One excellent thing that's going to happen because of genetic engineering of humans: fish people. With webbed fingers/feet and gills.
One nice side effect of this will be that land-humans will be forced to treat the ocean with a little more respect. When they want to dump a few million tons of toxic waste into the sea they'll be getting sued by the fish people.
Bird people, unfortunately, probably won't be so practical.
Eidola sounds similar to the Microsoft research project Intentional Programming IP's basic statement of purpose ( from the page ):
"The Intentional Programming group is investigating a kind of programming abstraction (called an Intention) whose syntactic look, implementation details, and feature-driven variations may be defined by the programmer. Reusable libraries of such Intentions lend themselves to the automatic generation of custom reusable componentry that, over many applications, expresses both greater variation and better performance than one can get from reusable libraries of object oriented concrete classes, abstract classes, or templates."
In case thats too taxing for ya, here's a nice screenshot.
When stuff like OEL becomes truly ubiqitious -- ie you'll be able buy rolls and rolls of the stuff like wrapping paper -- people will start decorating their houses with it. You'll walk into someone's house, and -- hey! Its the African Sahara!
The truly interesting application of this technology will be the rise of Visual DJs (VDJs). Dance clubs will be covered wall to wall with OEL-like material, and, much like audio DJ's mix music today, VDJs will be mixing video and sound. Creation of mixed video will become a truly creative art. (And its going to make for some very interesting parties. Not to mention some bad trips... )
I think it is possible to do both industry and research ( with a caveat or two ).
Get a job with a company that will pay for your education and start doing an aggressive class schedule ( 2 classes a semester ). It will take you about twice as long to your masters, and you won't have much free time, but you will be completely submersed in software/computer science related stuff.
Doing both will additionally give you both a good practical and theoretical understanding of our ( black? ) art. Working for The Man will teach you how to write sloppy and ill-managed code ( er, I mean, efficient and cost-effective code;). Doing the school thing will teach you to write impractical and over-abstract code ( er, I mean, niche'd and deep code;)
In the end you should come out as a balanced and skilled programmer.
Finding myself unable to code, I started writing the code in english on paper. I would sit down in a corner of the room and start writing in english. "check the user permissions. if the guy is an admin, show this and that screen. for each line in the screen, make sure it's bla bla." and so on. Once I was done and saw that I had something that could work, I took the text, pasted it into the existing source code and started translating it to code (Java in this case).
I think one of the main reasons for "coding block" is a lack of understanding of what the system your building is supposed to do. In macpeep's case above, he got away from the code and did some design work.
Which is probably one really good way to get out of coding block: do design work. If your design is frustrated too, you might have to keep going up and do analysis or design.
One of the primary reasons software projects fail is overemphasis on the actual act of coding. Immature managers often fall victim to this mentality; they think that if you're not coding, then you're not working. Working on design or analysis diagrams, writing up architecture specifications or doodling out use cases is seen as unproductive.
The openning scene of the movie was absolutely powerful - it set a tone that (IMO) the rest of the movie failed to live up to. If the entire movie carried the emotional payload of the first five minutes, it would have been draining, and not envigorating. It would have left half of it's target audience, the early-teen boys, in shambles, asking some very hard questions.
There was a little girl and her father sitting behind me in the movie, and during the opening scene ( without giving too much away, hint: Hitler Germany, Auswitz camp ) she asked him: "What are they doing? Where are they taking those people?" Made me think: "Kids movie? No way!"
Marvel announced yesterday that, since the movie did so well this weekend ( 60 million plus ), they are starting the sequel. Whoohoo!
I read somewhere (sorry, don't remember where) that soon we'll have physical books with LCD pages. You could download the virtual book to your LCD book and read the text 'in real life.' Sort of invalides the Library of Congress argument. Sozin
I'm curious what RMS's opinion is about Gnutella, both philosophically and technically. Proponents of gnutella argue that, unlike napster, Gnutella will be very difficult for the The Man to put down (due to its distributed, anonymous, peer-to-peer, ownerless nature). Antagonists argue that its just another way for lawbreakers to share MP3's.
Which leads me to a second opinion: what is RMS's opinion on the current lawsuit by Mettalica against Napster?
Slashdot Mirror
One nice side effect of this will be that land-humans will be forced to treat the ocean with a little more respect. When they want to dump a few million tons of toxic waste into the sea they'll be getting sued by the fish people.
Bird people, unfortunately, probably won't be so practical.
"The Intentional Programming group is investigating a kind of programming abstraction (called an Intention) whose syntactic look, implementation details, and feature-driven variations may be defined by the programmer. Reusable libraries of such Intentions lend themselves to the automatic generation of custom reusable componentry that, over many applications, expresses both greater variation and better performance than one can get from reusable libraries of object oriented concrete classes, abstract classes, or templates."
In case thats too taxing for ya, here's a nice screenshot.
When stuff like OEL becomes truly ubiqitious -- ie you'll be able buy rolls and rolls of the stuff like wrapping paper -- people will start decorating their houses with it. You'll walk into someone's house, and -- hey! Its the African Sahara!
The truly interesting application of this technology will be the rise of Visual DJs (VDJs). Dance clubs will be covered wall to wall with OEL-like material, and, much like audio DJ's mix music today, VDJs will be mixing video and sound. Creation of mixed video will become a truly creative art. (And its going to make for some very interesting parties. Not to mention some bad trips ... )
Sozin, peering into the crystal ball.
I think it is possible to do both industry and research ( with a caveat or two ).
;). Doing the school thing will teach you to write impractical and over-abstract code ( er, I mean, niche'd and deep code ;)
Get a job with a company that will pay for your education and start doing an aggressive class schedule ( 2 classes a semester ). It will take you about twice as long to your masters, and you won't have much free time, but you will be completely submersed in software/computer science related stuff.
Doing both will additionally give you both a good practical and theoretical understanding of our ( black? ) art. Working for The Man will teach you how to write sloppy and ill-managed code ( er, I mean, efficient and cost-effective code
In the end you should come out as a balanced and skilled programmer.
Sozin
They give a UNIX test ( in Dutch, of course ); me and a co-worker took it, and scored 83% ( without using Babel fish :).
I'm really feeling guru level now :)
I think one of the main reasons for "coding block" is a lack of understanding of what the system your building is supposed to do. In macpeep's case above, he got away from the code and did some design work.
Which is probably one really good way to get out of coding block: do design work. If your design is frustrated too, you might have to keep going up and do analysis or design.
One of the primary reasons software projects fail is overemphasis on the actual act of coding. Immature managers often fall victim to this mentality; they think that if you're not coding, then you're not working. Working on design or analysis diagrams, writing up architecture specifications or doodling out use cases is seen as unproductive.
There was a little girl and her father sitting behind me in the movie, and during the opening scene ( without giving too much away, hint: Hitler Germany, Auswitz camp ) she asked him: "What are they doing? Where are they taking those people?" Made me think: "Kids movie? No way!"
Marvel announced yesterday that, since the movie did so well this weekend ( 60 million plus ), they are starting the sequel. Whoohoo!
I read somewhere (sorry, don't remember where) that soon we'll have physical books with LCD pages. You could download the virtual book to your LCD book and read the text 'in real life.' Sort of invalides the Library of Congress argument. Sozin
Which leads me to a second opinion: what is RMS's opinion on the current lawsuit by Mettalica against Napster?
Thank you!!