* How smart they are.
* How many cool devices they own.
The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it's solved. No illness or distraction is sufficient to get the engineer off the case. These types of challenges quickly become personal -- a battle between the engineer and the laws of nature.
Engineers will go without food and hygiene for days to solve a problem. (Other times just because they forgot.) And when they succeed in solving the problem they will experience an ego rush that is better than sex--and I'm including the kind of sex where other people are involved.
Nothing is more threatening to the engineer than the suggestion that somebody has more technical skill. Normal people sometimes use that knowledge as a lever to extract more work from the engineer. When an engineer says that something can't be done (a code phrase that means it's not fun to do), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the engineer with a look of compassion and pity and say something along these lines: "I'll ask Bob to figure it out. He knows how to solve difficult technical problems."
At that point it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between the engineer and the problem. The engineer will set upon the problem like a starved Chihuahua on a pork chop
Your Netscape example is a piss-poor way to make your point, because it is very factually inaccurate.
1. You can't copyright an idea (duh).
2. NCSA invented "the browser", better know as "NCSA Mosaic".
3. Netscape (closely tied to NCSA) and Microsoft Internet Explorer both have Mosaic code inside them.
I know that he sold some of his Canadian newspaper holdings, but I don't think he sold the Post (IANAJ).
Why did he sell them? So that he could step into other media temporarily, and make enough money to buy his papers back.. then he will TRUELY dominate, and there will be no such as thing as a free media in Canada.
...considering how The National Post is owned by Conrad Black.
If you don't know Mr. Black, he's trying to buy up 100% of the news media in Canada. The idea is so that you only get "News for Robots - Stuff that matters to Mr. Black."
The hosts clearly stated that the rockets were planted in the junkyard, as they knew that there would be no naturally-occuring rocket engines there, but they still wanted to make the contestants search for parts.
Now, if I had been in charge of the show, I would have expected them to make the engines, too... A little bit of powerdered aluminium would not have been hard to dig up... finding magnesium might have been difficult, I wonder what else they could have used?
At any rate, I'm sure that the show's producers thought it best to hide the rocket engines to guarantee a finale which made for good television.
The best debugger is not your brain alone. Your brain, in conjunction with a multitude of tools (such as gdb, truss, gprof, assert, and debug-output) gives much better results.
With a debugger, you tend to fix symptoms, not the disease.
A doctor "fixes" patients by examining their symptoms, determining what their disease is, and then curing it.
Programmers do the same thing. Merely thinking about a problem and mentally stepping through code is a piss-poor way to figure out what's going wrong. Stepping through code with a debugger is a hundred times more effective, especially in a team environment where you are debugging code you didn't write, or when a junior programmer is misusing a library routine he thinks he understands.
While it is true that some programmers take stupid actions based on what they see from the debugger, that is because their brains are stupid -- not because they are using a debugger. The debugger is merely another tool for diagnosing a problem, and provides food for thought. Nobody has ever claimed that is a replacement for a good brain.
Yeesh.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, I found it interesting that the British government required him to explain the workings of H4 to a panel of scientists (etc) in order to pass the knowledge of how it worked on to the public.
The article I've quoted mentions that his endowment made him the first recepient of a government research grant -- and the government had the sense to make sure he published the inner workings before paying him.
If you're building the hardware anyways, and your RAM/demultiplexers are fast enough, you can make pretty much any addressing scheme look like any other addressing scheme.
I bet you wouldn't even have to get very creative, though, 'cause I'll bet those old games all use 8-bit words.
And yes, Virginia, there is still such a thing as a 74138.
According to the DMCA, if you made a digital VCR (i.e. a VCR that transmitted and received signals via some digital means, instead of those lossy copper cables), it would be illegal to use it in the exact same way that US courts have been deemed fair use for regular VCRs in the Betamax case from the mid-eighties.
Slashdot Mirror
Ego-wise, two things are important to engineers:
* How smart they are.
* How many cool devices they own.
The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it's solved. No illness or distraction is sufficient to get the engineer off the case. These types of challenges quickly become personal -- a battle between the engineer and the laws of nature.
Engineers will go without food and hygiene for days to solve a problem. (Other times just because they forgot.) And when they succeed in solving the problem they will experience an ego rush that is better than sex--and I'm including the kind of sex where other people are involved.
Nothing is more threatening to the engineer than the suggestion that somebody has more technical skill. Normal people sometimes use that knowledge as a lever to extract more work from the engineer. When an engineer says that something can't be done (a code phrase that means it's not fun to do), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the engineer with a look of compassion and pity and say something along these lines: "I'll ask Bob to figure it out. He knows how to solve difficult technical problems."
At that point it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between the engineer and the problem. The engineer will set upon the problem like a starved Chihuahua on a pork chop
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It was live on CNN... I watched it go Ka-boom.. Live!
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How is this News for Nerds? It is definately not Stuff That Matters.
Who is this Alexander Burke, guy, anyways? He must be a real dork.
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Your Netscape example is a piss-poor way to make your point, because it is very factually inaccurate.
1. You can't copyright an idea (duh).
2. NCSA invented "the browser", better know as "NCSA Mosaic".
3. Netscape (closely tied to NCSA) and Microsoft Internet Explorer both have Mosaic code inside them.
--
I know that he sold some of his Canadian newspaper holdings, but I don't think he sold the Post (IANAJ).
Why did he sell them? So that he could step into other media temporarily, and make enough money to buy his papers back.. then he will TRUELY dominate, and there will be no such as thing as a free media in Canada.
--
...considering how The National Post is owned by Conrad Black.
If you don't know Mr. Black, he's trying to buy up 100% of the news media in Canada. The idea is so that you only get "News for Robots - Stuff that matters to Mr. Black."
--
The hosts clearly stated that the rockets were planted in the junkyard, as they knew that there would be no naturally-occuring rocket engines there, but they still wanted to make the contestants search for parts.
Now, if I had been in charge of the show, I would have expected them to make the engines, too... A little bit of powerdered aluminium would not have been hard to dig up... finding magnesium might have been difficult, I wonder what else they could have used?
At any rate, I'm sure that the show's producers thought it best to hide the rocket engines to guarantee a finale which made for good television.
--
Maybe M$ was running Java-based DNS servers, and their settlement with Sun forced them to take them offline..
--
If you have the right nokia phone (8260, for one) you can send the sync vcal and vcard info as SMS messages.
--
The interm solution really isn't that hard -- contact a few hundred schoolboards, offer to take all their old Atari equipment off their hands.
Make backups of the tapes (just use a regular duplicator on slow speed), and you've got enough equipment to last until the software *needs* updating.
Problem solved.
--
A doctor "fixes" patients by examining their symptoms, determining what their disease is, and then curing it.
Programmers do the same thing. Merely thinking about a problem and mentally stepping through code is a piss-poor way to figure out what's going wrong. Stepping through code with a debugger is a hundred times more effective, especially in a team environment where you are debugging code you didn't write, or when a junior programmer is misusing a library routine he thinks he understands.
While it is true that some programmers take stupid actions based on what they see from the debugger, that is because their brains are stupid -- not because they are using a debugger. The debugger is merely another tool for diagnosing a problem, and provides food for thought. Nobody has ever claimed that is a replacement for a good brain. Yeesh.
--
..if some spam-mail gets routed to /dev/null, and there is nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound?
--
You don't need to use fiber to implement one-way links; standard ethernet, with one pair cut, will do the trick.
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You can read more about John Harrison here.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, I found it interesting that the British government required him to explain the workings of H4 to a panel of scientists (etc) in order to pass the knowledge of how it worked on to the public.
The article I've quoted mentions that his endowment made him the first recepient of a government research grant -- and the government had the sense to make sure he published the inner workings before paying him.
--
Linus does it just like the rest of us, ..., oh, er, nevermind.
Seriously, Linus does it with strong leadership attained by actively (but not obviously) pursuing his apparent Godhood status.
If people will die for their Gods, certainly they will not whine when some of their code hits the cutting floor.
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He helped write the best programming language, best operating system, and my favourite book (K&R)
--
Fly to Saturn's moons,
and let me write my name in chalk;
Let me see what Spring is like on
A 3 mile-wide rock.
In other words, hold my hand,
In other words, darling -- kiss me.
(you're not a musician, are you?)
--
Fetuses are life, but not human life. They are merely raw materials for health-drink manufacturers. Yum!
--
Just because one is less blue than 99% of the other smurfs does mean that one is white.
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Next week you will see a link to my bum, with Natalie Portmap licking hot grits out of it.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of *those*, eh??
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and chroot()!
What's wrong with Bill? When he steals, he always forgets to grab the good stuff.
--
If you're building the hardware anyways, and your RAM/demultiplexers are fast enough, you can make pretty much any addressing scheme look like any other addressing scheme.
I bet you wouldn't even have to get very creative, though, 'cause I'll bet those old games all use 8-bit words.
And yes, Virginia, there is still such a thing as a 74138.
--
> "as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee"
Hark! Thy narcuations are to me.
(geez, there's something I haven't heard in a long time)
--
According to the DMCA, if you made a digital VCR (i.e. a VCR that transmitted and received signals via some digital means, instead of those lossy copper cables), it would be illegal to use it in the exact same way that US courts have been deemed fair use for regular VCRs in the Betamax case from the mid-eighties.
--
No, it was a super nova.
--