Heh! The media has finally given me a name: "Digital Native". I kind of like it. Lot better than "Baby Boomer" or "Gen X'er", especially since I was kind of between the two.
Agreed. Here we are, over a hundred missions into the program, and this is the first time they've had a look. I'm guessing this little bit of padding ooze has happened on many previous missions (maybe all). And if that's enough to somehow "throw off the aerodynamics" then that rig is way less stable than it's being sold as.
The other thing I was annoyed by was the constant repetition of "dangerous EVA" by the "news" media this morning. "It's dangerous and hazardous and risky, oh my!" Despite the fact that we've never had an EVA accident or injury EVER, and that these guys train for it like Lance Armstrong trains on his bike, it's somehow "risky". Given their frequent flyer miles, I'd say the EVA and fixing this was far less "risky" than my drive into work this morning.
So, the big question is: are NASA higherups telling the PR flacks to "pimp the danger, we need public interest in this shuttle mission so we get more funding?"
OK, so let me trot out the standard "standards committee" rant.
Any standards committees stated purpose is to try to bring standardization to a field. They are populated by competitors in that field, each representing their own company's interest. Each member has a strong financial or emotional desire to have their technology represented as the "right" approach. When the competitors have money on the table, it's also in your best interest to derail their proposals as that's money you won't get.
A standard tactic applied by participants is to slip in enough vagaries to the spec that let you "extend" the standard without having violated its letter. Microsoft has certainly mastered this tactic; see their implementation of Kerberos authentication for a beautiful example.
Microsoft also strongly believes that standards are fine, as long as they don't hamper their idea of innovation. Sure, we support w3c, as long as it doesn't interfere with our next big idea. And they believe they're big enough to depart from the standard on occasion. For a while it was Netscape, but now Firefox and Safari are literally the only restraints keeping the w3c spec from falling completely into Microsoft's hands (sorry Opera / Lynx fanbois, but your favorite browser does not drive the web.)
The end result is Microsoft is going to write what they want anyway, and expect the rest of the web to maybe catch up, maybe not. Too bad, so sad, this page is best viewed in IE7. Get over it.
I think either John Travolta or Tom Cruise did this flick already. Doesn't matter -- the Scamentologists copyrighted it as holy text anyway! They just called 'em clams instead of Niburu, and if that doesn't work they're going to label it pr0n and get Congress to try to ban the story outright.
Well I just used the feature quite extensively this weekend. I was selecting points on a googlemap to locate traffic cameras.
The only reference points I had was a rough text description (TH77 @ Old Shakopee Road, camera nearest TH77 southbound) and a pair of reference photos showing the viewpoints to the north and south. Through the camera photos, I could see things like bridges in the distance, cross streets, nearby features, the curvature of the roads, etc. Using the hybrid view, I was able to see the physical features on the map, and in most cases was able to locate the camera quite accurately.
I found it quite difficult to locate the cameras using the map only, and there were places where I was unfamiliar with the roads, and would have spent a lot of time flipping back and forth from the map to the satellite view in order to identify the locations.
In my area, the roads Google indicates are dead center down the middle of the paved stripes visible in the satellite images, so they line up nicely. As an added bonus, the precise placement on the map isn't of paramount importance - being off by 50 feet won't make a difference in usabiliity. Although it would have been nice to do it "perfectly", I had no source for lat/lon data for the cameras. That actually would have made it much easier, as I could have bulk inserted the cameras into the database rather than pick them all out by eyeball.
I just saw a presentation where the guy gave an example of a CSquare inheriting from a CRectangle. He said look at the differences: if your CRectangle has a SetSize(int height, int width) method, what do you do if the width isn't the same as the height? Perhaps you should have a SetSize(int side) method instead. But then it's still different enough that the two really aren't as related as they seem, even though a square is most certainly a rectangle.
I agree that inheritance is overused. Yes, it has its place, but I think that place is in defining an interface rather than in trying to reuse functionality.
The only place I see it being of serious value is in automated software testing. JUnit (for Java) and NUnit (for.NET) both rely on reflection to discover the unit tests in your code and execute them.
There's also a unit test framework for C++ called CppUnit, which was intended to bring the benefit of more formal unit testing to that language. However, since C++ doesn't support reflection, you end up having to employ macros to use it. It's not self-discovering.
Otherwise, I haven't noticed its absence from C++.
The answer to all of your questions is "yes". It's about algorithms that solve common problems or address common issues. It's also about a common set of names, so that designers are less ambiguous when they talk to each other.
Also important is that it lets you know of the "consequences" of using a given pattern, both good and bad. If you employ the composite pattern, for example, you treat a group of objects the same as a single object, and the container will recurse through the children.
The other thing about patterns is: they're not new. People have been doing these things long before they were named. Patterns are simply a way to share that expertise. The Gang of Four recognized this, claiming not that they invented these patterns, but rather discovered them.
I'd say almost any programmer who's serious about their craft can benefit from the book, but it will help you to have a working understand of basic object oriented concepts and terms before reading it.
A beginner might also benefit from a companion introductory book, too, such as Design Pattern Hatching. It goes through a fairly simplistic set of example problems facing a developer, and how matching patterns up with the problems can lead to a better, more maintainable and more flexible design. Plus, the coding is easier when you have a solid example to follow.
Yeah, I followed someone else's link to the Solatube (TM) site and those are indeed what I've been seeing at the shows. They look really easy to install, just carve a few holes here and there and Bob's yer uncle.
TFA does mention the potential danger of the energy being carried by the optics. They stuck one in a cup of coffee and in minutes the coffee was boiling. The impressive part is this was done with the visible light energy only, they had already filtered out the UV and IR. But because they're afraid of lawsuits, they won't sell them for self-installation. A homeowner could nick the fiber allowing a dangerous amount of heat radiation to escape inside a wall, for example, burning his house down!
Because the Secret Service keeps track of every single counterfeit bill passed. Everywhere. They track the date it was passed, who turned it in, what store, what time, which employee reported it, description of the perpetrator, technology used to produce the fake, everything.
Any of these "yellow-dot-trackable" laser printed bills will also have the serial number / dot-pattern noted and recorded along with the rest of the information.
Any time a new phony bill comes in, it goes into the system, and unlike Slashdot, they search for duplicates very thoroughly. Let's say there was a bad bill passed in Joe's Bar in Bumblestump, Wisconsin on Friday night. The next Friday night, another bad bill is passed in Bumblestump, but in Fred's Bar down the street. You can bet a real $20 bill that the Secret Service will have someone in both bars the next Friday.
The one constant they can count on is that greedy people remain greedy. If phony bills are passed more than once, then 99 times out of a hundred the counterfeiter will keep doing it.
The real purpose of the dots is to tie the crimes together. While they may or may not have your printer's "fingerprint" on file, they will use the dot patterns to match up separate crimes. If your town has had two bad bills passed, they caught you in the act of passing a third, and you owned the color laser printer on which all three were printed? You are not going to walk out of that courtroom without handcuffs.
The Secret Service takes counterfeiting very, very seriously, and they have zero tolerance for the 'petty' criminals just printing "lunch money". Counterfeiting money is a Federal PMITA prison sentence, first offence. It is not how you want to pay for your lunches.
According to the Xerox representative quoted in TFA, he said the mechanism is in a chip "20 billionths of a second from the laser". That made it sound like a tiny EPROM, similar to an SPD chip on a stick of RAM. And "20 billionths of a second" simply means "within 20 feet", so he really gave nothing away there.
Next, the EFF is going to ask us all to each desolder a different specific chip in our printers. Whoever's printer keeps working without printing the yellow dots is supposed to let them know.
A buddy got passed a $20 bill that was printed on an inkjet! We found out the next day when he was paying for lunch, the cashier wouldn't take it. It was obviously a fake in the daylight.
Apparently, it doesn't take a good copy to fool a waitress in a dark bar. Nor does it take a good copy to fool my drunk friend in that same dark bar!
There's also a "more traditional" system that I've been seeing at the Home and Garden shows for a few years now. It's a small (about 8" diameter) clear dome 'skylight' mounted in the roof. It caps an ordinary round sheet metal duct that leads straight down into the home. The ductwork is lined with a reflective mylar sheet, making it a mirrored pipe. The inside end is pointed at a translucent diffuser. From inside the house, it looks like an ordinary recessed can light.
Ultra low tech (no fibers) but it produces very nicely colored light in an interior room. I thought they were too pricey, though. Then I saw this article, where they want $8000! Wow.
Actually, it won't produce much noise at all. The fans in PCs are powered by "brushless" motors, which don't generate noise like the brush-type motors that are constantly arcing.
I don't even think it's a lack of caring. I think some of them truly believe they are causing no damage at all, and that they're being unfairly persecuted. They convince themselves that they're not evil, or they look at themselves simply a provider of a salable service to their customers.
Of course, they're really ignorant, hick, syphillitic, sister-fscking morons with the morals of Rush Limbaugh faced with an oxycontin-laced chocolate cake and no witnesses, but still...
This is slashdot. That book was required reading for geeks in high school in the 1970s. Unfortunately my copy went missing years ago, likely during a move. Sigh. I enjoyed reading it even though the writing was pretty much hack.
What I liked most about it is how it predated all current ideas about machine worms and viruses by several years. (I'm sure some researcher at MIT thought of this stuff in the 1960s, but hey, they didn't write the book now, did they?) I often wondered if Morris read the book before writing his infamous worm. Even news of Richard Skrenta's original Apple virus didn't get published until the early 1980s.
Y'know, that's really insightful. Economists could much more easily measure "rational" vs. "irrational" decisions in an online world, because they can see the decisions being made that aren't normally visible in the real world.
For example, if you're carrying around a hunk of tin ore but your bags are full and you encounter a gold vein, you might choose to discard the tin in order to have a place to put the gold. In the real world, researchers can't see what, when or why something hits the waste stream. Here, that information is immediately visible on the servers.
Similarly, if a player has a valuable thing such as a recipe, they could be watched to see how often they use it, what they charge per use, how many freebies they give to their friends, a comparison of their circle of freebie-deserving friends vs. guildmates vs. random strangers, etc. They could see the fluctuations in price -- the player may be willing to perform an enchantment for 5GP for some players, and 100GP for others. There's no rational decision-making there (if it's worth 100GP, why not charge everyone 100GP?) Maybe they can use that to help model peoples' "randomness factor".
They could even go so far as to set up controlled experiments with the cooperation of Blizzard. What if the Darkmoon Faire is really an experiment to see how far people will go to gain valuable items? This time, it's 1200 tickets for an epic item. Next time, maybe it'll be 1500 tickets. They could measure the percent of characters willing to farm a certain thing. For example, since they know the only reason for killing plague bats today would be to farm turn-in items for the faire, they could measure the average amount of time someone is willing to spend on the menial task of bat-killing, or how many people will get involved, or any number of things.
Of course, modelling the behavior of people willing to invest 2000+ hours/year in a virtual game may not be the best representation of the population as a whole. But it's still probably a lot better than current static assumptions about human behavior.
You should check out Slashdot Live Comment Tree. It adds [+] and [-] links to the front of each comment, allowing you to collapse the comment threads that wander way off topic (like when Jebus gets mentioned, when idiots whine pointlessly about dupes, or people bring up Hilter and Godwin's law, etc...) Really makes slashdot a pleasant place.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it you don't live in Arkansas?
Society has accepted rap "music", so the only possible answer to your question is "yes".
Heh! The media has finally given me a name: "Digital Native". I kind of like it. Lot better than "Baby Boomer" or "Gen X'er", especially since I was kind of between the two.
The other thing I was annoyed by was the constant repetition of "dangerous EVA" by the "news" media this morning. "It's dangerous and hazardous and risky, oh my!" Despite the fact that we've never had an EVA accident or injury EVER, and that these guys train for it like Lance Armstrong trains on his bike, it's somehow "risky". Given their frequent flyer miles, I'd say the EVA and fixing this was far less "risky" than my drive into work this morning.
So, the big question is: are NASA higherups telling the PR flacks to "pimp the danger, we need public interest in this shuttle mission so we get more funding?"
Any standards committees stated purpose is to try to bring standardization to a field. They are populated by competitors in that field, each representing their own company's interest. Each member has a strong financial or emotional desire to have their technology represented as the "right" approach. When the competitors have money on the table, it's also in your best interest to derail their proposals as that's money you won't get.
A standard tactic applied by participants is to slip in enough vagaries to the spec that let you "extend" the standard without having violated its letter. Microsoft has certainly mastered this tactic; see their implementation of Kerberos authentication for a beautiful example.
Microsoft also strongly believes that standards are fine, as long as they don't hamper their idea of innovation. Sure, we support w3c, as long as it doesn't interfere with our next big idea. And they believe they're big enough to depart from the standard on occasion. For a while it was Netscape, but now Firefox and Safari are literally the only restraints keeping the w3c spec from falling completely into Microsoft's hands (sorry Opera / Lynx fanbois, but your favorite browser does not drive the web.)
The end result is Microsoft is going to write what they want anyway, and expect the rest of the web to maybe catch up, maybe not. Too bad, so sad, this page is best viewed in IE7. Get over it.
I think either John Travolta or Tom Cruise did this flick already. Doesn't matter -- the Scamentologists copyrighted it as holy text anyway! They just called 'em clams instead of Niburu, and if that doesn't work they're going to label it pr0n and get Congress to try to ban the story outright.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
The only reference points I had was a rough text description (TH77 @ Old Shakopee Road, camera nearest TH77 southbound) and a pair of reference photos showing the viewpoints to the north and south. Through the camera photos, I could see things like bridges in the distance, cross streets, nearby features, the curvature of the roads, etc. Using the hybrid view, I was able to see the physical features on the map, and in most cases was able to locate the camera quite accurately.
I found it quite difficult to locate the cameras using the map only, and there were places where I was unfamiliar with the roads, and would have spent a lot of time flipping back and forth from the map to the satellite view in order to identify the locations.
In my area, the roads Google indicates are dead center down the middle of the paved stripes visible in the satellite images, so they line up nicely. As an added bonus, the precise placement on the map isn't of paramount importance - being off by 50 feet won't make a difference in usabiliity. Although it would have been nice to do it "perfectly", I had no source for lat/lon data for the cameras. That actually would have made it much easier, as I could have bulk inserted the cameras into the database rather than pick them all out by eyeball.
I just saw a presentation where the guy gave an example of a CSquare inheriting from a CRectangle. He said look at the differences: if your CRectangle has a SetSize(int height, int width) method, what do you do if the width isn't the same as the height? Perhaps you should have a SetSize(int side) method instead. But then it's still different enough that the two really aren't as related as they seem, even though a square is most certainly a rectangle.
I agree that inheritance is overused. Yes, it has its place, but I think that place is in defining an interface rather than in trying to reuse functionality.
There's also a unit test framework for C++ called CppUnit, which was intended to bring the benefit of more formal unit testing to that language. However, since C++ doesn't support reflection, you end up having to employ macros to use it. It's not self-discovering.
Otherwise, I haven't noticed its absence from C++.
Also important is that it lets you know of the "consequences" of using a given pattern, both good and bad. If you employ the composite pattern, for example, you treat a group of objects the same as a single object, and the container will recurse through the children.
The other thing about patterns is: they're not new. People have been doing these things long before they were named. Patterns are simply a way to share that expertise. The Gang of Four recognized this, claiming not that they invented these patterns, but rather discovered them.
I'd say almost any programmer who's serious about their craft can benefit from the book, but it will help you to have a working understand of basic object oriented concepts and terms before reading it.
A beginner might also benefit from a companion introductory book, too, such as Design Pattern Hatching. It goes through a fairly simplistic set of example problems facing a developer, and how matching patterns up with the problems can lead to a better, more maintainable and more flexible design. Plus, the coding is easier when you have a solid example to follow.
TFA does mention the potential danger of the energy being carried by the optics. They stuck one in a cup of coffee and in minutes the coffee was boiling. The impressive part is this was done with the visible light energy only, they had already filtered out the UV and IR. But because they're afraid of lawsuits, they won't sell them for self-installation. A homeowner could nick the fiber allowing a dangerous amount of heat radiation to escape inside a wall, for example, burning his house down!
Any of these "yellow-dot-trackable" laser printed bills will also have the serial number / dot-pattern noted and recorded along with the rest of the information.
Any time a new phony bill comes in, it goes into the system, and unlike Slashdot, they search for duplicates very thoroughly. Let's say there was a bad bill passed in Joe's Bar in Bumblestump, Wisconsin on Friday night. The next Friday night, another bad bill is passed in Bumblestump, but in Fred's Bar down the street. You can bet a real $20 bill that the Secret Service will have someone in both bars the next Friday.
The one constant they can count on is that greedy people remain greedy. If phony bills are passed more than once, then 99 times out of a hundred the counterfeiter will keep doing it.
The real purpose of the dots is to tie the crimes together. While they may or may not have your printer's "fingerprint" on file, they will use the dot patterns to match up separate crimes. If your town has had two bad bills passed, they caught you in the act of passing a third, and you owned the color laser printer on which all three were printed? You are not going to walk out of that courtroom without handcuffs.
The Secret Service takes counterfeiting very, very seriously, and they have zero tolerance for the 'petty' criminals just printing "lunch money". Counterfeiting money is a Federal PMITA prison sentence, first offence. It is not how you want to pay for your lunches.
Next, the EFF is going to ask us all to each desolder a different specific chip in our printers. Whoever's printer keeps working without printing the yellow dots is supposed to let them know.
You first.
Apparently, it doesn't take a good copy to fool a waitress in a dark bar. Nor does it take a good copy to fool my drunk friend in that same dark bar!
Ultra low tech (no fibers) but it produces very nicely colored light in an interior room. I thought they were too pricey, though. Then I saw this article, where they want $8000! Wow.
Actually, it won't produce much noise at all. The fans in PCs are powered by "brushless" motors, which don't generate noise like the brush-type motors that are constantly arcing.
Of course, they're really ignorant, hick, syphillitic, sister-fscking morons with the morals of Rush Limbaugh faced with an oxycontin-laced chocolate cake and no witnesses, but still ...
What I liked most about it is how it predated all current ideas about machine worms and viruses by several years. (I'm sure some researcher at MIT thought of this stuff in the 1960s, but hey, they didn't write the book now, did they?) I often wondered if Morris read the book before writing his infamous worm. Even news of Richard Skrenta's original Apple virus didn't get published until the early 1980s.
For example, if you're carrying around a hunk of tin ore but your bags are full and you encounter a gold vein, you might choose to discard the tin in order to have a place to put the gold. In the real world, researchers can't see what, when or why something hits the waste stream. Here, that information is immediately visible on the servers.
Similarly, if a player has a valuable thing such as a recipe, they could be watched to see how often they use it, what they charge per use, how many freebies they give to their friends, a comparison of their circle of freebie-deserving friends vs. guildmates vs. random strangers, etc. They could see the fluctuations in price -- the player may be willing to perform an enchantment for 5GP for some players, and 100GP for others. There's no rational decision-making there (if it's worth 100GP, why not charge everyone 100GP?) Maybe they can use that to help model peoples' "randomness factor".
They could even go so far as to set up controlled experiments with the cooperation of Blizzard. What if the Darkmoon Faire is really an experiment to see how far people will go to gain valuable items? This time, it's 1200 tickets for an epic item. Next time, maybe it'll be 1500 tickets. They could measure the percent of characters willing to farm a certain thing. For example, since they know the only reason for killing plague bats today would be to farm turn-in items for the faire, they could measure the average amount of time someone is willing to spend on the menial task of bat-killing, or how many people will get involved, or any number of things.
Of course, modelling the behavior of people willing to invest 2000+ hours/year in a virtual game may not be the best representation of the population as a whole. But it's still probably a lot better than current static assumptions about human behavior.
No you didn't. No, you came here for an argument.
Look, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
You should check out Slashdot Live Comment Tree. It adds [+] and [-] links to the front of each comment, allowing you to collapse the comment threads that wander way off topic (like when Jebus gets mentioned, when idiots whine pointlessly about dupes, or people bring up Hilter and Godwin's law, etc...) Really makes slashdot a pleasant place.
I prefer my argument the other way: I don't eat yogurt because culture should be hanging on the wall in a museum, not in a spoon headed for my mouth.
Now, what features do their husbands have that these women DON'T understand how to interface with?