It worries me you asked about A+ certification. A+ seems like an obvious non-starter unless you need it for some obscure employer policy (as at least one other posters mentioned (for Alaska)). Which makes me wonder if other problems (challenges?) are missing from your original problem description.
Can you post a streamlined version of your resume? Simple text + skills + work history; you can strip company + identifying info. That would give the crowd here some more to work on.
Some additional questions for you:
What area do you live in? (Country + closest major city).
Can you travel?
What kind of schedule can you work?
Skills: Java, C#, PL/SQL, some Unix scripting
What kind of role are you looking for?
What kind of recruiters have you reached out to?
Agreed.
It is still interesting to think about; and kind of cool that we have no idea what the future really holds.
This has a nice summary Ultimate_fate_of_the_Universe of current thinking.
Big Rips, Big Bounces, Big Freezes, Big Crunches.
Lots of options:-)
The night sky on Earth (assuming it survives) will change dramatically as our Milky Way galaxy merges with its neighbors and distant galaxies recede beyond view.
The quickening expansion will eventually pull galaxies apart faster than light, causing them to drop out of view. This process eliminates reference points for measuring expansion and dilutes the distinctive products of the big bang to nothingness. In short, it erases all the signs that a big bang ever occurred.
To our distant descendants, the universe will look like a small puddle of stars in an endless, changeless void.
I forgot this part - 11am, short line. Paper ballot + scanner machine. Worked fine.
too many Judges though (e.g. why even "vote" if there's only one person seeking the position?)
In Chicago this morning I saw an election judge chastising a volunteer (I'm assuming they're all volunteers) who was answering a voter's questions on ballot organization or maybe interpretation (r.e. the lady in your post). The judge was pretty worked up about the volunteer helping the voter in isolation (e.g. solo, with no other volunteers present); she went went on for a few minutes about needing to have both a Democrat + Republican assist at the same time if any voter needed help with their ballot.
I was amused. It made me wonder how things would work out if (when?) a 3rd party crosses that 5% mark, will they need 3 "assistants" to make sure things are neutral?
I was also amused after the judge shushed the volunteer back to sit down at the table the voter was asking the judge questions.
Seriously though, the volunteers - are trying hard; I am grateful they put in the hard work that they do. It has to get old managing a polling station after a few hours.
So nano is an open source rewrite of pico; interesting to see nano has some fans (I'm guessing Pico isn't used so much in 2012).
From wikipedia:
nano implements some features that Pico lacks, including colored text, regular expression search and replace, smooth scrolling, multiple buffers, rebindable key support, and (experimental) undoing and redoing of edit changes.
I poked around nano's website and it seems pretty capable.
It sounds like nano does everything you need, so there is no reason to learn about other editors.
I have fond memories of pine and pico; maybe I will look at nano one of these days.
fwiw, I find some powertools worth learning to use well even if they have a non-easy learning curve (sed comes to mind). This also applies to text editors; they're just tools.
As for "1975 wants vi back", I actually get a lot of mileage from vim which is a bit closer to nano's era.
nano: born 1999 as TIP, inspired by pico.
(btw, the last item on the nano news page is from 2009: "Now on Twitter and Facebook and Happy 10th Birthday nano". Is nano under active development these days?)
vim:born 1988, released 1991 (initially for amiga, much more widespread now), inspired by vi (note I do feel sorry for anyone stuck using "classic vi" in the same way I'd feel sorry for anyone stuck with edlin).
(side note: vi-style learning curve sucks. My first two weeks were Painful, but now that I have some skill (muscle memory) with the keys I find it very effective. Kind of like how touch-typing is harder to learn than "hunt & peck" but it is still well worthwhile to learn how to touch-type; it pays dividends. Most of vi-style power (for me) comes from the fast navigation+editing commands that are tied to a rather terse (and admittedly cryptic) "shorthand" language of key combinations... I remember actually being surprised at how clunky arrow key + mouse navigation felt when I first used conventional editors after driving vi-style for a while.)
One of the things I like about having learned Vim is it will be available pretty much wherever I might need to work: here are some of the targets from from wikipedia's vim page (* indicates ports I have used):
AmigaOS (the initial target platform), DOS, Microsoft Windows 95/*98/Me/*NT/*2000/*XP/*Server 2003/*Vista/*Server 2008/*7, IBM OS/2 and OS/390, OpenVMS, QNX, *Unix, *Linux, BSD, and Mac OS. Also, Vim is shipped with every copy of Apple Mac OS X. Independent ports of Vim are available both for Android and iOS.
(I've also found vim for aix; useful if one needs to spend time there.) Note that vim seems pretty consistently fully featured on the various platforms I've used it on (*'s above).
By comparison, nano seems pretty content to excel in linux distributions (redhat & debian).
And maybe, possibly, kind of sort of windows: from the nano faq, 3.9 How about in Win32
We're still working on documentation for enabling synax highlighting on Win32; please bear with us. Note that the nano.rc file must remain Unix formatted in order for nano to understand it. In other words, you should use probably only use nano to edit its config file. Other programs like Wordpad and Notepad will either convert the file to DOS format when saving, and the latter does not even properly read Unix-formatted files to begin with.
*shrug* I'm glad nano is working for you in the land of the modern linux desktop.
As for emacs: I sincerely believe that emacs users enjoy the capabilities they find; I may find a need for something emacs does well these days. I've never heard anyone say "Yeah,
Blueprints for Civilization This TED video is worth 4 minutes of your time.
Jakubowski articulates his vision very clearly.
I remember hearing of this a few years ago; I am glad to see they're making some headway.
Why don't we try to strengthen laws for individuals....and make things easier for people to self employ, self incorporate and contract themselves.
Who is this "we" you speak of?
I like your ideas, fwiw. Sounds like something a union might productively work on.
Connecting your ideas back to The Fine Article, maybe one answer to "What might it take to start a programmer union" is a clear political policy goal like you described. While perhaps not a noble and selfless cause, it does appeals to my sense of enlightened self interest.
(btw, I would be really interested to see which, if any, companies or candidates endorsed the policies you describe).
What happens when that master key gets out in the wild? It's bound to happen eventually...
From the fine wiki article:
Some building managers wire Knox Boxes into their burglar alarm systems so that opening the box trips the alarm, negating their use in facilitating clandestine entry.
Certainly thought provoking.
It could be done more interestingly, perhaps operating in an area with a public facing surveillance cam. Then he could engage passers by in conversations more like: "Why are you taking a video?" "Do you think there is a difference between what I'm doing and what that camera over there is doing?" As it is, he just seems to be irritating people and not planting any seeds for future thought.
I say this after watching the second video here..
0:23 shopper exits store
shopper: "Can I ask who you are?"
video guy: "What."
shopper: "What are you doing?"
video guy: "Oh I'm taking a video."
shopper: "Of what?"
video guy: "Just a video."
shopper: "Why are you taking a video?"
video guy: "Why not?"
shopper: "I don't really care for other people just to be taking a random video of me."
video guy: "Didn't you just come out of the drug store?"
shopper: "Yeah"
video guy: "They have cameras in there."
shopper: "So?"
shopper: gets on bike, rides off.
I've heard nothing but good things about Kefir.
If I didn't travel as much I'd be trying home made Kefir, but some days I just just want to take a pill.
So your plan A:
1) Acquire goat, sheep or buffalo milk.
1.5) Acquire Kefir starter culture (I think you left this step out based on what I've read: "For more information on the starter culture,").
2) Ferment for 24 hours
3) Drink 3x day
4) CDiff gone.
Plan B:
1) Pop some probiotics pills
1.5) skip
2) skip
3) skip
4) CDiff gone probiotics-c-diff
This is an extremely subtle and twisted piece of Gold award winning code!
The judges had spent a considerable amount of time analyzing this entry. At one point we spent 18 minutes just to understand 18 key characters of this code.
The file zeitak_deobfucate.c provides a version that has been slightly deobfuscated. You may find reading that file helpful in your attempt to understand this extremely subtle entry.
Author’s comments: Nesting Errors Detector
What does it do As you have probably understood by looking at the source*, this program has something to do with parenthesis (and equality of opening and closing parenthesis, if you look close enough). It goes over the file given to it and checks that every opening (, [, or { has a matching closing one and vice versa. It also checks that every “ or ‘ is closed.
If an error is detected, an error message will be printed. If the problem is a superfluous closing bracket, it will even print a few characters around it’s position.
Make sure you view the source with 4 spaces tab width.
Features Ignores parenthesis inside strings or character constants, so no errors will be detected in the following line:
printf(")");
Doesn’t get confused by the 1984/anonymous entry!
Mis-Features Escapes (e.g. \") are ignored, so the following line will produce an error:
printf("\"");
Obfuscation IOCCC winners already contain entries without digits, control-flow keywords and certain operators in their source. This entry has an even more limited source, that is:
Without any digits.
Without any character constants.
Without using functions from headers other than stdio.
Without any control-flow keywords (not even the ?: operator).
Without any arithmetic or logic operators!
As for the other two things, typing skills and UI concepts, they can be trivially learned by him 10 years from now just as easily. He'll pick them up on his own before that, anyway.
What do you bet that in ten years:
Mice will be dead; everything will be motion tracking, eye tracking, touch tracking, etc.
Nobody will type (by "Nobody I mean you can safely round the number of typists in the world down to zero).
Contemporary "UI Concepts" will seem quaint in the way that most people today view command lines as quaint.
I can't offer any practical advice about helping a 3 year old develop, but ask yourself: "What did your parents do in your formative years?" Are you pleased with how you turned out? Can you think of anything that would have made a difference?
Let's assume you're 35 now. When you were a three year old, that would have been around 1978. Taking a guess at what environment environment enriching things your parents provided for you then, I'm going to go with a teddy bear over an altair. Maybe -speak n spell.
I'm guessing the finger paints, blocks, stuffed animals are more useful than technology.
One more thing to consider, most computer games aren't very interactive - you can play finger paints or blocks with your child. How much time will you interact with them if they're on the computer? In a few short years you both will have lots of fun with geek things in the future so enjoy the time you have now - it will go fast.:-)
Nobody has said what your web app is, or who actually owns it.
1) First question: What does the app do?
Is it something that is appropriate for an in-memorium quote? It may well be; authors, artists, musicians have a long history of dedicating important works that they've poured their heart into
2) Second question: who owns the app?
Is this a startup venture? An open source opus? Maybe a work for hire?
If someone is paying you to build the app, is it really yours to put a dedication into? And how would your customer feel upon seeing it? I'm not saying don't do this if you don't own it; I'm just saying it is important to get the owner's consent so they're not surprised at their next industry conference by their biggest client asking, "So who is 'Grandma Smith' anyway?"
3) Third question: how do your co-developers feel about giving a nod to you grandmother?
Observation: if for whatever reason the web app you're mentioned isn't appropriate, consider letting this inspire to you create something that is.
If you started some open source project, or even a commercial project, you could name it after your grandmother and put it in the About section.
Or maybe there is a book idea you've been sitting on for a while now...
*shrug* It could be a very nice gesture, or possibly crude or inappropriate. Like so many things it depends on the details.
Nothing he ever says is really any more solid than Nostradamus. Its all comfortably 30 years hence and arguably the signs are on the wall.
I haven't read much Nostradamus; I never found it that interesting.
I read some Kurzweil; his predictions didn't all seem "fuzzy".
Your assertion "Its all comfortably 30 years hence" is not totally accurate; many were for a shorter time frame.
Kurzweil's book, "The Age Of Spiritual Machines" (Jan, 1999) has predictions for 2009 (+10 years), 2019 (+20), 2029 (+30), 2049 (+50), 2072 (+73) and 2099 (+100). Saying "only 30 years and beyond" is unfair. btw: the wikipedia article has a nice summary of the predictions; they're thought provoking if nothing else.
Anyway, I don't care so much about "the singularity" and "Nerd Jesus" aspect of it. I'm more interested in the "information processing trends" aspect of it. (I'm generally interested in trends; who else is putting on their "futurist glasses" and doing interesting work in this area? I'd welcome suggested reading.) Kurzweil's Accelerating Returns idea is interesting, even if we don't upload our collective consciousness into the cloud next week.
Kurzweil wrote a ten-year followup talking the specific predictions 1999 vs. 2009 predictions from "The Age Of Spiritual Machines" (written in the mid to late 90's, published in 1999).
(As an aside, I have to ask: did Nostradamus ever published a "how am i doing" followup?)
So.... a longer but more detailed read, check out the 2010
"How My Predictions Are Faring" pdf) to see how "fuzzy" and how accurate his predictions are.
Kurzwil quote #1 (excerpt from above link):
[How My Predictions Are Faring P a g e | 8]
The status of these predictions changes very quickly. In November 2009, the idea of large-vocabulary, continuous, speaker-independent speech recognition using a cell phone appeared to some observers as still far off in the future.
Just one month later, this became the most popular free app for the iPhone (Dragon Dictation from Nuance, which used to be Kurzweil Computer Products, my first major company) as well as the popular Google Mobile App on iPhone, Blackberry, and Nokia S60 mobile phones, and on Google Nexus One and other Android phones.
[How My Predictions Are Faring P a g e | 9]
Just a few days after its official launch, the Dragon app made it to the top rankings in Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps “Best of 2009” and the Chorus Community top iPhone apps in December 2009, as reported by CNET News.
Another prediction that has been cited as wrong is “Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices.” This prediction is certainly true in Afghanistan and recently in America’s undeclared war in Pakistan. As Wired recently noted, “The unmanned air war has escalated under McChrystal’s watch.” UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were also commonly used in the second Iraq war, and countries like Israel are using them regularly for their own military operations, among many other nations.
One critic cites my prediction that “by 2009, a top supercomputer would be capable of performing 20 petaflops (quadrillion operations per second)” and dismisses my contention that this is “off by a few years,” saying it is “not just a little bit wrong, but
wildly, laughably wrong.”
IBM’s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer, to be delivered to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2011, runs nearly 8 times faster than the world’s current fastest supercomputer, the Chinese Tianhe-1A system. Yet, IBM’s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer is already under construction and IBM has announced that it will begin operation in 2012. The Sequoia supercomputer is the latest of the Blue Gene series by IBM, dedicated
It seems that, rather than asking, "Why is there so little xenon in the atmosphere" and coming up with a purely speculative answer, the researchers might have questioned why anyone expected to find more.
I thought everyone (well, scientists anyway) expected more Xenon than we observe on Earth because of meteorite samples: apparently meteorites have more xenon than we see in our atmosphere.
Unless... did you mean why didn't the Bayreuth researches test (e.g. question) any those theories? I thought they did test one of those theories by trying to saturate a mineral (perovskite) with xenon, said mineral being found in the Earth's mantel. (IANAGS, so perhaps an actual geo-scientist could comment on whether perovskite was a good choice for a test like this; I'm willing to give the Bayreuth researchers the benefit of the doubt, given that they are actual geoscientists and probably gave some thought to candidate minerals for their test).
Interesting? Sure... I never knew about a "xenon discrepancy"; so mildly interesting.
Informative? Sort of... I would have liked to see another paragraph on xenon comparing content for extra vs. terrestrial rocks. I'm willing to give the geo-scientist community the benefit of the doubt of having thoroughly considered the "xenon deficiency" to the point where they actually gave it a name.
From TFA:
“This model is enough to explain the whole xenon deficiency,” says Svyatoslav Shcheka, a geochemist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. He and Hans Keppler, also of Bayreuth, report the finding online October 10 in Nature.
Compared with meteorites that formed out of primordial solar system stuff, Earth and Mars have far less xenon in their atmospheres. Scientists have proposed many possible explanations, such as minerals that locked up xenon in the upper parts of Earth’s middle layer, the mantle.
Companies continue to force non-free software onto unsuspecting victims too.
Actually the fine article is about hardware; processors to be specific.
If I was heavily invested in Solaris I would be interested in the Sparc T5. Here are some excerpts from this Register article:
The Sparc T5 chip is more than just a shrunken Sparc T4 processor, which Oracle revealed at last year's Hot Chips conference and then started shipping in systems as 2011 wound down. The Sparc T4s had eight of the new S3 generation of Sparc cores, and the 3GHz clock speed and tweaks to the instruction pipeline were designed to make it much better at single-threaded work than its Sparc T chip predecessors. The Sparc T4 is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp using its 40 nanometer processes, and the sixteen-core Sparc T5 chip uses the popular 28 nanometer processes from TSMC that a number of processor and graphics card makers are employing in their latest devices.
Getting back to sixteen cores on the Sparc T5 die, each with eight threads for running heavily threaded work, is a good use of the process shrink. Oracle could have gone a simpler route and double-stuffed the sockets with slightly modified Sparc T4 designs, akin to what IBM is doing with its Power7+ processors in some server configurations, to get to that sixteen core level. But, for whatever reason, Oracle wants to have all of the cores on the same die and running on the same crossbar interconnect.
"Totally caved"?
I didn't see it that way. In the story, the "Ohhh!" moment didn't come until Human++ thinking (the emergent mind of a cloned population) could see things from a different perspective. In aggregate, contemporary Humans are sharply bounded in their ability for rational decisions (as per your Middle East reference; notable but not unique, any long running conflict could serve as a similar example). Haldeman was suggesting that Human++ thinking could work better than what we can do now, or at least that it took Human++ thinking to see the former opposition more clearly.
Also note: I liked that Human++ encouraged independent genome repositories vs. Borg-like assimilation.
Forever War was a very enjoyable and thought provoking read - exactly why I like scifi.
(I'm looking forward to checking out Forever Free, I just learned about that in this thread.)
Except the book totally caved in the end.
Both sides, after several thousand years of war: "oh, we thought you wanted the war! Oops, nevermind!"
As if the ancient causes of a war would even matter by that point. c.f. today's middle east.
Their firmware and driver teams need adequate room in which to explore the wide variety of vexing bugs that you can get away with shipping...
Or drivers they're not shipping; I am the unhappy owner an orphaned HP color laser printer (CLJ 1500). While Brother figured out how to support 64 bit Vista & Win 7, HP decided to "focus on things that matter." It is going to be a while before I look at buying HP hardware again. (Yeah, yeah, I'm sure HP is all bummed out about that.) But who knows, maybe they'll impress me with their visionary innovation some day.
One is to prevent "winners" from punishing opposition voters; that applies to what you're describing, and I'm perplexed the judge didn't think that through. (*shrug* Maybe the judge is optimistic, not pessimistic.)
The other is to prevent vote selling. For a modest amount of money one could boost voter turnout by saying "Vote for McSleeze, bring your ballot (proving you voted for us) to the 'victory party' and get Free Beer". There are lots of possible incentives. Today it might be "Vote for CorporateShill and redeem your barcode with a free itunes download", or a "magic cow" for your Farmville plot...
Suppose you were going to spend $20 million on television adds; you could save half of that for incentives: $10M would buy a lot of beer, or virtual cows, etc.
OS names are like car models... it's just that OS names haven't been around as long so articles like TFA still get written.
For example, Porsche911 has been around almost fifty years (since 1963).
I wonder if anyone in 1973 wrote an article on "Porsche '911' - A Nonsensical Naming Standard?"
Maybe people in 2052 will still be driving "OS X" or "Windows Server 2052".
Feature-wise, both OS makers & auto makes have arbitrary upgrade cycles. Industry observers for both often complain about minor do-nothing incremental changes, as well as sweeping wide reaching changes (vista, anyone?).
fwiw - I believe airplane manufacturers follow a similar naming convention (737, 747, Airbus, Cesna,...).
Spaceship manufacturers are still fairly new, but I bet in 2052 that SpaceX will still be building Falcons.
Slashdot Mirror
It worries me you asked about A+ certification. A+ seems like an obvious non-starter unless you need it for some obscure employer policy (as at least one other posters mentioned (for Alaska)). Which makes me wonder if other problems (challenges?) are missing from your original problem description.
Can you post a streamlined version of your resume? Simple text + skills + work history; you can strip company + identifying info. That would give the crowd here some more to work on.
Some additional questions for you:
What area do you live in? (Country + closest major city).
Can you travel?
What kind of schedule can you work?
Skills: Java, C#, PL/SQL, some Unix scripting
What kind of role are you looking for?
What kind of recruiters have you reached out to?
Pricing
SpaceX offers open and fixed pricing for its launch services. Modest discounts are available for contractually committed, multi-launch purchases.
PAYLOAD PRICE
Up to 6.4 ton to GTO $83M*
Greater than 6.4 ton to GTO $128M*
*Paid in full standard launch prices for 2012. Please contact us for details at sales@spacex.com
btw, GTO = Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit
Agreed. :-)
It is still interesting to think about; and kind of cool that we have no idea what the future really holds.
This has a nice summary Ultimate_fate_of_the_Universe of current thinking.
Big Rips, Big Bounces, Big Freezes, Big Crunches.
Lots of options
The night sky on Earth (assuming it survives) will change dramatically as our Milky Way galaxy merges with its neighbors and distant galaxies recede beyond view.
The quickening expansion will eventually pull galaxies apart faster than light, causing them to drop out of view. This process eliminates reference points for measuring expansion and dilutes the distinctive products of the big bang to nothingness. In short, it erases all the signs that a big bang ever occurred.
To our distant descendants, the universe will look like a small puddle of stars in an endless, changeless void.
r.e. emacs capabilities - cool, it does sound useful. Thanks.
Learning clojure might be enough to nudge me into emacs land.
I forgot this part - 11am, short line. Paper ballot + scanner machine. Worked fine.
too many Judges though (e.g. why even "vote" if there's only one person seeking the position?)
In Chicago this morning I saw an election judge chastising a volunteer (I'm assuming they're all volunteers) who was answering a voter's questions on ballot organization or maybe interpretation (r.e. the lady in your post). The judge was pretty worked up about the volunteer helping the voter in isolation (e.g. solo, with no other volunteers present); she went went on for a few minutes about needing to have both a Democrat + Republican assist at the same time if any voter needed help with their ballot.
I was amused. It made me wonder how things would work out if (when?) a 3rd party crosses that 5% mark, will they need 3 "assistants" to make sure things are neutral?
I was also amused after the judge shushed the volunteer back to sit down at the table the voter was asking the judge questions.
Seriously though, the volunteers - are trying hard; I am grateful they put in the hard work that they do. It has to get old managing a polling station after a few hours.
From wikipedia:
nano implements some features that Pico lacks, including colored text, regular expression search and replace, smooth scrolling, multiple buffers, rebindable key support, and (experimental) undoing and redoing of edit changes.
I poked around nano's website and it seems pretty capable.
It sounds like nano does everything you need, so there is no reason to learn about other editors.
I have fond memories of pine and pico; maybe I will look at nano one of these days.
fwiw, I find some powertools worth learning to use well even if they have a non-easy learning curve (sed comes to mind). This also applies to text editors; they're just tools.
As for "1975 wants vi back", I actually get a lot of mileage from vim which is a bit closer to nano's era.
nano: born 1999 as TIP, inspired by pico.
(btw, the last item on the nano news page is from 2009: "Now on Twitter and Facebook and Happy 10th Birthday nano". Is nano under active development these days?)
vim:born 1988, released 1991 (initially for amiga, much more widespread now), inspired by vi (note I do feel sorry for anyone stuck using "classic vi" in the same way I'd feel sorry for anyone stuck with edlin).
(side note: vi-style learning curve sucks. My first two weeks were Painful, but now that I have some skill (muscle memory) with the keys I find it very effective. Kind of like how touch-typing is harder to learn than "hunt & peck" but it is still well worthwhile to learn how to touch-type; it pays dividends. Most of vi-style power (for me) comes from the fast navigation+editing commands that are tied to a rather terse (and admittedly cryptic) "shorthand" language of key combinations... I remember actually being surprised at how clunky arrow key + mouse navigation felt when I first used conventional editors after driving vi-style for a while.)
One of the things I like about having learned Vim is it will be available pretty much wherever I might need to work: here are some of the targets from from wikipedia's vim page (* indicates ports I have used):
AmigaOS (the initial target platform), DOS, Microsoft Windows 95/*98/Me/*NT/*2000/*XP/*Server 2003/*Vista/*Server 2008/*7, IBM OS/2 and OS/390, OpenVMS, QNX, *Unix, *Linux, BSD, and Mac OS. Also, Vim is shipped with every copy of Apple Mac OS X. Independent ports of Vim are available both for Android and iOS.
(I've also found vim for aix; useful if one needs to spend time there.) Note that vim seems pretty consistently fully featured on the various platforms I've used it on (*'s above).
By comparison, nano seems pretty content to excel in linux distributions (redhat & debian).
And maybe, possibly, kind of sort of windows: from the nano faq, 3.9 How about in Win32
We're still working on documentation for enabling synax highlighting on Win32; please bear with us. Note that the nano.rc file must remain Unix formatted in order for nano to understand it. In other words, you should use probably only use nano to edit its config file. Other programs like Wordpad and Notepad will either convert the file to DOS format when saving, and the latter does not even properly read Unix-formatted files to begin with.
*shrug* I'm glad nano is working for you in the land of the modern linux desktop.
As for emacs: I sincerely believe that emacs users enjoy the capabilities they find; I may find a need for something emacs does well these days. I've never heard anyone say "Yeah,
Blueprints for Civilization This TED video is worth 4 minutes of your time.
Jakubowski articulates his vision very clearly.
I remember hearing of this a few years ago; I am glad to see they're making some headway.
Why don't we try to strengthen laws for individuals....and make things easier for people to self employ, self incorporate and contract themselves.
Who is this "we" you speak of?
I like your ideas, fwiw. Sounds like something a union might productively work on.
Connecting your ideas back to The Fine Article, maybe one answer to "What might it take to start a programmer union" is a clear political policy goal like you described. While perhaps not a noble and selfless cause, it does appeals to my sense of enlightened self interest.
(btw, I would be really interested to see which, if any, companies or candidates endorsed the policies you describe).
What happens when that master key gets out in the wild? It's bound to happen eventually...
From the fine wiki article:
Some building managers wire Knox Boxes into their burglar alarm systems so that opening the box trips the alarm, negating their use in facilitating clandestine entry.
Certainly thought provoking.
..
It could be done more interestingly, perhaps operating in an area with a public facing surveillance cam. Then he could engage passers by in conversations more like: "Why are you taking a video?" "Do you think there is a difference between what I'm doing and what that camera over there is doing?" As it is, he just seems to be irritating people and not planting any seeds for future thought.
I say this after watching the second video here
0:23 shopper exits store
shopper: "Can I ask who you are?"
video guy: "What."
shopper: "What are you doing?"
video guy: "Oh I'm taking a video."
shopper: "Of what?"
video guy: "Just a video."
shopper: "Why are you taking a video?"
video guy: "Why not?"
shopper: "I don't really care for other people just to be taking a random video of me."
video guy: "Didn't you just come out of the drug store?"
shopper: "Yeah"
video guy: "They have cameras in there."
shopper: "So?"
shopper: gets on bike, rides off.
(The other interactions go down hill from there.)
I've heard nothing but good things about Kefir.
If I didn't travel as much I'd be trying home made Kefir, but some days I just just want to take a pill.
So your plan A:
1) Acquire goat, sheep or buffalo milk.
1.5) Acquire Kefir starter culture (I think you left this step out based on what I've read: "For more information on the starter culture,").
2) Ferment for 24 hours
3) Drink 3x day
4) CDiff gone.
Plan B:
1) Pop some probiotics pills
1.5) skip
2) skip
3) skip
4) CDiff gone probiotics-c-diff
With the ongoing legal action between Samsung and Apple it’s no surprise that the relationship has cooled.
Selected Judges Remarks:
This is an extremely subtle and twisted piece of Gold award winning code!
The judges had spent a considerable amount of time analyzing this entry. At one point we spent 18 minutes just to understand 18 key characters of this code.
The file zeitak_deobfucate.c provides a version that has been slightly deobfuscated. You may find reading that file helpful in your attempt to understand this extremely subtle entry.
Author’s comments:
Nesting Errors Detector
What does it do
As you have probably understood by looking at the source*, this program has something to do with parenthesis (and equality of opening and closing parenthesis, if you look close enough). It goes over the file given to it and checks that every opening (, [, or { has a matching closing one and vice versa. It also checks that every “ or ‘ is closed.
If an error is detected, an error message will be printed. If the problem is a superfluous closing bracket, it will even print a few characters around it’s position.
Make sure you view the source with 4 spaces tab width.
Features
Ignores parenthesis inside strings or character constants, so no errors will be detected in the following line:
Doesn’t get confused by the 1984/anonymous entry!
Mis-Features
Escapes (e.g. \") are ignored, so the following line will produce an error:
Obfuscation
IOCCC winners already contain entries without digits, control-flow keywords and certain operators in their source. This entry has an even more limited source, that is:
As for the other two things, typing skills and UI concepts, they can be trivially learned by him 10 years from now just as easily. He'll pick them up on his own before that, anyway.
What do you bet that in ten years:
Mice will be dead; everything will be motion tracking, eye tracking, touch tracking, etc.
Nobody will type (by "Nobody I mean you can safely round the number of typists in the world down to zero).
Contemporary "UI Concepts" will seem quaint in the way that most people today view command lines as quaint.
I can't offer any practical advice about helping a 3 year old develop, but ask yourself: "What did your parents do in your formative years?" Are you pleased with how you turned out? Can you think of anything that would have made a difference? :-)
Let's assume you're 35 now. When you were a three year old, that would have been around 1978. Taking a guess at what environment environment enriching things your parents provided for you then, I'm going to go with a teddy bear over an altair. Maybe -speak n spell.
I'm guessing the finger paints, blocks, stuffed animals are more useful than technology.
One more thing to consider, most computer games aren't very interactive - you can play finger paints or blocks with your child. How much time will you interact with them if they're on the computer? In a few short years you both will have lots of fun with geek things in the future so enjoy the time you have now - it will go fast.
Nobody has said what your web app is, or who actually owns it.
1) First question: What does the app do?
Is it something that is appropriate for an in-memorium quote? It may well be; authors, artists, musicians have a long history of dedicating important works that they've poured their heart into
2) Second question: who owns the app?
Is this a startup venture? An open source opus? Maybe a work for hire?
If someone is paying you to build the app, is it really yours to put a dedication into? And how would your customer feel upon seeing it? I'm not saying don't do this if you don't own it; I'm just saying it is important to get the owner's consent so they're not surprised at their next industry conference by their biggest client asking, "So who is 'Grandma Smith' anyway?"
3) Third question: how do your co-developers feel about giving a nod to you grandmother?
Observation: if for whatever reason the web app you're mentioned isn't appropriate, consider letting this inspire to you create something that is.
If you started some open source project, or even a commercial project, you could name it after your grandmother and put it in the About section.
Or maybe there is a book idea you've been sitting on for a while now...
*shrug* It could be a very nice gesture, or possibly crude or inappropriate. Like so many things it depends on the details.
Nothing he ever says is really any more solid than Nostradamus. Its all comfortably 30 years hence and arguably the signs are on the wall.
I haven't read much Nostradamus; I never found it that interesting.
I read some Kurzweil; his predictions didn't all seem "fuzzy".
Your assertion "Its all comfortably 30 years hence" is not totally accurate; many were for a shorter time frame. Kurzweil's book, "The Age Of Spiritual Machines" (Jan, 1999) has predictions for 2009 (+10 years), 2019 (+20), 2029 (+30), 2049 (+50), 2072 (+73) and 2099 (+100). Saying "only 30 years and beyond" is unfair. btw: the wikipedia article has a nice summary of the predictions; they're thought provoking if nothing else.
Anyway, I don't care so much about "the singularity" and "Nerd Jesus" aspect of it. I'm more interested in the "information processing trends" aspect of it. (I'm generally interested in trends; who else is putting on their "futurist glasses" and doing interesting work in this area? I'd welcome suggested reading.) Kurzweil's Accelerating Returns idea is interesting, even if we don't upload our collective consciousness into the cloud next week.
Kurzweil wrote a ten-year followup talking the specific predictions 1999 vs. 2009 predictions from "The Age Of Spiritual Machines" (written in the mid to late 90's, published in 1999).
(As an aside, I have to ask: did Nostradamus ever published a "how am i doing" followup?)
So.... a longer but more detailed read, check out the 2010 "How My Predictions Are Faring" pdf) to see how "fuzzy" and how accurate his predictions are.
Kurzwil quote #1 (excerpt from above link):
[How My Predictions Are Faring P a g e | 8]
The status of these predictions changes very quickly. In November 2009, the idea of large-vocabulary, continuous, speaker-independent speech recognition using a cell phone appeared to some observers as still far off in the future.
Just one month later, this became the most popular free app for the iPhone (Dragon Dictation from Nuance, which used to be Kurzweil Computer Products, my first major company) as well as the popular Google Mobile App on iPhone, Blackberry, and Nokia S60 mobile phones, and on Google Nexus One and other Android phones.
[How My Predictions Are Faring P a g e | 9]
Just a few days after its official launch, the Dragon app made it to the top rankings in Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps “Best of 2009” and the Chorus Community top iPhone apps in December 2009, as reported by CNET News.
Another prediction that has been cited as wrong is “Warfare is dominated by unmanned intelligent airborne devices.” This prediction is certainly true in Afghanistan and recently in America’s undeclared war in Pakistan. As Wired recently noted, “The unmanned air war has escalated under McChrystal’s watch.” UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were also commonly used in the second Iraq war, and countries like Israel are using them regularly for their own military operations, among many other nations.
One critic cites my prediction that “by 2009, a top supercomputer would be capable of performing 20 petaflops (quadrillion operations per second)” and dismisses my contention that this is “off by a few years,” saying it is “not just a little bit wrong, but wildly, laughably wrong.”
IBM’s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer, to be delivered to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2011, runs nearly 8 times faster than the world’s current fastest supercomputer, the Chinese Tianhe-1A system. Yet, IBM’s 20 petaflop Sequoia supercomputer is already under construction and IBM has announced that it will begin operation in 2012. The Sequoia supercomputer is the latest of the Blue Gene series by IBM, dedicated
It seems that, rather than asking, "Why is there so little xenon in the atmosphere" and coming up with a purely speculative answer, the researchers might have questioned why anyone expected to find more.
I thought everyone (well, scientists anyway) expected more Xenon than we observe on Earth because of meteorite samples: apparently meteorites have more xenon than we see in our atmosphere.
Unless... did you mean why didn't the Bayreuth researches test (e.g. question) any those theories? I thought they did test one of those theories by trying to saturate a mineral (perovskite) with xenon, said mineral being found in the Earth's mantel. (IANAGS, so perhaps an actual geo-scientist could comment on whether perovskite was a good choice for a test like this; I'm willing to give the Bayreuth researchers the benefit of the doubt, given that they are actual geoscientists and probably gave some thought to candidate minerals for their test).
Interesting? Sure... I never knew about a "xenon discrepancy"; so mildly interesting.
Informative? Sort of... I would have liked to see another paragraph on xenon comparing content for extra vs. terrestrial rocks. I'm willing to give the geo-scientist community the benefit of the doubt of having thoroughly considered the "xenon deficiency" to the point where they actually gave it a name.
From TFA:
“This model is enough to explain the whole xenon deficiency,” says Svyatoslav Shcheka, a geochemist at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. He and Hans Keppler, also of Bayreuth, report the finding online October 10 in Nature.
Compared with meteorites that formed out of primordial solar system stuff, Earth and Mars have far less xenon in their atmospheres. Scientists have proposed many possible explanations, such as minerals that locked up xenon in the upper parts of Earth’s middle layer, the mantle.
Companies continue to force non-free software onto unsuspecting victims too.
Actually the fine article is about hardware; processors to be specific.
If I was heavily invested in Solaris I would be interested in the Sparc T5. Here are some excerpts from this Register article:
The Sparc T5 chip is more than just a shrunken Sparc T4 processor, which Oracle revealed at last year's Hot Chips conference and then started shipping in systems as 2011 wound down. The Sparc T4s had eight of the new S3 generation of Sparc cores, and the 3GHz clock speed and tweaks to the instruction pipeline were designed to make it much better at single-threaded work than its Sparc T chip predecessors. The Sparc T4 is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp using its 40 nanometer processes, and the sixteen-core Sparc T5 chip uses the popular 28 nanometer processes from TSMC that a number of processor and graphics card makers are employing in their latest devices.
Getting back to sixteen cores on the Sparc T5 die, each with eight threads for running heavily threaded work, is a good use of the process shrink. Oracle could have gone a simpler route and double-stuffed the sockets with slightly modified Sparc T4 designs, akin to what IBM is doing with its Power7+ processors in some server configurations, to get to that sixteen core level. But, for whatever reason, Oracle wants to have all of the cores on the same die and running on the same crossbar interconnect.
I didn't see it that way. In the story, the "Ohhh!" moment didn't come until Human++ thinking (the emergent mind of a cloned population) could see things from a different perspective. In aggregate, contemporary Humans are sharply bounded in their ability for rational decisions (as per your Middle East reference; notable but not unique, any long running conflict could serve as a similar example). Haldeman was suggesting that Human++ thinking could work better than what we can do now, or at least that it took Human++ thinking to see the former opposition more clearly.
Also note: I liked that Human++ encouraged independent genome repositories vs. Borg-like assimilation.
Forever War was a very enjoyable and thought provoking read - exactly why I like scifi.
(I'm looking forward to checking out Forever Free, I just learned about that in this thread.)
Except the book totally caved in the end.
Both sides, after several thousand years of war: "oh, we thought you wanted the war! Oops, nevermind!"
As if the ancient causes of a war would even matter by that point. c.f. today's middle east.
Their firmware and driver teams need adequate room in which to explore the wide variety of vexing bugs that you can get away with shipping...
Or drivers they're not shipping; I am the unhappy owner an orphaned HP color laser printer (CLJ 1500). While Brother figured out how to support 64 bit Vista & Win 7, HP decided to "focus on things that matter." It is going to be a while before I look at buying HP hardware again. (Yeah, yeah, I'm sure HP is all bummed out about that.) But who knows, maybe they'll impress me with their visionary innovation some day.
One is to prevent "winners" from punishing opposition voters; that applies to what you're describing, and I'm perplexed the judge didn't think that through. (*shrug* Maybe the judge is optimistic, not pessimistic.)
The other is to prevent vote selling. For a modest amount of money one could boost voter turnout by saying "Vote for McSleeze, bring your ballot (proving you voted for us) to the 'victory party' and get Free Beer". There are lots of possible incentives. Today it might be "Vote for CorporateShill and redeem your barcode with a free itunes download", or a "magic cow" for your Farmville plot...
Suppose you were going to spend $20 million on television adds; you could save half of that for incentives: $10M would buy a lot of beer, or virtual cows, etc.
For example, Porsche911 has been around almost fifty years (since 1963).
I wonder if anyone in 1973 wrote an article on "Porsche '911' - A Nonsensical Naming Standard?"
Maybe people in 2052 will still be driving "OS X" or "Windows Server 2052".
Feature-wise, both OS makers & auto makes have arbitrary upgrade cycles. Industry observers for both often complain about minor do-nothing incremental changes, as well as sweeping wide reaching changes (vista, anyone?).
fwiw - I believe airplane manufacturers follow a similar naming convention (737, 747, Airbus, Cesna, ...).
Spaceship manufacturers are still fairly new, but I bet in 2052 that SpaceX will still be building Falcons.
r.e "the VP has what power?"
It matters.
Really.
To put it terms you might relate to, try thinking of it as a Disaster Recovery planning exercise.