usually done for maintainability, expandability and is pretty much a requirement if there are multiple people writing pieces of the program
All of which can be pretty much assumed to be the case if you're getting paid to code. Not always -- some jobs (eg sysadmin, and others) might require a fair bit of "quick bang out a script to do X" where the code will never be used again. But even there you want somebody who can think on their feet, not develop the script by stepwise refinement from "echo 'hello world'".
Indenting is relevant to this for the same reason that Python uses only indenting, not braces or begin-end, to indicate block structure.
Yes, one school of coding in a text editor is to place the open/close braces first and then fill in the code. As you say, that's tough to do on paper. It's also a crutch.
Another school says indent your code properly and the braces are superfluous, just there for the compiler (for non-Python languages).
If you follow the latter train of thought, you just put in the closing brace when you're done filling in the intermediate, indented code.
I swear I've known alleged programmers who, for any given problem, with start with a "hello world" and follow the edit/compile/test cycle until it does what they want.
For hobby programming, fine. If I (or my employer) is paying them, I want something a bit more efficient.
That makes all kinds of sense for a job interview situation. There, they want to know not just what you know, but how well you perform under pressure, and how fast you can perform.
The guy who knows the syntax and the APIs off the top of his head is, ultimately, going to produce faster than the guy who relies on multiple passes through the compiler to correct his syntax and using 'man' or equivalent to look up the API of every function -- just as the person who can add/subtract numbers in their head can check their change faster than someone who has to count on their fingers.
Somebody looking to actually pay money to somebody to write code for them (ie, to hire a programmer) is going to prefer the former rather than the latter, so why not give them such a test? (And it will instantly screen out the bozos who've lied on their resume and maybe just memorized enough to pass simple interview questions.)
Bullshit. The clock overflow at 47 days locks it up solid. But yeah, if that's all it's being used for it may well last the 47 days.
Re:What about the transition defects?
on
Java Powers of Ten
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Agreed, although they make some (lame) argument in the web site notes about "visual impact" and such.
But they could have done the transitions as a smooth zoom of the whole image if they'd chosen images to avoid the abrupt jumps like that. What would be really cool would be something like this but with a slider control so you could do fractional powers of ten and zoom in or out at your own speed.
Yeah, gyroscopes probably isn't even the right term, these things are momentum wheels used to soak up undesired angular momentum of the station (or occasionally to restore angular momentum in a desired direction.)
Intellegence is about finding the differences between things that are the same, sameness between things that are different, and adapting to new situations fluidly. All of these are impossible with large collections of rules.
Nice summary. Cyc and programs like it "learn" by adding exceptions and tweaks and special cases to their existing rules, ie new rules. (Some people operate like that too -- consider a gambler who keeps coming up with "rules" about his lucky shirt that only works on Thursdays if he stirs his coffee clockwise..).
True intelligence has more (IMHO) to do with limiting the total number of rules by rewriting the rules as necessary to a new model. (Classic example - Kepler's use of ellipses to describe planetary orbits instead of the prior "circles with cycles and epicycles"
(Of course, given the above, it appears obvious that many people are operating on artificial intelligence rather than the real thing;-)
If it doesn't have a "sense of morality", then it dang well better have been programmed with the Three Laws of Robotics.
(And if you think it isn't a problem because it isn't a "robot" -- ie is immobile and has no manipulators -- well, it's connected to the net, ain't it?)
Do you really get upset when you see someone on a sitcom drinking a Pepsi?
Heh. Remember the subtle and amusing anti-product placement in the movie "Repo Man"? They'd go buy some snacks and beer and everything was generically labeled (in plain black and white as I recall) "Chips" or "Beer" or "Food".
Pretty funny really. (And if you haven't seen that movie, you should.)
As to why gopher died out, Tim Berners-Lee offers the following:
"It was just about this time, spring 1993, that the University of Minnesota decided that it would ask for a license fee from certain classes of users who wanted to use gopher. Since the gopher software being picked up so widely, the university was going to charge an annual fee. The browser, and the act of browsing, would be free, and the server software would remain free to nonprofit and educational institutions. But any other users, notably companies, would have to pay to use gopher server software.
"This was an act of treason in the academic community and the Internet community. Even if the university never charged anyone a dime, the fact that the school had announced it was reserving the right to charge people for the use of the gopher protocols meant it had crossed the line. To use the technology was too risky. Industry dropped gopher like a hot potato."
From the pictures on harcop, it looks like a Russian-made Sovtek 6922 (aka E88CC aka 6DJ8). Here's the specs on a 6DJ8. Basically a dual triode like the 12AX7 but somewhat different characteristics.
TCI did something similar during a pay-per-view boxing match. Flashed up a message offering a free T-shirt (or some such) to those calling a certain 800 number.
A simple cross check of the callers vs those who'd actually paid to watch the fight turned up a number of PPV freeloaders.
There is a difference. Sony's i.Link connectors are 4-pin, data-only (omitting the 2 power pins of the standard 6-pin 1394/FireWire connector).
The wire protocol is of course identical, and these days just about every add-on 1394 card comes with an adapter cable. The 4-pin is a nice size for devices like cameras where a lot of stuff is crammed into a small space.
Theoretically one can plug a firewire drive into a firewire camera, and transfer footage from the camera directly to the HD.
The catch there is that the camera has to know something about filesystems. Shrug, I have both, I'll have to try the experiment.
However, it does work very nicely to transfer DV between two cameras without a computer (MiniDV to D8 in my case) or to stream DV data to multiple PC's on the same 1394 bus. Since it's peer-to-peer (unlike USB), it's great for audio-video gear (where it is starting to show up).
And they couldn't have simply released the new technology into the public domain
You can still do that with the patent, and that guarantees (well, in theory) that nobody else will be granted a patent anyway. Given some of the PTO's decisions, merely PD'ing it without a patent gives no such guarantee.
This is what Bell Labs did with their software patent on the Unix SUID bit -- they formally released the patent into the public domain.
the only thing a patent is good for is to stop people from using an invention, or make them pay you
Depends on whether or not you consider being allowed to use somebody else's patent a payment or not.
Most big companies with patent portfolios don't necessarily license them out for money, they'll trade licensing rights with some other company that holds patents they want to use. I.e, if companies A and B each hold patents on some critical component of product Y, they might well mutally license them to each other to allow both to produce the product. (Or, more realistically, A needs B's patent to produce Y, and B needs A's patent to produce Z).
Furthermore, getting the patent yourself is (these days) often the only way to easily prove "prior art" to defend yourself against some other bozo patenting your invention and charging you for it. What's known as a "defensive patent".
Randall Garret's Lord Darcy stories and novels were doing this years ago. A parallel Earth (with a couple of historical differences) where "magic" is the technology of the day and is used more as background (the stories tend toward Sherlock Holmes-type mysteries).
Technically fantasy but written to the rules of hard SF such that the stories used to be published in Analog back under John W Campbell, when that magazine had such a reputation for hard SF it was often referred to as "the one with rivets".
Well, I think in a couple of cases (Winnie the Pooh?) Disney might have actually paid for rights, but in most cases you're exactly right, and yes, the irony is obvious.
Microsoft's attempt to justify closed-source... so insecure that [it] must be kept top-secret
Hmm, would that be the same closed source that apparently (although MSFT later denied it) leaked out to some foreign crackers that had infiltrated Microsoft's internal network for a couple of months last year?
Oh, wait, that was before the four weeks of "security related" bug fixing last February. Okay, everything's fine now. Just a small leak, really.
Your railroad analogy is interesting. Just the other day I was remarking that, although a lot of reflexive anti-government libertarians are down on the whole Microsoft anti-trust trial, Bill Gates is more like a Cornelius ('Commodore') Vanderbilt than a Hank Rearden.
To be more precise, Steamboat Willy (the first Micky cartoon) would have lost its copyright. Later works would lose their copyrights at later dates.
Although given how much heavy duty recycling some of the 50+ year old Disney "classics" have gone through on VHS and DVD, I'm sure the company would love to keep on milking those for a few more generations. Although it looks like they're hedging their bets with all the derivative stuff lately -- Little Mermaid 2, Cinderella 2, Return To Neverland (aka Peter Pan 2), etc, etc.
The web site is www.coloradonocall.com to opt out. The law doesn't go into effect until June 1st, but they've already got more people on the opt-out list in a few weeks than they had on the voluntary list in a couple of years.
As seems typical, it doesn't ban charitable institutions, companies with "established business relationships", or (of course) political campaigns. But it does also cover fax lines.
The thing is, SSNs aren't unique IDs. Oh, they're supposed to be, but screw-ups by the SSA and by people innocently using numbers that weren't theirs means that there are plenty of duplicates around.
And any database designer worth his paycheck should bloody well know that (there's a good summary of the problems here). And any software designer worthy of the name should include a "Generate Unique ID" button on any data entry screen that otherwise might want SSN just as a key.
Heck, even if there's a requirement for SSN in the database (eg tax-related info), don't use that as the bloody key. Banks don't use your SSN as your account number, after all. (At least, not the ones I deal with.)
The point about patents and inventions is that it only becomes an infringement of the patent when the idea expressed in it is reduced to practise. You can compile broken or translated source to your heart's content, or even build a hard-wired implementation of the dang thing (showing how to do that is how Bell Labs got a patent on the SUID bit back when, when software patents were unheard of) -- but as soon as you actually use the idea commercially, you're infringeing.
Distributing source code which implements a patented algorithm is, in theory, no more infringeing than distributing copies of the patent itself. Depending on the specific circumstances, though, if somebody then used that in an infringeing manner, you could get nailed for contributory infringement.
(In this particular case, though, the patent is just bogus.)
Slashdot Mirror
usually done for maintainability, expandability and is pretty much a requirement if there are multiple people writing pieces of the program
All of which can be pretty much assumed to be the case if you're getting paid to code. Not always -- some jobs (eg sysadmin, and others) might require a fair bit of "quick bang out a script to do X" where the code will never be used again. But even there you want somebody who can think on their feet, not develop the script by stepwise refinement from "echo 'hello world'".
You miss the point.
Indenting is relevant to this for the same reason that Python uses only indenting, not braces or begin-end, to indicate block structure.
Yes, one school of coding in a text editor is to place the open/close braces first and then fill in the code. As you say, that's tough to do on paper. It's also a crutch.
Another school says indent your code properly and the braces are superfluous, just there for the compiler (for non-Python languages).
If you follow the latter train of thought, you just put in the closing brace when you're done filling in the intermediate, indented code.
Yes.
I swear I've known alleged programmers who, for any given problem, with start with a "hello world" and follow the edit/compile/test cycle until it does what they want.
For hobby programming, fine. If I (or my employer) is paying them, I want something a bit more efficient.
That makes all kinds of sense for a job interview situation. There, they want to know not just what you know, but how well you perform under pressure, and how fast you can perform.
The guy who knows the syntax and the APIs off the top of his head is, ultimately, going to produce faster than the guy who relies on multiple passes through the compiler to correct his syntax and using 'man' or equivalent to look up the API of every function -- just as the person who can add/subtract numbers in their head can check their change faster than someone who has to count on their fingers.
Somebody looking to actually pay money to somebody to write code for them (ie, to hire a programmer) is going to prefer the former rather than the latter, so why not give them such a test? (And it will instantly screen out the bozos who've lied on their resume and maybe just memorized enough to pass simple interview questions.)
win95 router box up for months
Bullshit. The clock overflow at 47 days locks it up solid. But yeah, if that's all it's being used for it may well last the 47 days.
Agreed, although they make some (lame) argument in the web site notes about "visual impact" and such.
But they could have done the transitions as a smooth zoom of the whole image if they'd chosen images to avoid the abrupt jumps like that. What would be really cool would be something like this but with a slider control so you could do fractional powers of ten and zoom in or out at your own speed.
Yeah, gyroscopes probably isn't even the right term, these things are momentum wheels used to soak up undesired angular momentum of the station (or occasionally to restore angular momentum in a desired direction.)
Intellegence is about finding the differences between things that are the same, sameness between things that are different, and adapting to new situations fluidly. All of these are impossible with large collections of rules.
;-)
Nice summary. Cyc and programs like it "learn" by adding exceptions and tweaks and special cases to their existing rules, ie new rules. (Some people operate like that too -- consider a gambler who keeps coming up with "rules" about his lucky shirt that only works on Thursdays if he stirs his coffee clockwise..).
True intelligence has more (IMHO) to do with limiting the total number of rules by rewriting the rules as necessary to a new model. (Classic example - Kepler's use of ellipses to describe planetary orbits instead of the prior "circles with cycles and epicycles"
(Of course, given the above, it appears obvious that many people are operating on artificial intelligence rather than the real thing
If it doesn't have a "sense of morality", then it dang well better have been programmed with the Three Laws of Robotics.
(And if you think it isn't a problem because it isn't a "robot" -- ie is immobile and has no manipulators -- well, it's connected to the net, ain't it?)
Do you really get upset when you see someone on a sitcom drinking a Pepsi?
Heh. Remember the subtle and amusing anti-product placement in the movie "Repo Man"? They'd go buy some snacks and beer and everything was generically labeled (in plain black and white as I recall) "Chips" or "Beer" or "Food".
Pretty funny really. (And if you haven't seen that movie, you should.)
However, a quicky search turns up several still-active gophers, for example:
gopher://gopher.umsl.edu/
gopher://gopher.cac.psu.edu/
(These actually return data -- some others I found the server up but no data returned).
As to why gopher died out, Tim Berners-Lee offers the following:
(from his book, Weaving the Web)
From the pictures on harcop, it looks like a Russian-made Sovtek 6922 (aka E88CC aka 6DJ8). Here's the specs on a 6DJ8. Basically a dual triode like the 12AX7 but somewhat different characteristics.
TCI did something similar during a pay-per-view boxing match. Flashed up a message offering a free T-shirt (or some such) to those calling a certain 800 number.
A simple cross check of the callers vs those who'd actually paid to watch the fight turned up a number of PPV freeloaders.
There is a difference. Sony's i.Link connectors are 4-pin, data-only (omitting the 2 power pins of the standard 6-pin 1394/FireWire connector).
The wire protocol is of course identical, and these days just about every add-on 1394 card comes with an adapter cable. The 4-pin is a nice size for devices like cameras where a lot of stuff is crammed into a small space.
Theoretically one can plug a firewire drive into a firewire camera, and transfer footage from the camera directly to the HD.
The catch there is that the camera has to know something about filesystems. Shrug, I have both, I'll have to try the experiment.
However, it does work very nicely to transfer DV between two cameras without a computer (MiniDV to D8 in my case) or to stream DV data to multiple PC's on the same 1394 bus. Since it's peer-to-peer (unlike USB), it's great for audio-video gear (where it is starting to show up).
And they couldn't have simply released the new technology into the public domain
You can still do that with the patent, and that guarantees (well, in theory) that nobody else will be granted a patent anyway. Given some of the PTO's decisions, merely PD'ing it without a patent gives no such guarantee.
This is what Bell Labs did with their software patent on the Unix SUID bit -- they formally released the patent into the public domain.
the only thing a patent is good for is to stop people from using an invention, or make them pay you
Depends on whether or not you consider being allowed to use somebody else's patent a payment or not.
Most big companies with patent portfolios don't necessarily license them out for money, they'll trade licensing rights with some other company that holds patents they want to use. I.e, if companies A and B each hold patents on some critical component of product Y, they might well mutally license them to each other to allow both to produce the product. (Or, more realistically, A needs B's patent to produce Y, and B needs A's patent to produce Z).
Furthermore, getting the patent yourself is (these days) often the only way to easily prove "prior art" to defend yourself against some other bozo patenting your invention and charging you for it. What's known as a "defensive patent".
Randall Garret's Lord Darcy stories and novels were doing this years ago. A parallel Earth (with a couple of historical differences) where "magic" is the technology of the day and is used more as background (the stories tend toward Sherlock Holmes-type mysteries).
Technically fantasy but written to the rules of hard SF such that the stories used to be published in Analog back under John W Campbell, when that magazine had such a reputation for hard SF it was often referred to as "the one with rivets".
Well, I think in a couple of cases (Winnie the Pooh?) Disney might have actually paid for rights, but in most cases you're exactly right, and yes, the irony is obvious.
Microsoft's attempt to justify closed-source ... so insecure that [it] must be kept top-secret
Hmm, would that be the same closed source that apparently (although MSFT later denied it) leaked out to some foreign crackers that had infiltrated Microsoft's internal network for a couple of months last year?
Oh, wait, that was before the four weeks of "security related" bug fixing last February. Okay, everything's fine now. Just a small leak, really.
Your railroad analogy is interesting. Just the other day I was remarking that, although a lot of reflexive anti-government libertarians are down on the whole Microsoft anti-trust trial, Bill Gates is more like a Cornelius ('Commodore') Vanderbilt than a Hank Rearden.
Mickey Mouse would have lost its copyright
To be more precise, Steamboat Willy (the first Micky cartoon) would have lost its copyright. Later works would lose their copyrights at later dates.
Although given how much heavy duty recycling some of the 50+ year old Disney "classics" have gone through on VHS and DVD, I'm sure the company would love to keep on milking those for a few more generations. Although it looks like they're hedging their bets with all the derivative stuff lately -- Little Mermaid 2, Cinderella 2, Return To Neverland (aka Peter Pan 2), etc, etc.
The web site is www.coloradonocall.com to opt out. The law doesn't go into effect until June 1st, but they've already got more people on the opt-out list in a few weeks than they had on the voluntary list in a couple of years.
As seems typical, it doesn't ban charitable institutions, companies with "established business relationships", or (of course) political campaigns. But it does also cover fax lines.
The thing is, SSNs aren't unique IDs. Oh, they're supposed to be, but screw-ups by the SSA and by people innocently using numbers that weren't theirs means that there are plenty of duplicates around.
And any database designer worth his paycheck should bloody well know that (there's a good summary of the problems here). And any software designer worthy of the name should include a "Generate Unique ID" button on any data entry screen that otherwise might want SSN just as a key.
Heck, even if there's a requirement for SSN in the database (eg tax-related info), don't use that as the bloody key. Banks don't use your SSN as your account number, after all. (At least, not the ones I deal with.)
The point about patents and inventions is that it only becomes an infringement of the patent when the idea expressed in it is reduced to practise. You can compile broken or translated source to your heart's content, or even build a hard-wired implementation of the dang thing (showing how to do that is how Bell Labs got a patent on the SUID bit back when, when software patents were unheard of) -- but as soon as you actually use the idea commercially, you're infringeing.
Distributing source code which implements a patented algorithm is, in theory, no more infringeing than distributing copies of the patent itself. Depending on the specific circumstances, though, if somebody then used that in an infringeing manner, you could get nailed for contributory infringement.
(In this particular case, though, the patent is just bogus.)