Also, increasing the width of your CPU datapath is not something that can be pushed up forever. A simple 256 bit adder would require at least 768 inputs/outputs. At some point it becomes a lot more efficient to change your approach! Yes. Consider also L1 cache issues - memory access is already larger than machine word size. I suspect fundamental machine word size changes will be hardware driven based on RAM address size and disk/file sizes. 64-bit math will last us for awhile. 32-bit machines had an effective lifetime of over four decades and that's pretty good.
The voting machines should have a security kernel and implement mandatory access controls. It'd also be nice if the system was evaluated to identify which Orange Book class it falls under. The Orange Book isn't relevant. It's at best C2 and only that if there is no network involved. C2 security is liking being able to write your name in the snow inside of an enclosed vault that's sealed in such a fashion that the snow will melt before you can show it to someone, but there'll be a full audit trail so that authorities will be able to find it out after the fact.
I'm aware of that. The article I linked to indicated this game was explicitly used for "open house" type events with visitors. Under those circumstances, the probability approaches one that at least one of the parents there did just what the IBM 360 guy did, let his kids play it, a decade earlier.
I'm really tired of this. Why? Do you have a personal investment in BluRay?
I find it tiring that the prevailing attitude is "If everybody tells you that you cannot succeed, don't bother trying". Whatever happened to "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again"?
This is a thinly disquised shot at MS and closed source formats, not some noble attempt to help out archives. If you don't think the aim of open file formats is noble, you have serious issues. Who owns your data, you who have created it with the assistance of a tool or the company you bought the software from?
It's not the same thing as opening the source code to MS Office and besides, how many people have written here and elsewhere that Open Office, etc. are crap compared to MS Office?
Your post isn't + informative, it's + astroturfing.
A good programmer plans for his demise/departure Let's just stop there. Spot on! Coding is a very short phase in the life of computer software. Maintenance is everything.
Standard, Commented, well structured code is what I look for. Compare the code in Fred Brooks' book The Mythical Man Month -vs- the code in Elements of Programming Style. I'll take uncommented but easy to understand at sight code over Brooks' over-commented and turgid style any day.
My philosophy is that if you can't explain it to me, in layman's terms in under 3 minutes (you're allowed a whiteboard), then you can't explain it to a computer. It's not always that easy, but I hear what you're saying.
Perhaps the defining moment of my career was the time I[1] was tasked with teaching the C language to an incoming programmer (we were in a mostly all-Fortran environment at the time and the project I was on was one of earliest non-Fortran ones in that company) and having to explain, white board and all, the difference between char **, char []* and char [][] to an intelligent individual.
I learned more than she did in the experience and thank you Mark and Betsy!
I take comfort from the fact that I did warn them that this was the kind of guy that he was when he first started, and they didn't listen. I guess my first job post-college was more rewarding. The guy in our group who wouldn't listen to me (he was a "superstar" in his graduating CS group) got his ass canned on his first code review when he proposed implementing a shole bunch of dynamic structures in static C multidimension arrays. Whatever or maybe my bosses were smarter than yours.
[1] Being the only programmer at the time hired into the group based on prior C programming experience.
But you forgot the most important details about the "recognizing" part. If they seem puzzled by the idea of interacting with people - especially people who don't program or otherwise spend most of their day with computers - then you're on right track. If they interact easily and are comfortable conversing on a wide variety of topics look elsewhere. I have to call 'bullshit' on that one. I've found the exact opposite to be true. I have to mostly agree with you, with the qualification that you have to look at age and maybe other factors as well (like how many different stamps they have in their passport, etc.). For younger people (< 40), I agree with the original statement. I'd rather hire a totally devoted, passionate and highly geeky programmer and then train him or her on social skills than vice versa.
With regards to evaluating older folks (like me), I think you're correct. After years of getting the highest marks on technical skill with "people skills need improvement" for balance, I finally went out and did it and I would be highly suspicious of someone my age without any social skills being able to work with a team.
Nope. You would have missed #4 (why the lack of confidence?). Either you're young and are inexperienced at these sorts of things, or you're correct, but I don't think you can be both.
I've interviewed young programmers and had to work with terrible programmers with degrees and certifications. I think the essay is pretty much spot on. YMMV, but mine doesn't.
That might be a good Idea but it could create some problems. Nothing you write about is in any way comparable to the current situation where the majority of the country has polls open when voting results start to be reported in UT-5.
You can either forbid news media from reporting any results until all polls close or make it technically impossible. I'd prefer the latter. Any system that has disenfranchised hundreds of millions of voters for decades is seriously broken and must be fixed. Short of EMPing all radio and TV transmissions on election day, the only solution that will work fairly is to synchronize the voting times.
Another possible addition - make election day a national holiday. Anything that makes it easier for working people to vote cannot be bad and you could reduce the number of hours the polls need to stay open.
I suspect the China solution[1] would be most unpopular - anyone else remember going to school in the dark in Nixon winter (and that was only maintaining Daylight "Savings" Time year round)?
[1] China is UT+8 across the entire country (with minor exceptions) and I have no idea how Western China copes with it.
That may already be happening. I've read that the Ohio-class subs are actually quieter than the surrounding sea when they're not moving, and the only thing giving them away is the "hole." That was a plot point in Clancy's The Sum of All Fears. The book contained a great deal of "technical detail" regarding submarines and the history of submarines. I have no idea how true any of it is (real specs would be classified above Top Secret), but it makes for interesting reading[1].
[1] And of course the line "Sir, he couldn't lead a three year old to the crapper" is worth the price of the book all by itself.
Seriously. Our own Government has done a lot more to make us afraid of terrorism then the terrorists themselves have done. At all levels, some of them real. As an unreal example, how many Americans who have stayed in the US have ever been searched and wanded entering a shopping mall (which is routine in places where there is a real terrorist problem - and popular opinion over the Glorietta mall explosion a few months ago was that it was not an accident)?
At the same time the US embassy in Manila is warning against travel to Tagum (impossible for me to avoid - it's the nearest, largest city and the only way to get to an international airport) because of kidnapped American children, they're changing my passport to broadcast my citizenship to the world nearby. Oooh, I feel so much safer now, but thankfully, I can enter England quicker!!
Pretty clever to grandfather out the voting block that can remember pre-police state america. Strange how that works...
TFA says that everyone (even over 50) must have the new ID by 2017. By that time, everyone with one of the old good passports has long since been updated to the new nifty ones that broadcast "I'm an American, kidnap my children!!!" to the world.
The last time I reentered the US (about a week ago), the lines were longer in the RFID-enabled passport lines at immigration. Cool!
You know, the 2000 election in Florida and the absentee ballots that weren't getting counted cause the laws to be changed in Ohio where now every provisional and absentee ballot get counted now and publish in the official results. I believe is wasn't that way before the 2000 debacle. This is very sad if true, but I doubt it. There are plenty of other elections to be voted upon besides the top one. I find it difficult to believe that my absentee vote for San Luis Obispo City Mayor would not be counted due to the fact that the state vote on President was as decisive as it was. In 2000, I kept a very close watch on ss.ca.gov for absentee ballot counts until it was time to post the state's official Electoral College results and didn't see anything unusual. I can't prove with certainty that my vote was counted, but the federal/state and local totals continued to rise until the absentee ballots were deemed 100% counted.
Regardless of whether there were any irregularities at the polls in Florida, the fact remains that parts of Florida were still voting when initial results were announced due to time zone differences within the state, and the usual disenfranchisement of the Western United States with results from UT-5 being announced when polls closed there, but still had 3 hours or more of being open in UT-8 and Alaska/Hawaii.
A very easy "election reform" that nobody outside of me (to the best of my knowledge) has mentioned is that polling times should be synchronized across all US time zones. Polls on the East coast will have to stay open later than they are accustomed to and polls on the West coast will have to open earlier than they are accustomed to and that's O.K. Voters in Alaska and Hawaii can take comfort in their weird voting hours with the fact that they'll be able to vote in National Elections before the media has decided the race.
TO be fair, My original point was a reply to someone who said the representatives elected didn't reflect their constituents. Yeah, I was agreeing with you.
There are so many eligible people who don't bother to register to vote and more that are registered that don't care enough to show up. If it was a problem, they would show up and put the party in power out of office. They don't so you can only assume that they are somehow content with the issue and the people representing them. Or they're happy with whatever others decide.
A couple of issues though, it doesn't seem to matter which party is in power. The Contract With America sweeping of congress had about the same effect as the sweeping in the 2006 election -- Nothing Happens. In my (voting) lifetime, there hasn't been any fair general election in California (or any other state UT-8 and west) starting with Former President Carter conceding the election before polls had closed.
It really doesn't matter how you vote if either the new guys do the same thing as the old guys, or your vote doesn't count (or isn't counted) in the first place. I lost count of the people who told me my vote wasn't counted in 2000 (I voted by absentee due to working in Tokyo at the time and California overwhelmingly voted Algore). The whiners complaining about the vote counting in Florida (and absolute vote counts -vs- Electoral College) completely ignore the effects of reporting voting results before polls close in western timezones. It's real!
In short gerrymandering exacerbates the problems we already have in Congress, it strengthens the incumbent's position based on something other than the quality of governance they provide. True. I don't believe for a moment that term limits are a solution, but in my home town, there have been exactly two families representing us in Congress in the last 25 years - Erik Seastrand, died in office, his widow Andrea won the sympathy vote next time around, and Walter Capps, also died in office with his widow Lois winning the sympathy vote in the next election.
This is why crap like abortion and gay marriage are so frequently big political talking points, because they polarized the voters and are non-issues to the corporate interests. Yes. Case in point was Lois Capps' first election. The airwaves were flooded and I do mean flooded with 3rd party ads from a pro-life group with issue ads describing partial birth abortion in gruesome graphic detail and urging a vote for her opponent. It backfired, spectacularly.
A historical note for those who care about such things, the 1998 Bordanaro/Capps campaign featured the term "Compassionate Conservative" for the first time. It didn't work and Bordanaro lost by a wider margin than he did in the above mentioned special election.
It doesn't matter if Gerrymandering has taken place or not. If there are enough votes to elect someone then they are reflective of their voting populous. What you are attempting to state is that because of Gerrymandering, people who don't get enough votes are getting in office, That is simply not the case. Gerrymandering certainly is a big problem. My own birthplace of San Luis Obispo county (with a slight lean to the Republican Party) is gerrymandered either North with Monterey or South with Santa Barbara. Ideologically, we belong with Kern County, but that doesn't seem to happen. This leads to interesting elections like when a certain recent politician running for the US Congress could not locate San Luis Obispo on a map. Not surprisingly, he lost big time in our county, but voting irregularities in Santa Barbara where an amazing number of students of UCSB were allowed to vote after the polls were supposed to be closed (he was a professor there) gave him the election anyway.
At any rate, this article isn't about that. It's about how congressional districts are allocated on a state-wide level and that is a separate issue.
I consider this whole article to be something of a red herring. It matters not at all how many congressional districts a state gets if there is cheating in the election. Let's clean up elections first before we start worrying about minor things like this.
they are searching bags at SHOPPING MALLS? With wanding, etc. etc. I live in the Philippines and there is a terrorist problem there. The Glorietta mall in metro Manila was successfully bombed a couple months ago.
once on a 'bad guys list' you NEVER EVER get off. Sadly true. If ever I meet the asshole who used to live in Oakland that I am mixed up with, I'm going to kick his ass.
The only time I've ever been asked to turn on a notebook computer at customs (I wasn't carrying the battery, so it wasn't going to work) they took one look at the keyboard and told me to never mind.
I was treated as a criminal for the crime of not separating a notebook computer from the bag I was carrying it in. Ah well, I've not made that mistake again and haven't been bothered (wrt computers) since then.
It always irritates me when I go into a mall with my wife and the armed security guard waves me through while her purse is carefully examined. Boneheaded security knows no national boundaries.
It all started quite innocently. I was working for a basically nothing small company that's primary business was analog/digital converters. It was the beginning of the Internet revolution then and we were watching it pass by us. One day the boss came into my office and ordered me to game the corporate webpages to increase our hit rate. I held out for as long as I could, but a man has to eat, doesn't he? Reluctantly I agreed. For me, that was the beginning of the end.
Not long after that, I began taking (legal at the time) medical marijuana in order to sleep at night. In the mornings I began snorting cocaine along my morning cup of coffee to get me up for the day. Soon, that wasn't enough and I began using crack cocaine. At first it felt really, really good, but then it too began to not have very much effect on me. So I switched to methamphetimines in the morning and heroin at night.
As the internet revolution continued to pass us by, I resorted to armed bank robbery and B&E to supplement my dwindling paycheck. One night, I happened to hit the wrong store and was arrested and put in prison, where I remain to this very day.
I used to laugh at the videos they showed us in gradeschool like Reefer Madness, etc. It's not so funny now that I'm staring out of a cell most of the time.
Friends, don't let this sad tale of my life happen to you! Just say no! Don't game the Google Search engine. It only leads to drug use, violent crime and a whole host of things I cannot mention right now.
If you want to consider real money, consider the > 450 billion dollars spent over the last 5 years on the Iraq war, or the 450 Billion dollar Defense budget spent every year which doesn't even include war operations. Pictures of faraway things - $0.003/day Dead Iraqi women and children every day - Priceless
Slashdot Mirror
I'm aware of that. The article I linked to indicated this game was explicitly used for "open house" type events with visitors. Under those circumstances, the probability approaches one that at least one of the parents there did just what the IBM 360 guy did, let his kids play it, a decade earlier.
Nope, you're not even close. The first hit on a google search shows a computer game written in 1958.
http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/videogame.html
I find it tiring that the prevailing attitude is "If everybody tells you that you cannot succeed, don't bother trying". Whatever happened to "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again"?
It's not the same thing as opening the source code to MS Office and besides, how many people have written here and elsewhere that Open Office, etc. are crap compared to MS Office?
Your post isn't + informative, it's + astroturfing.
Perhaps the defining moment of my career was the time I[1] was tasked with teaching the C language to an incoming programmer (we were in a mostly all-Fortran environment at the time and the project I was on was one of earliest non-Fortran ones in that company) and having to explain, white board and all, the difference between char **, char []* and char [][] to an intelligent individual.
I learned more than she did in the experience and thank you Mark and Betsy! I take comfort from the fact that I did warn them that this was the kind of guy that he was when he first started, and they didn't listen. I guess my first job post-college was more rewarding. The guy in our group who wouldn't listen to me (he was a "superstar" in his graduating CS group) got his ass canned on his first code review when he proposed implementing a shole bunch of dynamic structures in static C multidimension arrays. Whatever or maybe my bosses were smarter than yours.
[1] Being the only programmer at the time hired into the group based on prior C programming experience.
With regards to evaluating older folks (like me), I think you're correct. After years of getting the highest marks on technical skill with "people skills need improvement" for balance, I finally went out and did it and I would be highly suspicious of someone my age without any social skills being able to work with a team.
Nope. You would have missed #4 (why the lack of confidence?). Either you're young and are inexperienced at these sorts of things, or you're correct, but I don't think you can be both.
I've interviewed young programmers and had to work with terrible programmers with degrees and certifications. I think the essay is pretty much spot on. YMMV, but mine doesn't.
You can either forbid news media from reporting any results until all polls close or make it technically impossible. I'd prefer the latter. Any system that has disenfranchised hundreds of millions of voters for decades is seriously broken and must be fixed. Short of EMPing all radio and TV transmissions on election day, the only solution that will work fairly is to synchronize the voting times.
Another possible addition - make election day a national holiday. Anything that makes it easier for working people to vote cannot be bad and you could reduce the number of hours the polls need to stay open.
I suspect the China solution[1] would be most unpopular - anyone else remember going to school in the dark in Nixon winter (and that was only maintaining Daylight "Savings" Time year round)?
[1] China is UT+8 across the entire country (with minor exceptions) and I have no idea how Western China copes with it.
[1] And of course the line "Sir, he couldn't lead a three year old to the crapper" is worth the price of the book all by itself.
"Oh come on, Max! You know that thing never works."
A couple weeks ago, someone ported Linux 0.01 to build on a modern toolchain. http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Dusting_Off_the_0.01_Kernel
Freedom rocks.
At the same time the US embassy in Manila is warning against travel to Tagum (impossible for me to avoid - it's the nearest, largest city and the only way to get to an international airport) because of kidnapped American children, they're changing my passport to broadcast my citizenship to the world nearby. Oooh, I feel so much safer now, but thankfully, I can enter England quicker!!
The last time I reentered the US (about a week ago), the lines were longer in the RFID-enabled passport lines at immigration. Cool!
Regardless of whether there were any irregularities at the polls in Florida, the fact remains that parts of Florida were still voting when initial results were announced due to time zone differences within the state, and the usual disenfranchisement of the Western United States with results from UT-5 being announced when polls closed there, but still had 3 hours or more of being open in UT-8 and Alaska/Hawaii.
A very easy "election reform" that nobody outside of me (to the best of my knowledge) has mentioned is that polling times should be synchronized across all US time zones. Polls on the East coast will have to stay open later than they are accustomed to and polls on the West coast will have to open earlier than they are accustomed to and that's O.K. Voters in Alaska and Hawaii can take comfort in their weird voting hours with the fact that they'll be able to vote in National Elections before the media has decided the race.
A couple of issues though, it doesn't seem to matter which party is in power. The Contract With America sweeping of congress had about the same effect as the sweeping in the 2006 election -- Nothing Happens. In my (voting) lifetime, there hasn't been any fair general election in California (or any other state UT-8 and west) starting with Former President Carter conceding the election before polls had closed.
It really doesn't matter how you vote if either the new guys do the same thing as the old guys, or your vote doesn't count (or isn't counted) in the first place. I lost count of the people who told me my vote wasn't counted in 2000 (I voted by absentee due to working in Tokyo at the time and California overwhelmingly voted Algore). The whiners complaining about the vote counting in Florida (and absolute vote counts -vs- Electoral College) completely ignore the effects of reporting voting results before polls close in western timezones. It's real!
A historical note for those who care about such things, the 1998 Bordanaro/Capps campaign featured the term "Compassionate Conservative" for the first time. It didn't work and Bordanaro lost by a wider margin than he did in the above mentioned special election.
At any rate, this article isn't about that. It's about how congressional districts are allocated on a state-wide level and that is a separate issue.
I consider this whole article to be something of a red herring. It matters not at all how many congressional districts a state gets if there is cheating in the election. Let's clean up elections first before we start worrying about minor things like this.
The only time I've ever been asked to turn on a notebook computer at customs (I wasn't carrying the battery, so it wasn't going to work) they took one look at the keyboard and told me to never mind.
I was treated as a criminal for the crime of not separating a notebook computer from the bag I was carrying it in. Ah well, I've not made that mistake again and haven't been bothered (wrt computers) since then.
It always irritates me when I go into a mall with my wife and the armed security guard waves me through while her purse is carefully examined. Boneheaded security knows no national boundaries.
It all started quite innocently. I was working for a basically nothing small company that's primary business was analog/digital converters. It was the beginning of the Internet revolution then and we were watching it pass by us. One day the boss came into my office and ordered me to game the corporate webpages to increase our hit rate. I held out for as long as I could, but a man has to eat, doesn't he? Reluctantly I agreed. For me, that was the beginning of the end.
Not long after that, I began taking (legal at the time) medical marijuana in order to sleep at night. In the mornings I began snorting cocaine along my morning cup of coffee to get me up for the day. Soon, that wasn't enough and I began using crack cocaine. At first it felt really, really good, but then it too began to not have very much effect on me. So I switched to methamphetimines in the morning and heroin at night.
As the internet revolution continued to pass us by, I resorted to armed bank robbery and B&E to supplement my dwindling paycheck. One night, I happened to hit the wrong store and was arrested and put in prison, where I remain to this very day.
I used to laugh at the videos they showed us in gradeschool like Reefer Madness, etc. It's not so funny now that I'm staring out of a cell most of the time.
Friends, don't let this sad tale of my life happen to you! Just say no! Don't game the Google Search engine. It only leads to drug use, violent crime and a whole host of things I cannot mention right now.
Dead Iraqi women and children every day - Priceless