Even if you define a subset of standard SQL that will run cross platform on a variety of target environments, it doesn't mean it will run well. For any serious (high volume, high performance) application , the queries you write end up being tweaked significantly to support the features/bugs/idiosyncracies of the query optimizer of a particular RDBMS. Move your standard queries to another vendor & watch your performance drop through the floor. Plus, limiting yourself to the subset of features that conform to standard SQL often prevents you from reaching that next level of performance (server-side procedures, bitmap indexes, anyone?).
The wonderful world of write-once SQL statements that will work well on all vendors' systems only exists if you don't have tight performance requirements (which, to be fair, does constitute a large number of applications out there).
Besides what it revealed about human nature, this experiment is arguably more famous for its long effects on psychological testing itself. Milgram's study became the center of the first real discussions about the ethical responsibilities of psychological researchers with regard to their subjects (some of the subjects suffered from long term traumatic episodes due to thir participation). It led to the ethical codes of conduct followed today.
Ironically, this experiment would not be allowed to be performed today for the same reasons we would forbid the Nazi hypothermia experiments (an example of the behavior Milgram's study was investigating).
Please excuse my ignorance in advance, but why bother with 3 character extensions - would it kill anyone to call it.mpeg4? Are there even browsers out there that only support 3CE's? I'm sure that nobody's writing any 16 bit editors/players for this format, so why worry about backwards compatibility to Win3.1?
-BbT
So, in other words, you agree with me
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
As I said, the << is atomically safe. If you insist on using multiple << operators and want your text to remain contiguous, you'll need to do this:
First off, this has nothing to do with object oriented design (even though cout & cerr are objects). It relates to thread safety, which applies in non-OO applications as well.
Secondly, there's nothing wrong with using cout or cerr in a multithreaded Solaris process. cout & cerr are thread safe - they inherit from ostream, which itself is thread safe. Sure, multiple threads will be dogpiling output to stdout or stderr, but the same can be said for fprintf; in any case, your app isn't going to dump core. As long as your willing to accept the fact that only text that is written out in a single command will remain contiguous, there is no problem.
... or any other 'hard' swear words for that matter. Check out Chet's philosophy on swearing here. In fact, this article was many orders of magnitude less funny than OMM's typical fare - there has yet to be a site that can imitate the OMM word salad such as this gem:
Of course, the last link includes fuck twice, but I don't think it's gratuitous (beyond the fact that all word choice in satire is gratuitous to one extent or another).
I've been following this since the original E3 trailer went public, and as far as I know, Bungie never said they would release on XBox and PC/Mac simultaneously. In fact, once it was announced that they were doing it for the XBox, they never made any commitments to what they game would ultimately contain, feature-wise, until very recently prior to launch.
What separates him from other 'great' sf/fantasy authors is that he can really _write_ - his stories stand on their own grounds. Unlike many of the other greats, who are idea men/women first, writers second. Martin's fiction will probably stand up to repeated readings 50 years from now, after the other greats stuff seems a little dated.
I predict Gibson will become the E.E. Doc Smith of our generation: remembered, but more as an icon of the times.
Since Code Red's damage seems to be primarily a function of its ability to spread, why not treat it the way we attack some diseases/pests: destroy its ability to reproduce.
Why doesn't someone write a Code Red anti-worm - it spreads via the same mechanism as does Code Red, but once it has infected a machine, it uses its root privileges to close the door behind itself, then deletes itself. It could even send mail to the administrator of the machine indicating the fact.
... is that they've never published (and probably never will publish) what the AI is supposed to do. Therefore, any errors in the AI code cannot be identified as such - everything is ultimately a 'behavior', whether intentionally programed by Lionhead or not.
They've achieved programmer nirvana, where they can at last exclaim "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" and leave it at that.
Reading the messageboard discussions for B&W reminded me profoundly of something: discussions I've had in the past with colleagues trying to deduce the inner workings of some third party technology that shipped without source code. All you can do is send rays into the black box and see where they come out.
Black & White is the first game to have turned the art of debugging into a commercially successful entertainment form, which is why I don't need to buy it - I get plenty of that from 9 to 5.
It's about Danni's hard drive, but it includes this statistic:
online adult content generates about $300 million annually in the United States.
For all people talk about how 'big' the sex industry is, consider this: in 1995 (when I was doing some contracting for them), Philip Morris' domestic revenue was $30 billion (20 billion from food & beer, 10 billion from tobacco), their total world-wide revenue was $60 billion (non-domestic revenue was $20 billion tobacco, $10 billion food/beer). As for profits, keep in mind that PM is one of the most profitable blue-chips out there - tobacco generates mad profits, no matter how big the tax the govts put on it (food much less so).
I just find it interesting how such a tiny industry gets blown up into such a big deal - the whole online sex industry has revenue estimated at 1% of a single brick & mortar old economy organization.
A favorite quote of mine from the PM Globe (an internal newsletter) (paraphrased): "In 1995, the Kraft cheese division generated $3 billion in revenue. However, this only represents 1/6 of the world's cheese market, so there's plenty of room for growth!"
I'd have to agree fully. Recently I also rented some Starblazers tapes, excited to relive those youthful memories of quality programming. Boy, talk about selective memory. Starblazers is barely entertainment by today's standards. Sure, the story is 'continuous', but there's so much padding in the production that each 30 minute episode could probably be summed up in about 5 minutes by modern standards.
Add to that the fact that the animation style is extremely 'economical' (to put it kindly) and it doesn't compare too favorably to modern fare. Sure, the story continued from one episode to another, but it took about 6 episodes to equal the plot we have nowadays.
Add (again) to that the weakness of anime in general - the plots really never survive the translation from Japanese - I think that the west & east have fundamentally different ideas about what constitutes a 'story' (but that's part of the fun) - and it's pretty hard going.
On the other hand, compared to what was out at the time it was at least an improvement. Except for Johnny Quest (which holds up very well by - far less dated) Starblazers was the only thing out there that at least acknowledged the fact that there were kids watching cartoons beyond the age of 8.
The developer was a guy named Chris Crawford - regarded as the Sid Meier of his day - I remember a decent number of interviews with him in various magazines.
Crawford had a number of interesting ideas, but they didn't always turn out to be fun. "Balance" was pretty frustrating, as others have pointed out, since your Soviet opponent was extremely touchy - they'd freak if you sent economic aid to Poland, but they'd also freak if you objected to their sending "military advisors" to Mexico!
The black screen & "Failure will not be rewarded" was the result of blowing up the world. However, Crawford apparently didn't believe in rewarding success, either - after managing to complete the game successfully (making it to the end without blowing up the world and coming out ahead of the Soviets, influence-wise), I was greeted an equally dry screen displaying the final game state.
That pretty much soured me on the whole game after that. It reminded me of the Simpson's episode where Skinner is trapped in the supply room, and he describes how he passed the time: "I would try to bounce a ball as long as I could. Then I'd try to beat that record".
I also bought a game of his called "Guns & Butter", a sort of Risk-like game with sophisticated technology tree concept & resource management. The crux of the game was directing the flow of various raw materials into finished products. Instead of a technology tree, you had a production tree, and you had to balance how the "feeder products" were allocated to make finished goods.
A pretty cool concept, and fun to play with, at first. However, since the end result was either Guns (in the form of swords, rifles, tanks) or Butter (in the form of plows, tractors, etc), it ended up being a lot of dicking around with knobs to get the end result you actually wanted. Eventually you figured out that all you wanted was N units of Guns & M units of Butter, so could the computer please run the resource allocation in reverse and just set it up for you? The end result was that the game became an example of just solving N dimensional system of equations every turn (expressed in the form of GUI sliders) - at that point it became strictly mechanical and pointless.
It had a diplomacy system as well, not dissimilar from Civilization's. In a lot of ways, it was pretty ahead of its time - I wouldn't be surprised if Meier & Co. took it as inspiration. But in the end it wasn't that fun.
Along the way there were attempts to drum up threats that never really caught on (does anyone remember the threats about "Ice" (meth) during the late 80's/early 90's, that all the news outlets claimed would be a blight worse than crack?)
I'm not sure what this pattern means, other than the fact that the media needs crises to write about in order to sell papers or page hits, but it's nothing new. Adults/parents will worry that the destructive behavior of a minority of youths translate into a broad threat to their precious little ones. The only real threat I've seen from any of these trends is the obvious criminal economy that has sprung up from the outlawing of the different drug threats. Of course, legalizing drugs has its own set of problems as well.
You're right about Godel - if I recall from my CSci courses, the incompleteness theorem and the halting proof are very closely related. I'm not enough of a formal mathematician to go any deeper than that.
You two are arguing what amounts to information theory's equivalent to the abortion debate. The argument cannot be resolved or 'won' with logic, since the disagreement between the two sides lies in the most basic assumptions that each party holds about the nature of conciousness & intelligence. BMazurek is arguing the 'strong AI' position (one that I hold), streetlawyer is arguing the 'weak AI' position (held by Roger Penrose, among others).
I imagine that BMazurek probably also believes that what we call 'conciousness' is also an illusion, an aritifact of the emergent behavior we call intelligence (as I do). Some people won't except that idea, and hold to the 'weak AI' position, which more or less says that what is commonly considered conciousness or intelligence is something beyond what can currently be defined by science, and that an algorithmic computer cannot ever be intelligent, since it is impossible to model intelligence algorithmically (it is called 'weak AI' because they do believe that algorithmic computers can be used to achieve certain subsets of behavior that can be useful (expert systems, vision, etc.), but cannot achieve 'conciousness'). People like Penrose use the Halting Problem and work by Euler to justify this position 'mathematically', but only with an extreme amount of handwaving (in my opinion).
The problem I have with Turing Test opponents is that they have no proper means of determining if something is 'intelligent', or if they do have such means, they invariably would exclude 99% of the Earth's current human population by setting impossibly high standards. In they end it boils down to faith, in that they say, "Humans are intelligent because I know I'm intelligent, and since I'm a human, all other humans are intelligent, too", which is certainly one way of 'proving' humans are intelligent (to an individual), but useless for determining if non-humans (living or otherwise) are also intelligent.
To understand the halting problem, you first have to understand what a Turing Machine is. As mentioned in posts above, a Turing machine is an infinitely long "tape" (magnetic, hole-punch, whatever) which can be filled with "symbols" (instructions, data, whatever). In addition, there is a "head" which can move back and forth over the tape and read a symbol or write to it. The Turing Machine "runs" by reading some starting symbol on the tape carrying out the instruction that symbol represents. As you can imagine from the structure of the Turing Machine, there aren't too many instructions that are capable of being performed - move left or right n units, or basic increment & decrement operations to symbols themselves.
In a nutshell (I'm glossing over details a little here), everything you consider to be a digital computer is just a form of Turing Machine, and all Turing Machines are equivalent in capability (assuming they have infinite memory), as long as you don't care about how fast they are. In other words, you could emulate a Linux box using the Life Turing Machine if you had enough memory. It would be very slow.
Anyway, as far as the halting problem is concerned, the main thing that interests people studying Turing Machines/programs is whether the head moving back & forth over the tape ever stops - in other words, will it get to the 'end' of the program. This isn't the same thing as 'failing' as you would normally consider. This is why a compiler can't determine whether a program halts. For example, if we consider C, the following program neither halts nor fails:
main()
{
while (1);
}
Whereas this program 'fails' and halts:
main()
{
int foo = 0;
int bar = 10 / foo;
}
and this program doesn't 'fail', but it also halts:
main()
{
int foo = 2;
int bar = 10 / foo;
}
All these programs compile, but only the last 2 halt. Although a person can look at a simple program and tell if it halts, the Halting Problem proof (which I can't remember) shows us that is not algorithmically possible to determine if a program halts without actually running it, and even then, we only can show that a program halts, but not that it will never halt (since we'd have to run it an infinitely long time to demonstrate that it doesn't halt).
This proof actually has very broad applications in mathematics beyond computer science. It has also been used to show that given a set of primitive 'axioms' (like the basic axioms of Euclidean geometry), it is possible to construct truths which cannot be proven by the same set of axioms. It's been about 10 years, but if you're really interested, read the book "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose, an extremely insteresting & informative survey of 20th century math & science. It's somewhat flawed by Penrose's personal intellectual biases (for example, he refuses to accept that randomness has any important role in the way that intelligence/conciousness works), but its packed with nerd food.
Unfortunately, Oracle's CONNECT BY isn't very useful - it only works if you have only one table in a query - it doesn't allow you to join the table containing the parent/child pointers to other tables. This is especially problematic if you tree structure is implemented this way:
CREATE TABLE NodeRelationship
( ParentNodeId NUMBER
, ChildNodeId NUMBER
, FromDate DATE
, ToDate DATE
);
Oracle's CONNECT BY will not let you join the NodeRelationship table to the Node table. You can maybe make it work by creating a virtual table in your from clause that looks like this:
SELECT NodeName
, NodeValue
, Level
FROM ( SELECT ChildNodeId
, RowNum
, Level
FROM NodeRelationship
WHERE:interestingDate BETWEEN FromDate and ToDate
START WITH NodeId =:foo
CONNECT BY PRIOR ChildNodeId = ParentNodeId
) tree
, Node
WHERE Node.NodeId = tree.ChildNodeId
ORDER BY tree.RowNum
But it isn't documented anywhere what the behavior of RowNum is when used inside subqueries, so this technique makes me nervous.
In any case, it only works for Oracle. All other systems have to use client-side code or make use of temp tables or cursors to acheive the same result, both of which are not a part of standard SQL, which always gives academician's (like this book's author) fits, but is rarely a problem in the real world (unless you have to migrate to a new RDBMS).
-BbT
Re:Irrelevant to most of us
on
Death March
·
· Score: 3
I guess I'd have to say that I disagree 100% with your last statement. If all you're doing is fulfilling tasks that are placed in front of your face, how can you not become burned out? It's all a matter of taste, I suppose. Some people prefer mushroom-mode, others don't. I'm not talking about undying loyalty. I'm talking about seeing the big picture of an assignment, as opposed to being a mindless drone taking orders like a short-order cook & serving up code.
The main reason I'm not contracting now is that I chose to pursue more technical programming as opposed to business systems. Plus, I realized that as a contractor, my work would never scale - if I wanted to reap maximum rewards from my efforts, I am better off working entrepreneurally with a small group of people to produce a product than selling my services by the hour.
The biggest problem I see from slashdot regulars is this immature "us-vs-them" attitude towards 'managers' & 'hackers'. Guess what guys - everyone's a manager. You can't absolve yourself from management responsibility. Software is not feudalism, and you're neither knights nor serfs. Contrary to popular belief, most managers are adequate to the task. Problem is, so many of their managees want to contribute nothing to the process, forcing the managers to become super-human predicters of human behavior & politics, as well as technology. Since almost noone is capable of this, we get the 'bad manager'.
NineNine, considering that you sign you posts "Oracle God", I'd figure you'd have a little more perspective. I can see this myopic mushroom view coming from a hardcore C/C++ hacker who is given his little subsystem to produce & grinds away heads down until it's done; a database person, though should be about as close to a manager as you can get in the coding world - you have to have an almost complete domain knowledge over the problem space for the project & understand how everything is affecting your consumers. How can you not be a manager when you're tasked with organizing the single most important part of a system? (FYI, this is all coming from someone who is both DBA and a heads-down C++ hacker).
Re:Yourdon is a weenie ...
on
Death March
·
· Score: 1
I'm inclined to agree. Yourdon has always struck me as one of these blowhards who claims all sorts of IT experience, yet seems to spend all his time writing books. What I've read from this guy makes me think that he's one of these know-nothing know-it-alls who extrapolate industry trends from a few personal experiences. The fact that it took him until "Rise & Resurrection" to figure out that reliability was not required to be 100% for every project underscores his lack of real-world experience.
Re:Irrelevant to most of us
on
Death March
·
· Score: 1
Most of slashdot are contractors? I doubt it.
I think your attitude stinks. Typical clockpunching point of view by someone who has zero commitment to providing an actual service to his customers. When I was contracting a few years ago, I actually felt obliged to provide my clients with value appropriate to the wage they were paying me. This didn't mean that I killed myself getting work done, but I certainly cared if the project was ahead or behind schedule.
Fools like you think you somehow deserve your salary because you're so brilliant. You aren't - you're scarce. You can exploit that scarcity by doing the bare minimum while pulling down as much cash as possible, or you can use that scarcity as a mandate to yourself to do the most good with the skills you have. Being scarce isn't just about pulling down big dollars - it also means that you can make a real difference in your work. So many people work at shit jobs that are shitty not just in pay, but in satisfaction. Count your blessings.
I suppose if programming didn't pay so well your career of choice would be processing forms at the local Dept of Motor Vehicles. Or maybe a job selling dubious stock to retirees because they're 'too stupid' to know that your product is crap, and it's not your problem if they loose their shirts.
So what we have here are fuel cells being charged by solar cells. Okay, nothing new there. Now we attach it to a kite & let it fly around. Why? Cheap satellite? How is this cheaper than a high altitude unmanned balloon? Seems useless as a powerplant - are you going to run a long wire from this thing down to your house, or maybe have it airdrop you charged batteries & pick up the empties skyhook-style?
I'm sure the people who've been working on this have good reasons for doing it. Too bad the CNN article doesn't tell us a single useful thing. Why do they bother mentioning space applications? Aren't they aware that solar charged fuel cells have been standard equipment in space since the Apollo program? And there's no air up there for that wing.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you define a subset of standard SQL that will run cross platform on a variety of target environments, it doesn't mean it will run well. For any serious (high volume, high performance) application , the queries you write end up being tweaked significantly to support the features/bugs/idiosyncracies of the query optimizer of a particular RDBMS. Move your standard queries to another vendor & watch your performance drop through the floor. Plus, limiting yourself to the subset of features that conform to standard SQL often prevents you from reaching that next level of performance (server-side procedures, bitmap indexes, anyone?).
The wonderful world of write-once SQL statements that will work well on all vendors' systems only exists if you don't have tight performance requirements (which, to be fair, does constitute a large number of applications out there).
-BbT
Besides what it revealed about human nature, this experiment is arguably more famous for its long effects on psychological testing itself. Milgram's study became the center of the first real discussions about the ethical responsibilities of psychological researchers with regard to their subjects (some of the subjects suffered from long term traumatic episodes due to thir participation). It led to the ethical codes of conduct followed today.
Ironically, this experiment would not be allowed to be performed today for the same reasons we would forbid the Nazi hypothermia experiments (an example of the behavior Milgram's study was investigating).
BbT
Please excuse my ignorance in advance, but why bother with 3 character extensions - would it kill anyone to call it .mpeg4? Are there even browsers out there that only support 3CE's? I'm sure that nobody's writing any 16 bit editors/players for this format, so why worry about backwards compatibility to Win3.1?
-BbT
As I said, the << is atomically safe. If you insist on using multiple << operators and want your text to remain contiguous, you'll need to do this:
{
stream_locker guard(cout, stream_locker::lock_defer);
if (cout.test_safe_flag())
{
guard.lock();
}
std::cout << "foo" << "bar" << std::endl;
}
First off, this has nothing to do with object oriented design (even though cout & cerr are objects). It relates to thread safety, which applies in non-OO applications as well.
Secondly, there's nothing wrong with using cout or cerr in a multithreaded Solaris process. cout & cerr are thread safe - they inherit from ostream, which itself is thread safe. Sure, multiple threads will be dogpiling output to stdout or stderr, but the same can be said for fprintf; in any case, your app isn't going to dump core. As long as your willing to accept the fact that only text that is written out in a single command will remain contiguous, there is no problem.
-BbT
For a surprise, go to www.rougewave.com and find out what they sell.
I wonder if the guys at Rogue have decided that the coolness of the name has been trumped by the hassle of correcting everyone.
-BbT
... or any other 'hard' swear words for that matter. Check out Chet's philosophy on swearing here. In fact, this article was many orders of magnitude less funny than OMM's typical fare - there has yet to be a site that can imitate the OMM word salad such as this gem:
In my ongoing quest to read everything ever written about my new favorite game Giants - a product that, while it does have a few bugs, hasn't caused any part of my computer to actually literally physically explode - I ran across this review at Gamepen, a site for which I have no snide comment because I don't know anything about it other than the fact that its name sounds a little like "gaypen", a fact that could potentially be used against it if you absolutely couldn't think of anything else, and, hey, what an epic journey this sentence has been - welcome to the end of it.
Or my personal favorite:
If I was Human Head's coach, I'd be grabbing them by the neck right now and screaming "Less whining, more less caves!"
Of course, the last link includes fuck twice, but I don't think it's gratuitous (beyond the fact that all word choice in satire is gratuitous to one extent or another).
-BbT
I've been following this since the original E3 trailer went public, and as far as I know, Bungie never said they would release on XBox and PC/Mac simultaneously. In fact, once it was announced that they were doing it for the XBox, they never made any commitments to what they game would ultimately contain, feature-wise, until very recently prior to launch.
Can you site your source for this information?
-BbT
What separates him from other 'great' sf/fantasy authors is that he can really _write_ - his stories stand on their own grounds. Unlike many of the other greats, who are idea men/women first, writers second. Martin's fiction will probably stand up to repeated readings 50 years from now, after the other greats stuff seems a little dated.
I predict Gibson will become the E.E. Doc Smith of our generation: remembered, but more as an icon of the times.
Since Code Red's damage seems to be primarily a function of its ability to spread, why not treat it the way we attack some diseases/pests: destroy its ability to reproduce.
Why doesn't someone write a Code Red anti-worm - it spreads via the same mechanism as does Code Red, but once it has infected a machine, it uses its root privileges to close the door behind itself, then deletes itself. It could even send mail to the administrator of the machine indicating the fact.
-BbT
They've achieved programmer nirvana, where they can at last exclaim "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" and leave it at that.
Reading the messageboard discussions for B&W reminded me profoundly of something: discussions I've had in the past with colleagues trying to deduce the inner workings of some third party technology that shipped without source code. All you can do is send rays into the black box and see where they come out.
Black & White is the first game to have turned the art of debugging into a commercially successful entertainment form, which is why I don't need to buy it - I get plenty of that from 9 to 5.
-BbT
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/10/21/index .ashe/cover.ashe/index.html
It's about Danni's hard drive, but it includes this statistic:
online adult content generates about $300 million annually in the United States.
For all people talk about how 'big' the sex industry is, consider this: in 1995 (when I was doing some contracting for them), Philip Morris' domestic revenue was $30 billion (20 billion from food & beer, 10 billion from tobacco), their total world-wide revenue was $60 billion (non-domestic revenue was $20 billion tobacco, $10 billion food/beer). As for profits, keep in mind that PM is one of the most profitable blue-chips out there - tobacco generates mad profits, no matter how big the tax the govts put on it (food much less so).
I just find it interesting how such a tiny industry gets blown up into such a big deal - the whole online sex industry has revenue estimated at 1% of a single brick & mortar old economy organization.
A favorite quote of mine from the PM Globe (an internal newsletter) (paraphrased): "In 1995, the Kraft cheese division generated $3 billion in revenue. However, this only represents 1/6 of the world's cheese market, so there's plenty of room for growth!"
-BbT
I'd have to agree fully. Recently I also rented some Starblazers tapes, excited to relive those youthful memories of quality programming. Boy, talk about selective memory. Starblazers is barely entertainment by today's standards. Sure, the story is 'continuous', but there's so much padding in the production that each 30 minute episode could probably be summed up in about 5 minutes by modern standards.
Add to that the fact that the animation style is extremely 'economical' (to put it kindly) and it doesn't compare too favorably to modern fare. Sure, the story continued from one episode to another, but it took about 6 episodes to equal the plot we have nowadays.
Add (again) to that the weakness of anime in general - the plots really never survive the translation from Japanese - I think that the west & east have fundamentally different ideas about what constitutes a 'story' (but that's part of the fun) - and it's pretty hard going.
On the other hand, compared to what was out at the time it was at least an improvement. Except for Johnny Quest (which holds up very well by - far less dated) Starblazers was the only thing out there that at least acknowledged the fact that there were kids watching cartoons beyond the age of 8.
> Either it's incredibly complex, or deisgned horribly
Neither. Almost all of those transistors are for the 32 megabytes of on-die RAM.
The developer was a guy named Chris Crawford - regarded as the Sid Meier of his day - I remember a decent number of interviews with him in various magazines.
Crawford had a number of interesting ideas, but they didn't always turn out to be fun. "Balance" was pretty frustrating, as others have pointed out, since your Soviet opponent was extremely touchy - they'd freak if you sent economic aid to Poland, but they'd also freak if you objected to their sending "military advisors" to Mexico!
The black screen & "Failure will not be rewarded" was the result of blowing up the world. However, Crawford apparently didn't believe in rewarding success, either - after managing to complete the game successfully (making it to the end without blowing up the world and coming out ahead of the Soviets, influence-wise), I was greeted an equally dry screen displaying the final game state.
That pretty much soured me on the whole game after that. It reminded me of the Simpson's episode where Skinner is trapped in the supply room, and he describes how he passed the time: "I would try to bounce a ball as long as I could. Then I'd try to beat that record".
I also bought a game of his called "Guns & Butter", a sort of Risk-like game with sophisticated technology tree concept & resource management. The crux of the game was directing the flow of various raw materials into finished products. Instead of a technology tree, you had a production tree, and you had to balance how the "feeder products" were allocated to make finished goods.
A pretty cool concept, and fun to play with, at first. However, since the end result was either Guns (in the form of swords, rifles, tanks) or Butter (in the form of plows, tractors, etc), it ended up being a lot of dicking around with knobs to get the end result you actually wanted. Eventually you figured out that all you wanted was N units of Guns & M units of Butter, so could the computer please run the resource allocation in reverse and just set it up for you? The end result was that the game became an example of just solving N dimensional system of equations every turn (expressed in the form of GUI sliders) - at that point it became strictly mechanical and pointless.
It had a diplomacy system as well, not dissimilar from Civilization's. In a lot of ways, it was pretty ahead of its time - I wouldn't be surprised if Meier & Co. took it as inspiration. But in the end it wasn't that fun.
-BbT
Why the big religious war? Why not just use Solaris X86:
/
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/ds/ds-intel
-BbT
Society goes through phases of fearing for the morals of its youth. The imagined threats seem to come from two common sources: Drugs and Nerds.
Nerd threats:
- Comic books (50's)
- D&D (80's)
- Video games (late 90's/early 00's)
Drug threats
- Alcohol (20's)
- Reefer madness (60's)
- Cocaine (late 70's/early 80's)
- Crack cocaine (late 80's/early 90's)
- Anabolic steroids (late 80's/early 90's)
Along the way there were attempts to drum up threats that never really caught on (does anyone remember the threats about "Ice" (meth) during the late 80's/early 90's, that all the news outlets claimed would be a blight worse than crack?)
I'm not sure what this pattern means, other than the fact that the media needs crises to write about in order to sell papers or page hits, but it's nothing new. Adults/parents will worry that the destructive behavior of a minority of youths translate into a broad threat to their precious little ones. The only real threat I've seen from any of these trends is the obvious criminal economy that has sprung up from the outlawing of the different drug threats. Of course, legalizing drugs has its own set of problems as well.
-BbT
You're right about Godel - if I recall from my CSci courses, the incompleteness theorem and the halting proof are very closely related. I'm not enough of a formal mathematician to go any deeper than that.
You two are arguing what amounts to information theory's equivalent to the abortion debate. The argument cannot be resolved or 'won' with logic, since the disagreement between the two sides lies in the most basic assumptions that each party holds about the nature of conciousness & intelligence. BMazurek is arguing the 'strong AI' position (one that I hold), streetlawyer is arguing the 'weak AI' position (held by Roger Penrose, among others).
I imagine that BMazurek probably also believes that what we call 'conciousness' is also an illusion, an aritifact of the emergent behavior we call intelligence (as I do). Some people won't except that idea, and hold to the 'weak AI' position, which more or less says that what is commonly considered conciousness or intelligence is something beyond what can currently be defined by science, and that an algorithmic computer cannot ever be intelligent, since it is impossible to model intelligence algorithmically (it is called 'weak AI' because they do believe that algorithmic computers can be used to achieve certain subsets of behavior that can be useful (expert systems, vision, etc.), but cannot achieve 'conciousness'). People like Penrose use the Halting Problem and work by Euler to justify this position 'mathematically', but only with an extreme amount of handwaving (in my opinion).
The problem I have with Turing Test opponents is that they have no proper means of determining if something is 'intelligent', or if they do have such means, they invariably would exclude 99% of the Earth's current human population by setting impossibly high standards. In they end it boils down to faith, in that they say, "Humans are intelligent because I know I'm intelligent, and since I'm a human, all other humans are intelligent, too", which is certainly one way of 'proving' humans are intelligent (to an individual), but useless for determining if non-humans (living or otherwise) are also intelligent.
To understand the halting problem, you first have to understand what a Turing Machine is. As mentioned in posts above, a Turing machine is an infinitely long "tape" (magnetic, hole-punch, whatever) which can be filled with "symbols" (instructions, data, whatever). In addition, there is a "head" which can move back and forth over the tape and read a symbol or write to it. The Turing Machine "runs" by reading some starting symbol on the tape carrying out the instruction that symbol represents. As you can imagine from the structure of the Turing Machine, there aren't too many instructions that are capable of being performed - move left or right n units, or basic increment & decrement operations to symbols themselves.
In a nutshell (I'm glossing over details a little here), everything you consider to be a digital computer is just a form of Turing Machine, and all Turing Machines are equivalent in capability (assuming they have infinite memory), as long as you don't care about how fast they are. In other words, you could emulate a Linux box using the Life Turing Machine if you had enough memory. It would be very slow.
Anyway, as far as the halting problem is concerned, the main thing that interests people studying Turing Machines/programs is whether the head moving back & forth over the tape ever stops - in other words, will it get to the 'end' of the program. This isn't the same thing as 'failing' as you would normally consider. This is why a compiler can't determine whether a program halts. For example, if we consider C, the following program neither halts nor fails:
main()
{
while (1);
}
Whereas this program 'fails' and halts:
main()
{
int foo = 0;
int bar = 10 / foo;
}
and this program doesn't 'fail', but it also halts:
main()
{
int foo = 2;
int bar = 10 / foo;
}
All these programs compile, but only the last 2 halt. Although a person can look at a simple program and tell if it halts, the Halting Problem proof (which I can't remember) shows us that is not algorithmically possible to determine if a program halts without actually running it, and even then, we only can show that a program halts, but not that it will never halt (since we'd have to run it an infinitely long time to demonstrate that it doesn't halt).
This proof actually has very broad applications in mathematics beyond computer science. It has also been used to show that given a set of primitive 'axioms' (like the basic axioms of Euclidean geometry), it is possible to construct truths which cannot be proven by the same set of axioms. It's been about 10 years, but if you're really interested, read the book "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose, an extremely insteresting & informative survey of 20th century math & science. It's somewhat flawed by Penrose's personal intellectual biases (for example, he refuses to accept that randomness has any important role in the way that intelligence/conciousness works), but its packed with nerd food.
I think you mean CONNECT BY.
...);
:interestingDate BETWEEN FromDate and ToDate
:foo
Unfortunately, Oracle's CONNECT BY isn't very useful - it only works if you have only one table in a query - it doesn't allow you to join the table containing the parent/child pointers to other tables. This is especially problematic if you tree structure is implemented this way:
CREATE TABLE Node
( NodeId NUMBER
, NodeName VARCHAR2(100)
, NodeValue VARCHAR2(100)
, CreateUser VARCHAR2(100)
,
CREATE TABLE NodeRelationship
( ParentNodeId NUMBER
, ChildNodeId NUMBER
, FromDate DATE
, ToDate DATE
);
Oracle's CONNECT BY will not let you join the NodeRelationship table to the Node table. You can maybe make it work by creating a virtual table in your from clause that looks like this:
SELECT NodeName
, NodeValue
, Level
FROM ( SELECT ChildNodeId
, RowNum
, Level
FROM NodeRelationship
WHERE
START WITH NodeId =
CONNECT BY PRIOR ChildNodeId = ParentNodeId
) tree
, Node
WHERE Node.NodeId = tree.ChildNodeId
ORDER BY tree.RowNum
But it isn't documented anywhere what the behavior of RowNum is when used inside subqueries, so this technique makes me nervous.
In any case, it only works for Oracle. All other systems have to use client-side code or make use of temp tables or cursors to acheive the same result, both of which are not a part of standard SQL, which always gives academician's (like this book's author) fits, but is rarely a problem in the real world (unless you have to migrate to a new RDBMS).
-BbT
I guess I'd have to say that I disagree 100% with your last statement. If all you're doing is fulfilling tasks that are placed in front of your face, how can you not become burned out? It's all a matter of taste, I suppose. Some people prefer mushroom-mode, others don't. I'm not talking about undying loyalty. I'm talking about seeing the big picture of an assignment, as opposed to being a mindless drone taking orders like a short-order cook & serving up code.
The main reason I'm not contracting now is that I chose to pursue more technical programming as opposed to business systems. Plus, I realized that as a contractor, my work would never scale - if I wanted to reap maximum rewards from my efforts, I am better off working entrepreneurally with a small group of people to produce a product than selling my services by the hour.
The biggest problem I see from slashdot regulars is this immature "us-vs-them" attitude towards 'managers' & 'hackers'. Guess what guys - everyone's a manager. You can't absolve yourself from management responsibility. Software is not feudalism, and you're neither knights nor serfs. Contrary to popular belief, most managers are adequate to the task. Problem is, so many of their managees want to contribute nothing to the process, forcing the managers to become super-human predicters of human behavior & politics, as well as technology. Since almost noone is capable of this, we get the 'bad manager'.
NineNine, considering that you sign you posts "Oracle God", I'd figure you'd have a little more perspective. I can see this myopic mushroom view coming from a hardcore C/C++ hacker who is given his little subsystem to produce & grinds away heads down until it's done; a database person, though should be about as close to a manager as you can get in the coding world - you have to have an almost complete domain knowledge over the problem space for the project & understand how everything is affecting your consumers. How can you not be a manager when you're tasked with organizing the single most important part of a system? (FYI, this is all coming from someone who is both DBA and a heads-down C++ hacker).
I'm inclined to agree. Yourdon has always struck me as one of these blowhards who claims all sorts of IT experience, yet seems to spend all his time writing books. What I've read from this guy makes me think that he's one of these know-nothing know-it-alls who extrapolate industry trends from a few personal experiences. The fact that it took him until "Rise & Resurrection" to figure out that reliability was not required to be 100% for every project underscores his lack of real-world experience.
Most of slashdot are contractors? I doubt it.
I think your attitude stinks. Typical clockpunching point of view by someone who has zero commitment to providing an actual service to his customers. When I was contracting a few years ago, I actually felt obliged to provide my clients with value appropriate to the wage they were paying me. This didn't mean that I killed myself getting work done, but I certainly cared if the project was ahead or behind schedule.
Fools like you think you somehow deserve your salary because you're so brilliant. You aren't - you're scarce. You can exploit that scarcity by doing the bare minimum while pulling down as much cash as possible, or you can use that scarcity as a mandate to yourself to do the most good with the skills you have. Being scarce isn't just about pulling down big dollars - it also means that you can make a real difference in your work. So many people work at shit jobs that are shitty not just in pay, but in satisfaction. Count your blessings.
I suppose if programming didn't pay so well your career of choice would be processing forms at the local Dept of Motor Vehicles. Or maybe a job selling dubious stock to retirees because they're 'too stupid' to know that your product is crap, and it's not your problem if they loose their shirts.
So what we have here are fuel cells being charged by solar cells. Okay, nothing new there. Now we attach it to a kite & let it fly around. Why? Cheap satellite? How is this cheaper than a high altitude unmanned balloon? Seems useless as a powerplant - are you going to run a long wire from this thing down to your house, or maybe have it airdrop you charged batteries & pick up the empties skyhook-style?
I'm sure the people who've been working on this have good reasons for doing it. Too bad the CNN article doesn't tell us a single useful thing. Why do they bother mentioning space applications? Aren't they aware that solar charged fuel cells have been standard equipment in space since the Apollo program? And there's no air up there for that wing.
Enlighten me, someone.