I assume that this means 5 million picture elements. Arranged in some sort of rectangular pattern.
But does it mean 1600 lines of 3000 pixels in each line? And if so, what is the resolution of each pixel? Is it 24 bits per pixel? That is, 8 bits of resolution each color red, green, blue ( or the equalivant three primary colors for recording images rather than generating images) like VGA? Or is it 4 bits per pixel with a predefined palatte of color shades?
Before everyone jumps on my case and calls me an idiot, a moron, 'go back to AOL, shit-for-brains', ect..., let me just say that I don't trust anything that the consumer electronics industry advertises any more in its product spec sheets. I just don't believe anything that they say. It's worth it to be called an idiot by thousands of geeks in exchange for a single nugget of real and valid technical expertise on a new digital consumer product.
I pick up the newspaper every Friday and there's this big beautiful 4 page color advertising insert from Fry's Electronics. And every week they feature portable CD players and point out the fantastic tech specs with bullets. Stuff like the 1-bit Digital-To-Analog convertor internally!! So much more advanced over anything that you can get anywhere else!?!
Dear Leader Ballmer was probably thinking along the lines of the fabulously successful RIAA model. That is, the consumer buys a portable CD player for $25 and then a constant string of CD purchases for $15 each.
He'll probably point out that the customer is 'saving' money with the Microsoft model, where they buy the PC for $100 and then the Windows for another $100 just once. Or at least until the next $100 upgrade.
The general consensus is different. A lower PC cost would make it less likely that people would buy an operating system that is 50% or more of the cost of the PC.
I have never accepted the idea that the 'operating system' is a seperate component from the computer and should be purchased seperately. I have always just made a copy of what's available from friends and work and used it.
Having a computer and operating system sold as sererate components makes as much sense as having the auto industry be in the practice of advertising and selling cars routinely without steering wheels. Then by historical quirk and tortured legalities offering the steering wheels for $1000 extra. Then having a dumpster behind every auto distributor full of perfectly good steering wheels that people can install in their new car for free.
It's a totally absurd situation and I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt rejecting it. All the basic fundamental research in computer science that led to OS development in the first place was done with US taxpayers dollars. MS coders were just recoding the same routines, data structures, and algorythyms that taxpayers paid for previously in military R&D. Nothing new has ever been developed north of the California border.
My first five computers (Radio Shack MC10 CoCo, Timex-Sinclair 2000, Atari XL, Apple II, Commodore 64) had no seperate operating system requiring seperate purchase. The idea that I'm going to pay the richest man in the world $100 for something that was deliberately left of the computer is absurd and insane. Don't even bother to ask anymore, it's never going to happen.
Your example refers to a description of how a particular programming language works.
My allegorical example would be if one engineer received a 20 page block of code from another engineer who wrote it and asked for a brief description of what it did and how it worked.
Having this description actually included in the at the expense of the time taken to merely speak it would significantly improve the ability of someone else to quickly understand the code in the future.
Talk is cheap. Having a powerful tool that can take talk and turn it into written text gives an incredible advantage to the people who are willing to explore the potential and opportunities opened up by this new tool.
The comments would of course be in a different color text from the code. Which is finally beginning to happen with code editors.
If diagrams and spoken explanations are so important to code documentation, then how come we don't have compiliers that can handle diagrams and MP3 clips as part of the source code file?
Programmers have to get away 1950s frame-of-references in their tool sets. It's a new century.
Imagine a parallel programming cluster of 10000 microprocessors with each processor having its own memory and gigabit ethernet connection. Imagine each of these processors running a complex but fixed routine very quickly.
Imagine each of these 10000 processors was represented by Chinese character. The programmer would organize the parallel activity of this supercluster by arranging and writing Chinese characters on a monitor.
Could you get a job programming in this kind of environment? Tens of thousands of people in China could. Chinese programmers are routinely expected to master 10000 characters (and combinations) to be literate, then they're expected to master 10000 english words and grammar constuctions, and master complex programming languages.
Americans complain about having to master dribble like C++.
I would recommend learning embedded systems programming. The tools are free or cheap, the microcontrollers are powerful, highly integrated, and very inexpensive. The skills that you learn as a programmer are nearly completely transferable.
Embedded systems works a lot more on the hardware electronic component level than traditional CS stuff like system administration. In a few years the entire electical power distribution grid of the country will have to be rewired with microcontrollers to monitor and control the energy inefficiencies that are ignored today (due to the consequences of >$50/barrel of oil, along with the possible devaluation of the US dollar).
That will open many opportunities for computer specialists with embedded-systems orientation.
An ultra-high tech book like this is story of Neal Stephenson's SF novel The Diamond Age. I read this from the library after someone alluded to it in a/. reply to a message. It's also found on Kazaa! occasionally.
Why not write intelligent structured sentences describing what each line does?
Of course, I would recommend structured sentences over rambling discourse. But that's an optimal condition; an 'in a perfect universe' condition. And it takes lots of discipline. Under time and management pressures, extended documentation of the source is the usually the first area to be expended on a death-march coding project.
The time used to make a sloppy speech-to-text code documentation piece that would be actually part of the code would be far less than the time spent tring to re-learn how a poorly-documented code works, especially a year after it is written.
The speech-to-text approach is an intermediate step to adequate documentation that seemed like an experiment in using new advanced technology in a new application.
My profs insisted that we should diagram the process algorythym before coding.
They recommended strict diagramming techniques like Warnier-Orr. They said use a white board with big erasures and little markers because large sections are going to be junk.
Strict and systematic Warnier-Orr diagramming can be a real discipline.
I've gone back to it in order to code very tight , time-dependent 50 nanosecond mulitple interrupt routines in assembler for microcontrollers and embedded systems. I've even placed the white board on the flatbed scanner to copy it when I've gotten that finally works in a walk-through (take the hinged cover off- it goes much easier.)
Even after doing this..and then assembling and burning the code into the chip..and having the device actually function correctly..I still get the feeling that there is something stange and magical happening that I'm not aware of.
One just sits down and tells oneself that, no, there's no magic here. You designed a complicated machine, you throughly tested a precise simulation, you built it, and it worked exactly like it supposed to because there wasn't any possiblity that it could not work like it was supposed to. It's just going through hundreds of precisely defined steps many millions of times a second...and gives the illusion of magic and sentinite intelligence...ramble on...
Or maybe you are being sarcastic and trying to make fun of my stupidity.
No one's making fun of you.. and you're not stupid. The fucking computer language is stupid for not making this kind of ambiguity easy to detect and for causing you to waste two whole days debugging.
Everybody does this.
The lower that you go in hardware, the more insane this kind of nonsense gets.
Check out the documentation for the Intel 8251 interrupt controller (a chip designed into the original IBM PC and cloned into every PC since). It is a masterpiece of surrealism and parallel realities. It starts out like a normal text document and soon gets very weird.
I suspect that the original PC designers got the thing to work right once by accident, and then used a logic analyser to find what configuration bytes were being sent to it on reset so they could write a stable and functional BIOS.
Yes, seriously... your code should read like a novel.
After finishing the program, compiling, and debugging it, get out your microphone and one of those speech-to-text programs. Train it if you haven't done so already by reading the presented text for twenty minutes or so. Do the training twice: once when sober and properly intoxicated. (Myself, I grew up in the 1970's and consider alcoholic beverages déclassé, but everyone has their own favorite intoxicant).
Get a picture of your favorite dreamboat celebrity and put it next to the screen. Load your source code on the editor and start the speech-to-text converter in the background. Take a deep breath and gaze adoringly in eyes of the person in the photo. Pretend that they are hopelessly infatuated with everything that you say and just love to hear you talk about your programming.
Then start talking. Talk about your code. Start at the beginning. Talk about every line and what it does. How it works. How it fits. How totally cool it is. Just go on and on.
When you're done, turn off the speech-to-text generator running in the background and save the hopefully rather large text file.
Go back and cut and paste lines from the source file into the spoken description text file. (Use the speech-to-text engine to make this step go fast.)
Hopefully you will now have about a half a page or more of rambling, but technically dense and accurate, speech text for every line of source code.
This is the proper amount of commentary that every line of code needs.
Put comment markers around your spoken text and lots of white space above and below the actual source lines.
Your program is still good: it compiles and runs. But it now looks like a novel.
This is good! The single line coding format that we all use is an obsolete product from the 1950's when a byte of computer RAM memory cost more than a good restaurant dinner. Those days are gone.
Now you want to be able to read and understand the code quickly. It's far easier to glance and read through pages of rambling dictation describing the code than it is to try to understand 'normal' code with little pissant comments pasted randomly through it.
You're a professional now. Anything that makes your job easier is good.
If your CS professor disagrees, give them a copy of your speech-to-text software and a picture of Lindsey Lohan to place next to their screen and have them try it themselves.
"Hi, I'm Officer Joe. We police think Citibank is handing out fake money. Please go into the bank, empty your account and bring me the bills" is NOT a "technologically-advanced" scam. It's something only a fool would fall for.
This kind of thing rarely happens because the police have made sure that there are laws with strongly enforced punishments for impersonating an officer and because CitiBank has made sure that there are precise and clear laws regarding bank fraud.
The tech community has never done jack shit to ensure that people who use internet technology to steal from citizens are punished and their illegally obtained assets are confiscated and returned to the people who were defrauded.
The tech community is rather quick to refer to anyone who hasn't mastered new technology a 'moron', an 'idiot', or deservant of the fraud that was inflicted upon them.
The tech community sometimes wonders, when they 're not distracted by video games and fantasies of interplanetary voyages, why they have no political power and why the rest of the world doesn't take them seriously.
Give Master Card or VISA a completed investigation...and THEY STILL WON'T PROSECUTE.
--- happened to me and it took 3 years to straighten out,
Rip off Tony Soprano for a couple hundred and then bring him the names, a written confession, an itemized list of goods purchased with stolen credit cards, videotapes of the suspects and see what happens.
All this pissant crime happens and will continue to happen because the punishment to the offenders doesn't match the collective pain to the victims.
Deal with crime by punishing the criminals. If the credit card companies refuse to prosecute the criminals then sue them for creating a public menace through negligence. People who work on the infrastructure pipes and stuff under roads don't leave big holes in the middle of road after dark. The first car that drove into the hole would file and win a big lawsuit. Same with credit card companies that won't prosecute fraud cases. By letting the criminals go unpunished because it is unconvienent to go after them they are creating a public menace through negligence.
One big class-action lawsuit would change their minds. Maybe they could let the unemployed engineers and computer technicians go after these people on a bounty-hunter basis, splitting recovered funds and asset forfeitures 50:50.
Bottom line is: a fool and his (or her) money are soon parted
I disagree. We aren't dealing with fools here, we discussing people who have been ripped off. Crime victims are not fools because they have been defrauded by technologically-advanced shitpeople.
If there are any 'fools' here it is us. For assuming that we could unleash cool advanced new technology like internet commerce onto the general public without our having built-in safeguards against the criminal element who would use this new technology to prey on people. People who trusted us and our technology.
We should be the ones who take responsibility to ensure that the criminals who use our technology to steal and defraud are punished. We can't rely on the established law-enforcement authorities since they are far too busy dealing with all the 12-year-old file-sharers, pot smokers, and grandmas trying to board airplanes with plastic forks.
We created the technology that created the problem. We can't deal with the problem by just calling people 'fools' as a result of their using the technology that we told them would improve their lives.
Just once I'd like the see the sun come up in the West over the Golden Gate Bridge. Just once I'd like to read mature and ethical comments from Slashdot posters.
The intelligence agencies of the USA are extremely embarrassed that they couldn't infiltrate one operative into the Islamic terrorist networks, even though these spent many billions of dollars trying to do so.
What's even worse is that some 19-year-old stoned-out white hippie freak kid from Sausalito can buy a copy of the Koran at a garage sale, walk into to the Islamic Student Center at San Francisco State saying that "it's a really cool book, but there are some things that I don't understand...", and a year later be a full, trusted member of the Taliban.
This is the real reason why John Walker Lindh got 20 years in maximum-security prison; he embarrassed the Republicans. They keep him separated from the other prisoners because they're afraid that, like Malcolm X, he will convert the other prisoners to Islam. What the Americans don't really need is a million young people in prison, black and white, serving insanely long sentences for chickenshit drug 'crimes', to become radical Muslims committed to the destruction of the corporate ruling class when released.
After weeks of seismic activity, Mt. St Helens shot off its lava dome that had been building for 20 years.
The solid 5000 ton piece of rock shot off like a cannonball out of the crater of the volcano.
It traveled 100 miles north in a perfect parabola. Then it smashed into the main administrative center of Microsoft corporation outside Redmond.
"All our source code and back-ups were destroyed", said a Microsoft spokescreature. "We'll have to start all over from MS-DOS 6.2 again".
"It's as if Mother Nature was gunning for us and scored a big, fat bulls-eye on her first shot", said VP Steve Ballmer. Mr. Ballmer was directly in the main inpact center when the giant rock hit but he suffered no apparent damage. "No force of nature would ever dare fuck with me!", said Mr. Ballmer. He then announced that in light of the loss of all the source code and support network, there would be 3% reduction in the list price of all current Windows versions selling at full retail.
The way to deal with an overextended empire, as you write that the USA is becoming, is to get it bogged down in highly symbolic but strategically worthless wars that comsume all of its energy and resources.
Naturally, no one in their right mind would want to take on the empire directly. But it might be worthwhile to provoke some of one's annoying hot-headed neighbors to do so. That way you keep your neighbors too busy fighting the empire to bother you.
This world is not really a good place to run a totalitarian empire. There is a giant surplus of young people without jobs who can be easily convinced that all their troubles are caused by the empire, and that some god will solve all of their troubles if they just kill enough of the empire's citizens and solders. The empire spends billions each year on high tech weapons but only has a million or so solders up against two billion young people willing to fight it. Globally they get spread pretty thin.
The USA is in deep debt. Each year its government spends far more than it takes in through taxes. It finances itself by issuing bonds. People outside the USA buy its bonds because they believe that the USA will always make good on its bonds. The USA believes that whenever its bonds come due it can cover them by just selling more bonds. The empire finances itself not through looting and pillage but with a giant Ponzi scheme.
Want to stop the growth of the empire. Stop buying its government bonds. Today the largest buyer of USA government bonds is the government of People's Republic of China. Fifteen years ago it was the the various banks of Japan. Thirty years ago it was Saudi Arabia.
It's best for everyone if the empire occupies itself with endless expensive wars in worthless little hellholes. Let's hope that they continue to do so and leave the rest of us alone.
I'm not sure. I vaguely remember a title like this where people put rare plants and items in special places so that they can be found in the future after they go extinct.
Hello,
I'm glad to see someone caught the reference to Harry Turtledove's WorldWar alternate history series.
Yes I've read the series. Yes, it's quite annoying a lot of the time. Dr. Turtledove seems to just crank the prose out on auto-pilot. I eventually just speed read it. The first book of the series is the best.
I think the best Turtledove alt history book is 'The Guns of the South'.
Original poster here. I like and respect the Netherlands. I pay attention to what the Dutch people say and pay heed to their analysis of us Americans. I think the Dutch are the most advanced of all the Europeans, followed by the French, the British (all those in the UK), the Irish, and the Italians. At the bottom of my (I must admit completely biased) list are the Germans, the Swiss, and the Austrians, in that order.
Someday I will win the lottery and spend my days drifting across Amsterdam from koffeehuis to coffeeshop, learning Dutch, French, and Japanese. Listening to everyone, being very cool, and pulling the occasional child and drunken tourist out of the canal.
No, seriously, many young people around the world have a respect for the Netherlands that they don't for their own country and most others. When others berate us we turn nasty, sarcastic, bitter, and defensive. With criticism from the Dutch, we try to absorb what we are being told in order that we might use the advice to become better people.
Especially by treating minorities with respect and discrete freedom (here I refer to the marijuana community, the gay and open-sexual communities, and politcal refugees, not only the racial minorities) the Dutch get a lot more respect in the world than other small countries. Most of this respect and influence is kept really quiet, especially by the minorities in their home countries.
Freedoms have their price and the Netherlands is an expensive place to live and visit. I sometimes wonder how the Dutch and Americans can be so different and still both have so much money.
I think we should get away from actually believing that a 15-year-old boy in Norway sat down and decoded the media industry DVD Content Scrambling System.
A technician from Xing Corporation passed the confidential trade-secret information for descrambling the signal to 'DVD Jon' who wrote a front-end interface in Linux for this information and uploaded his program to a Linux distribution site.
If you think that a 15-year-old could just sit down and decode an industry encryption standard, then you should go work for National Public Radio and not spend so much time on Slashdot.
I have a site [averagebacon.com] too! Now can I be part of the in-crowd? Huh? Huh? Can I?
Superior Sir,
It is our impression that you have created an accurate artistic rendering of the female of this sentinent humanoid species found on the third planet of this solar system, the water planet.
However, we believe that the reproductive opening of the female in your drawing is too big and in the wrong place.
Intercepts of their communications that is oriented towards reproduction lead us to believe that the female's reproductive organs are accessed through a smaller opening actually located at the joining of the legs.
We also believe that both the male and female of the species have two identical eyes.
Complete conformation will have to wait until our deep space probes arrive on the surface of Tosev 3 and begin to send back data on this species.
You are obviously retarded. The linux community already has enough retards bringing it down, we don't need any more. You will never be able to use Linux to work with eBay. Don't even bother trying.
Thank you for your help and kind comment.
Nevertheless, I feel a simple 'eBay won't work with Linux, they're simply not compatable at the present time' would have been much more courteous...Asshole
I'm watching the US from a distance,... how can you stop American politicians from being legally bribed?
Maybe you can give us some help here. How exactly do you keep the politicians honest and concerned with public welfare in this place where you 'watch the US from a distance'?
This isn't a flamebait. It just a question; what do people do in the place you are to keep the political process working and balanced?
Do you put reporters in jail when they write about political payoffs in the newspapers? This keeps stories of bad pols out of the public mind and has everyone thinking all that 'stuff' that takes place in America can't happen here.
Do you have no corrupt politicians? Then the government in this magical place called 'a distance' runs a complete stagnant society, nothing ever changes, and it never occurs to anyone that anything could change. There is no western media exposure to 'bad influences'.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume that this means 5 million picture elements. Arranged in some sort of rectangular pattern.
But does it mean 1600 lines of 3000 pixels in each line? And if so, what is the resolution of each pixel? Is it 24 bits per pixel? That is, 8 bits of resolution each color red, green, blue ( or the equalivant three primary colors for recording images rather than generating images) like VGA? Or is it 4 bits per pixel with a predefined palatte of color shades?
Before everyone jumps on my case and calls me an idiot, a moron, 'go back to AOL, shit-for-brains', ect..., let me just say that I don't trust anything that the consumer electronics industry advertises any more in its product spec sheets. I just don't believe anything that they say. It's worth it to be called an idiot by thousands of geeks in exchange for a single nugget of real and valid technical expertise on a new digital consumer product.
I pick up the newspaper every Friday and there's this big beautiful 4 page color advertising insert from Fry's Electronics. And every week they feature portable CD players and point out the fantastic tech specs with bullets. Stuff like the 1-bit Digital-To-Analog convertor internally!! So much more advanced over anything that you can get anywhere else!?!
Dear Leader Ballmer was probably thinking along the lines of the fabulously successful RIAA model. That is, the consumer buys a portable CD player for $25 and then a constant string of CD purchases for $15 each.
He'll probably point out that the customer is 'saving' money with the Microsoft model, where they buy the PC for $100 and then the Windows for another $100 just once. Or at least until the next $100 upgrade.
The general consensus is different. A lower PC cost would make it less likely that people would buy an operating system that is 50% or more of the cost of the PC.
I have never accepted the idea that the 'operating system' is a seperate component from the computer and should be purchased seperately. I have always just made a copy of what's available from friends and work and used it.
Having a computer and operating system sold as sererate components makes as much sense as having the auto industry be in the practice of advertising and selling cars routinely without steering wheels. Then by historical quirk and tortured legalities offering the steering wheels for $1000 extra. Then having a dumpster behind every auto distributor full of perfectly good steering wheels that people can install in their new car for free.
It's a totally absurd situation and I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt rejecting it. All the basic fundamental research in computer science that led to OS development in the first place was done with US taxpayers dollars. MS coders were just recoding the same routines, data structures, and algorythyms that taxpayers paid for previously in military R&D. Nothing new has ever been developed north of the California border.
My first five computers (Radio Shack MC10 CoCo, Timex-Sinclair 2000, Atari XL, Apple II, Commodore 64) had no seperate operating system requiring seperate purchase. The idea that I'm going to pay the richest man in the world $100 for something that was deliberately left of the computer is absurd and insane. Don't even bother to ask anymore, it's never going to happen.
Your example refers to a description of how a particular programming language works.
My allegorical example would be if one engineer received a 20 page block of code from another engineer who wrote it and asked for a brief description of what it did and how it worked.
Having this description actually included in the at the expense of the time taken to merely speak it would significantly improve the ability of someone else to quickly understand the code in the future.
Talk is cheap. Having a powerful tool that can take talk and turn it into written text gives an incredible advantage to the people who are willing to explore the potential and opportunities opened up by this new tool.
The comments would of course be in a different color text from the code. Which is finally beginning to happen with code editors.
If diagrams and spoken explanations are so important to code documentation, then how come we don't have compiliers that can handle diagrams and MP3 clips as part of the source code file?
Programmers have to get away 1950s frame-of-references in their tool sets. It's a new century.
Imagine a parallel programming cluster of 10000 microprocessors with each processor having its own memory and gigabit ethernet connection. Imagine each of these processors running a complex but fixed routine very quickly.
Imagine each of these 10000 processors was represented by Chinese character. The programmer would organize the parallel activity of this supercluster by arranging and writing Chinese characters on a monitor.
Could you get a job programming in this kind of environment? Tens of thousands of people in China could. Chinese programmers are routinely expected to master 10000 characters (and combinations) to be literate, then they're expected to master 10000 english words and grammar constuctions, and master complex programming languages.
Americans complain about having to master dribble like C++.
I would recommend learning embedded systems programming. The tools are free or cheap, the microcontrollers are powerful, highly integrated, and very inexpensive. The skills that you learn as a programmer are nearly completely transferable.
Embedded systems works a lot more on the hardware electronic component level than traditional CS stuff like system administration.
In a few years the entire electical power distribution grid of the country will have to be rewired with microcontrollers to monitor and control the energy inefficiencies that are ignored today (due to the consequences of >$50/barrel of oil, along with the possible devaluation of the US dollar).
That will open many opportunities for computer specialists with embedded-systems orientation.
An ultra-high tech book like this is story of Neal Stephenson's SF novel The Diamond Age. I read this from the library after someone alluded to it in a /. reply to a message. It's also found on Kazaa! occasionally.
Why not write intelligent structured sentences describing what each line does?
Of course, I would recommend structured sentences over rambling discourse. But that's an optimal condition; an 'in a perfect universe' condition. And it takes lots of discipline. Under time and management pressures, extended documentation of the source is the usually the first area to be expended on a death-march coding project.
The time used to make a sloppy speech-to-text code documentation piece that would be actually part of the code would be far less than the time spent tring to re-learn how a poorly-documented code works, especially a year after it is written.
The speech-to-text approach is an intermediate step to adequate documentation that seemed like an experiment in using new advanced technology in a new application.
My profs insisted that we should diagram the process algorythym before coding.
..ramble on...
They recommended strict diagramming techniques like Warnier-Orr. They said use a white board with big erasures and little markers because large sections are going to be junk.
Strict and systematic Warnier-Orr diagramming can be a real discipline.
I've gone back to it in order to code very tight , time-dependent 50 nanosecond mulitple interrupt routines in assembler for microcontrollers and embedded systems. I've even placed the white board on the flatbed scanner to copy it when I've gotten that finally works in a walk-through (take the hinged cover off- it goes much easier.)
Even after doing this..and then assembling and burning the code into the chip..and having the device actually function correctly..I still get the feeling that there is something stange and magical happening that I'm not aware of.
One just sits down and tells oneself that, no, there's no magic here. You designed a complicated machine, you throughly tested a precise simulation, you built it, and it worked exactly like it supposed to because there wasn't any possiblity that it could not work like it was supposed to. It's just going through hundreds of precisely defined steps many millions of times a second...and gives the illusion of magic and sentinite intelligence.
Or maybe you are being sarcastic and trying to make fun of my stupidity.
No one's making fun of you.. and you're not stupid. The fucking computer language is stupid for not making this kind of ambiguity easy to detect and for causing you to waste two whole days debugging.
Everybody does this.
The lower that you go in hardware, the more insane this kind of nonsense gets.
Check out the documentation for the Intel 8251 interrupt controller (a chip designed into the original IBM PC and cloned into every PC since).
It is a masterpiece of surrealism and parallel realities. It starts out like a normal text document and soon gets very weird.
I suspect that the original PC designers got the thing to work right once by accident, and then used a logic analyser to find what configuration bytes were being sent to it on reset so they could write a stable and functional BIOS.
Yes, seriously...
.
your code should read like a novel.
After finishing the program, compiling, and debugging it, get out your microphone and one of those speech-to-text programs. Train it if you haven't done so already by reading the presented text for twenty minutes or so. Do the training twice: once when sober and properly intoxicated. (Myself, I grew up in the 1970's and consider alcoholic beverages déclassé, but everyone has their own favorite intoxicant).
Get a picture of your favorite dreamboat celebrity and put it next to the screen. Load your source code on the editor and start the speech-to-text converter in the background.
Take a deep breath and gaze adoringly in eyes of the person in the photo. Pretend that they are hopelessly infatuated with everything that you say and just love to hear you talk about your programming.
Then start talking. Talk about your code. Start at the beginning. Talk about every line and what it does. How it works. How it fits. How totally cool it is. Just go on and on.
When you're done, turn off the speech-to-text generator running in the background and save the hopefully rather large text file.
Go back and cut and paste lines from the source file into the spoken description text file. (Use the speech-to-text engine to make this step go fast.)
Hopefully you will now have about a half a page or more of rambling, but technically dense and accurate, speech text for every line of source code.
This is the proper amount of commentary that every line of code needs.
Put comment markers around your spoken text and lots of white space above and below the actual source lines.
Your program is still good: it compiles and runs. But it now looks like a novel.
This is good! The single line coding format that we all use is an obsolete product from the 1950's when a byte of computer RAM memory cost more than a good restaurant dinner. Those days are gone.
Now you want to be able to read and understand the code quickly. It's far easier to glance and read through pages of rambling dictation describing the code than it is to try to understand 'normal' code with little pissant comments pasted randomly through it.
You're a professional now. Anything that makes your job easier is good
If your CS professor disagrees, give them a copy of your speech-to-text software and a picture of Lindsey Lohan to place next to their screen and have them try it themselves.
"Hi, I'm Officer Joe. We police think Citibank is handing out fake money. Please go into the bank, empty your account and bring me the bills" is NOT a "technologically-advanced" scam. It's something only a fool would fall for.
This kind of thing rarely happens because the police have made sure that there are laws with strongly enforced punishments for impersonating an officer and because CitiBank has made sure that there are precise and clear laws regarding bank fraud.
The tech community has never done jack shit to ensure that people who use internet technology to steal from citizens are punished and their illegally obtained assets are confiscated and returned to the people who were defrauded.
The tech community is rather quick to refer to anyone who hasn't mastered new technology a 'moron', an 'idiot', or deservant of the fraud that was inflicted upon them.
The tech community sometimes wonders, when they 're not distracted by video games and fantasies of interplanetary voyages, why they have no political power and why the rest of the world doesn't take them seriously.
Give Master Card or VISA a completed investigation...and THEY STILL WON'T PROSECUTE.
--- happened to me and it took 3 years to straighten out,
Rip off Tony Soprano for a couple hundred and then bring him the names, a written confession, an itemized list of goods purchased with stolen credit cards, videotapes of the suspects and see what happens.
All this pissant crime happens and will continue to happen because the punishment to the offenders doesn't match the collective pain to the victims.
Deal with crime by punishing the criminals. If the credit card companies refuse to prosecute the criminals then sue them for creating a public menace through negligence. People who work on the infrastructure pipes and stuff under roads don't leave big holes in the middle of road after dark. The first car that drove into the hole would file and win a big lawsuit. Same with credit card companies that won't prosecute fraud cases. By letting the criminals go unpunished because it is unconvienent to go after them they are creating a public menace through negligence.
One big class-action lawsuit would change their minds. Maybe they could let the unemployed engineers and computer technicians go after these people on a bounty-hunter basis, splitting recovered funds and asset forfeitures 50:50.
Bottom line is: a fool and his (or her) money are soon parted
I disagree. We aren't dealing with fools here, we discussing people who have been ripped off.
Crime victims are not fools because they have been defrauded by technologically-advanced shitpeople.
If there are any 'fools' here it is us. For assuming that we could unleash cool advanced new technology like internet commerce onto the general public without our having built-in safeguards against the criminal element who would use this new technology to prey on people. People who trusted us and our technology.
We should be the ones who take responsibility to ensure that the criminals who use our technology to steal and defraud are punished. We can't rely on the established law-enforcement authorities since they are far too busy dealing with all the 12-year-old file-sharers, pot smokers, and grandmas trying to board airplanes with plastic forks.
We created the technology that created the problem. We can't deal with the problem by just calling people 'fools' as a result of their using the technology that we told them would improve their lives.
Just once I'd like the see the sun come up in the West over the Golden Gate Bridge. Just once I'd like to read mature and ethical comments from Slashdot posters.
The intelligence agencies of the USA are extremely embarrassed that they couldn't infiltrate one operative into the Islamic terrorist networks, even though these spent many billions of dollars trying to do so.
What's even worse is that some 19-year-old stoned-out white hippie freak kid from Sausalito can buy a copy of the Koran at a garage sale, walk into to the Islamic Student Center at San Francisco State saying that "it's a really cool book, but there are some things that I don't understand...", and a year later be a full, trusted member of the Taliban.
This is the real reason why John Walker Lindh got 20 years in maximum-security prison; he embarrassed the Republicans. They keep him separated from the other prisoners because they're afraid that, like Malcolm X, he will convert the other prisoners to Islam. What the Americans don't really need is a million young people in prison, black and white, serving insanely long sentences for chickenshit drug 'crimes', to become radical Muslims committed to the destruction of the corporate ruling class when released.
Flash!
After weeks of seismic activity, Mt. St Helens shot off its lava dome that had been building for 20 years.
The solid 5000 ton piece of rock shot off like a cannonball out of the crater of the volcano.
It traveled 100 miles north in a perfect parabola. Then it smashed into the main administrative center of Microsoft corporation outside Redmond.
"All our source code and back-ups were destroyed", said a Microsoft spokescreature. "We'll have to start all over from MS-DOS 6.2 again".
"It's as if Mother Nature was gunning for us and scored a big, fat bulls-eye on her first shot", said VP Steve Ballmer. Mr. Ballmer was directly in the main inpact center when the giant rock hit but he suffered no apparent damage. "No force of nature would ever dare fuck with me!", said Mr. Ballmer. He then announced that in light of the loss of all the source code and support network, there would be 3% reduction in the list price of all current Windows versions selling at full retail.
The way to deal with an overextended empire, as you write that the USA is becoming, is to get it bogged down in highly symbolic but strategically worthless wars that comsume all of its energy and resources.
Naturally, no one in their right mind would want to take on the empire directly. But it might be worthwhile to provoke some of one's annoying hot-headed neighbors to do so. That way you keep your neighbors too busy fighting the empire to bother you.
This world is not really a good place to run a totalitarian empire. There is a giant surplus of young people without jobs who can be easily convinced that all their troubles are caused by the empire, and that some god will solve all of their troubles if they just kill enough of the empire's citizens and solders. The empire spends billions each year on high tech weapons but only has a million or so solders up against two billion young people willing to fight it. Globally they get spread pretty thin.
The USA is in deep debt. Each year its government spends far more than it takes in through taxes. It finances itself by issuing bonds. People outside the USA buy its bonds because they believe that the USA will always make good on its bonds. The USA believes that whenever its bonds come due it can cover them by just selling more bonds. The empire finances itself not through looting and pillage but with a giant Ponzi scheme.
Want to stop the growth of the empire. Stop buying its government bonds. Today the largest buyer of USA government bonds is the government of People's Republic of China. Fifteen years ago it was the the various banks of Japan. Thirty years ago it was Saudi Arabia.
It's best for everyone if the empire occupies itself with endless expensive wars in worthless little hellholes. Let's hope that they continue to do so and leave the rest of us alone.
I'm not sure. I vaguely remember a title like this where people put rare plants and items in special places so that they can be found in the future after they go extinct.
Hello,
I'm glad to see someone caught the reference to Harry Turtledove's WorldWar alternate history series.
Yes I've read the series. Yes, it's quite annoying a lot of the time. Dr. Turtledove seems to just crank the prose out on auto-pilot. I eventually just speed read it. The first book of the series is the best.
I think the best Turtledove alt history book is 'The Guns of the South'.
Hi,
Original poster here. I like and respect the Netherlands. I pay attention to what the Dutch people say and pay heed to their analysis of us Americans. I think the Dutch are the most advanced of all the Europeans, followed by the French, the British (all those in the UK), the Irish, and the Italians. At the bottom of my (I must admit completely biased) list are the Germans, the Swiss, and the Austrians, in that order.
Someday I will win the lottery and spend my days drifting across Amsterdam from koffeehuis to coffeeshop, learning Dutch, French, and Japanese. Listening to everyone, being very cool, and pulling the occasional child and drunken tourist out of the canal.
No, seriously, many young people around the world have a respect for the Netherlands that they don't for their own country and most others. When others berate us we turn nasty, sarcastic, bitter, and defensive. With criticism from the Dutch, we try to absorb what we are being told in order that we might use the advice to become better people.
Especially by treating minorities with respect and discrete freedom (here I refer to the marijuana community, the gay and open-sexual communities, and politcal refugees, not only the racial minorities) the Dutch get a lot more respect in the world than other small countries. Most of this respect and influence is kept really quiet, especially by the minorities in their home countries.
Freedoms have their price and the Netherlands is an expensive place to live and visit. I sometimes wonder how the Dutch and Americans can be so different and still both have so much money.
I think we should get away from actually believing that a 15-year-old boy in Norway sat down and decoded the media industry DVD Content Scrambling System.
A technician from Xing Corporation passed the confidential trade-secret information for descrambling the signal to 'DVD Jon' who wrote a front-end interface in Linux for this information and uploaded his program to a Linux distribution site.
If you think that a 15-year-old could just sit down and decode an industry encryption standard, then you should go work for National Public Radio and not spend so much time on Slashdot.
I have a site [averagebacon.com] too! Now can I be part of the in-crowd? Huh? Huh? Can I?
Superior Sir,
It is our impression that you have created an accurate artistic rendering of the female of this sentinent humanoid species found on the third planet of this solar system, the water planet.
However, we believe that the reproductive opening of the female in your drawing is too big and in the wrong place.
Intercepts of their communications that is oriented towards reproduction lead us to believe that the female's reproductive organs are accessed through a smaller opening actually located at the joining of the legs.
We also believe that both the male and female of the species have two identical eyes.
Complete conformation will have to wait until our deep space probes arrive on the surface of Tosev 3 and begin to send back data on this species.
Praise be to the Emperor!
Suxs to be you...
I'm sorry, but this phrase won't parse in my language translator. The equivalent phrases that I get are (in English):
"Here's to your success!"
"You are creating a vacuum with your mouth"
Since the phase has no preceeding or subsequent sentences, it can't be matched against any cultural context.
Could you please clarify as to which of the above choices this expression refers?
Thank you,
-A person who speaks a language that you've never heard of, living in a place unknown to you or any of your teachers.
You are obviously retarded. The linux community already has enough retards bringing it down, we don't need any more. You will never be able to use Linux to work with eBay. Don't even bother trying.
Thank you for your help and kind comment.
Nevertheless, I feel a simple 'eBay won't work with Linux, they're simply not compatable at the present time' would have been much more courteous.
+1 Moron
What the hell are you doing at Slashdot?
I live here.
+1 asshole
Whilst no others actually got that you were being sarcastic and/or funny
I'm not being sarcastic or funny, everything works exactly the way I described it.
I will admit to being too bitter in the last paragraph, though.
I'm watching the US from a distance,... how can you stop American politicians from being legally bribed?
Maybe you can give us some help here. How exactly do you keep the politicians honest and concerned with public welfare in this place where you 'watch the US from a distance'?
This isn't a flamebait. It just a question; what do people do in the place you are to keep the political process working and balanced?
Do you put reporters in jail when they write about political payoffs in the newspapers? This keeps stories of bad pols out of the public mind and has everyone thinking all that 'stuff' that takes place in America can't happen here.
Do you have no corrupt politicians? Then the government in this magical place called 'a distance' runs a complete stagnant society, nothing ever changes, and it never occurs to anyone that anything could change. There is no western media exposure to 'bad influences'.
On and On..