (on the first Frat Boy level was it?) And couldn't figure out where to go next.
We did enjoy the chewing animations, however.
Tekken 4 has a mode very similar to the old beat 'em ups, where you start at one end of the level and have to work you're way to the other side, fighting all the way. As in the beat-em-ups of old, most of the enemies have low health relative to you. Definately in the spirit of Double Dragon and Final Fight and River City Ransom.
I agree that the regular mode of Tekken isn't "beat-em-up", the history of that kind of fighter goes back through Street Fighter to, I dunno, Karate Champ and Yie-Ar Kung Fu?
Yeah, when I read that I came up with:
* Worms Blast (I just bought this, kind of an odd puzzle bobble clone)
* Zoocube
* Does that upcoming GC puzzle release, with 4 player "Tetris Attack", Dr. Mario, and Yoshi's Cookie count?
That being said, I hate the lack of variable resolution on LCD's. Can't have everything, I guess.
If you're a videophile, it's probably not good enough, but personally I've been very impressed with newer LCDs' ability to support various resolutions by something resembling on-the-fly "resize" in Photoshop...my wife's 2000 laptop has that awful double-some-pixels effect, but my "Cornea" desktop LCD and my Dell laptop handle it pretty gracefully. (Good thing to...the Dell with its 1600x1200 laptop screen is too fine a resolution for my eyes to deal with, but makes the lower resolutions look almost native.)
I think the most important thing to come from Wind95 is the taskbar. Unfortunately, it took away animated icon art, but hey. Being able to see all your running programs at a glance makes a lot of sense--something it took Mac a long time to figure out (you used to have to use the mouse to click on the task list to see it) and I think the dock mixes shortcuts and running program icons in a way that is counter-intuitive to me. (I've heard the arguments for the dock, that you shouldn't care what's an open task and what's not, but in pracice, I care a lot.)
I wonder what % of people use a Console as their main DVD player...the original poster said "I wouldn't believe it" and that might be true, 'cause to me it seems pretty small. I think DVDs made big inroads to the popular market before PS2 was around.
DVDs look cooler on a shelf and take less room, tend to sell for a low price, let you jump around with scene select, seem less prone to wearing down, often have bonus material, and have great picture especially when pausing. I think all of these have more to do with DVD's stomping over VHS. (Though its funny, recently when I was forced to rent VHS, I had to admit that the picture quality wasn't as bad as I expected.)
'Course what do I know, I'm a big Nintendo fanboy anyway. I have a PS2, and currently the only game that has really excited me and I can't get for GC is GTA3 and VC.
Yeah, I kind of see what you mean, actually-- a day late and a dollar short relative to, say, Nintendo.
There was that one similar kind of game, with a green main character with suction cup hands...
And the preview versions would always come with that screen of colorful DOS text promoting the full version.
We'll switch the chips with M$-approved valves, they may be bulky, heavy, hot, requte 200 MW generator strapped to your back, explode for no apparent reason whatsoever, but they sure as hell are immune to EMP pulse Untill the gun BSOD's).
Heh. Sounds like something right outta the RPG "Paranoia"!
The Computer Is Your Friend!
Hmm, MAME has a facility for hacking/cheating games, kind of like Game Genie / Gameshark for console systems. I wonder if the protaganist considered looking for some cheat codes to help get through that level...
The TTT is interesting. I'm not sure if I'd do that well on it... Wired, a videogame mag, a book of quotes. But most of my techie reading tends to be a smaller number of larger books, or online.
I'd hope this interview would also get into how much decent coding I do on my own time for my own projects, not just what i read.
Heck, I have a method for How to Crash and Burn your Java project that fits on one line. Two words, in fact:
Use EJBs
Seriously, I have heard of 4 or 5 major failures and no major successes with these things. Entity Beans are about *the* most complicated and complex way of doing O/R mapping, there's very little you can do with Session Beans that can't be done with static functions (stateless) or regular objects (stateful), and the best practices with business delegates and facades gives you like 5 or 6 layers for anything you want to do. And benefits like clustering? Hell, everything goes back to a single RDB anyway.
Seriously, I can't see any benefit to EJBs that you can't get with regular Java and a good understanding of the more common patterns.
Anyone agree/disagree?
Reviewer: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?"
Reviewee: "Your boss."
Reviewer: "Right, ok that will be all."
If you're smart, you'd say "still reporting directly to you...but you're the president of the company". That way, you shouw you're politically smart and not just ambitious.
I wonder how many people who talk about star programmers actually are one. And if the stars are more or less likely to read stuff like Slashdot.
So we're just looking at hydrogen as a storage mechanism? Well, that sucks. The Wired article talked about the different options for carrying hydrogen around, from (very pressurized) gas, to liquid, to solid. Are any of those that much better than batteries?
I remember there was some talk that flywheels might be one way of storing electricity kinetically, and then powering our cars with that...carefully counterbalanced to counter any nasty gyroscopic effect I'd imagine. And then there's the what happens when there's a crash factor. I imagine car accidents could get a lot more interesting, if something stops the flywheel from rotating relative to the car, then I guess the car relative to everything else might be in for a spin.
Frankly, he could have studied basket weaving in college and still learned enough to be a good programmer from on-the-job experience.
God, I think I've worked with too many people like this. Or maybe there's some other reason, but there are so many bad programmers out there. About 1 in 3 I'd say tend to be sharp...the rest are the reason why Offshore coders in India look so good. They tend to be even less than 1 in 3 sharp, but at least they're cheap.
What year are you? I was very fortunate in getting some terrific work experience on-campus; (I was at Tufts 1992-1996.) I started as a "PC Lab User Consultant" and parlayed that into being the student manager of the PC lab--I just showed a little ambition and smarts. (When I asked why I got it over some of the other UCs they were interviewing, they said I was the only who seemed to really want it.) I also got some terrific programming experience at the "Curricular Software Studio", an on-campus program that had student programmers working with various faculty members on interesting software projects (usually dependent on grant money-- that gave me 2 summers programming Win32 code by the time I graduated. I also got some small change as an undergrad TA for the entry level Comp Sci classes (I kind of accidentally made the decision to lean towards the general user labs rather than the academics, so I mighta missed out on some good sysadmin chances.) And also Tufts has this program called the "X-college" (as in experimental) that lets undergrads design a for-credit (but graded pass-fail) course; I taught one in Visual Basic, which was still kind of a novelty on campus in the mid-90s.
Some of these opportunities were probably unique to my time and place, but don't overlook the academic environment as a place to get solid experience. I had a kickass resume when I graduated, and only left campus for fun.
(Hell, IIRC I think NPR this morning mentioned schools in Massachusetts were one area that increased # of jobs)
YMMV, of course.
Well, it's been too long since I've played for me to sensibly comment much further. But it points out how non-cinematic space combat would likely be...hugely long distance beaming or missile-ing at fanastic velocities...
Take the aforementioned example: Elite 2. Have you played it recently? The gameplay is STILL rock solid after all this time. The graphics engine is dated, sure, but what other game gives you such an open-ended experience? You could do almost ANYTHING you wanted! The universe was open to you.
If memory serves, the actual spaceship combat (a big draw for the original) wasn't that much fun...it was too realistic for a game, hyper fast speeds, long distance zapping with beams.
But yeah, it was a hell of a universe to be able to fit onto a 1.4 floppy!