I suspect that the American election this November will offer a catalyst. Electronic voting is far, FAR more complicated than most people suspect. Even those well versed in cryptography only know have the problem. You have to deal with both the problem, the people and the politics. A very tall order.
The fundamental problem is the Austrailian ballot wants to provide two things, that repel each other like the north ends of two magnets: anonymity and accountability. We want a system that can accurately tally the votes in all races (itself a difficult problem domain), while divorcing the vote itself from the fact a vote was cast. With a paper ballot, its easy enough to have a tear tab that visually confirms receipt of a specific ballot while divorcing the vote from the receipt. Computers offer the task of accounting for nearly the entire process without need for human overview. I don't think I can visually inspect a hard drive for its contents, can you?
The problem itself seems daunting enough, but you're hardly finished if you've got a solution. You'll need to promote and sell this thing without alienating the people running the show (I hope that phrase isn't offensive). They want paperless voting real, real bad. And age demographic of voters is in need of things like visual enhancements and handicapped accessibility. So you're gonna have to break the news to them that they can't have their pie today.
Then theres the politics of it all. First, the special interests groups. Understandably, groups that promote the interests of the blind, and the elderly are in favor of the machines. What's a little more intriguing is where the ACLU comes down on this. I was under the impression that the national group had sided with the impaired voters, but I can't seem to find any supporting evidence. On the other hand, I can find some local chapters in technologically affluent states rejecting them. Another odd opponent is the Women's League of Voters or some such (its been a while since I last dealt with the issue and I've tragically misplaced my main references on it =/) . They really want those machines. One of their big deals is volunteering to run the place. Again, some of the local chapters have disagreed with the statements of the national organization, which helps show the characteristic of a national lobby organization, even one as seemingly benign as a women's right to vote group.
Finally, there's the matter of party politics. The owners of voting machine manufactuers are overwhelmingly Republican. This seems pretty suspicious, but you gotta realize that the owners of anything are overwhemingly Republican. Thats a deep statement, perhaps deeper than I had originally thought. Anyways, as highly compensated officers of a profitable corporation, owners, presidents and CE?'s are prone to political donations and lobbying, especially given the nature of their business. Some have even gone on to successfully win the bid for office in DC. This is something they don't want out, simply because its an election year, and implications of wrongdoing aren't well recieved, even if they're found innocent in the court of public opinion in the long run.
Digital voting today has solved the people problem and the politics problem, but I think we'll find they haven't yet addressed the problem problem (I think if I have to present this to someone in the field I'll have to rework that one...). If digital voting fouls up the presidential election, there will be a shitstorm, and lucky will be the person who walks away with a clean face and a bright smile. Bugs alone are enough to really make a mess of things, but there's unlimited potential for intentional abuse, be it someone out to prove a point about computer security or someone who believes just a little bit more in a pet cause than in fundamental American democracy.
And Opera stole the gesture idea from Black and White. I'm pretty sure tabbed broswing/MDI was a popular feature in other applications like Microsoft Office and others. They also were the first to recognize the utility behind getright, and provide some of the functionality there.
The one innovation i'm surpised few people bring up is the f2 command. it seems innocous at first but at a single button press it can be configured to open a new tab with the provided url. It happens that they've upped the parser to actually do things as though in a command line, like "g opera sucks" will bring up a new window with the search results from google on the downsides of opera. I've loved that button since 3.51 and I wrote this comment today in opera 7.51.
They'd be in a different market. I'm sure they'd argue that providing the kind of system this onerous burden is supposed to produce (a system that doesn't have regular problems) is costly and not what consumers are paying for.
If you think of Microsoft as a software development firm, you've thought of them completely wrong. They're a software trading and branding machine. I shouldn't need to tell anyone reading this the relationship between MS and DOS. Most of the code they write is glue. Somehow they took a piece of standalone software purchased from a 3rd party, and managed to integrate it with the Operating System called Windows such that its now inseperable.
The cost of a car repair is probably about 10 percent or so. The cost of fixing one bug as proposed would eat the entire profit on the sale, and two would probably be a loss for the sale. So either Microsoft starts charging twenty (or possibly two hundred) times the current price of software, or spends twenty to two hundred times the current cost of development and testing to reduce the likelyhood of these errors. I'm pretty sure we're all in favor of more engineers, it means more software jobs, less bugs, and happier techs. But a fixed cost is still a cost that needs to be recouped in revenue. Its incredibly hard to estimate the amount per unit you'll need to charge to recoup the extra work, since the more you raise the price, the fewer purchases you'll see, resulting in having to charge more per unit, and so on. Finally, it WILL affect time to market. I can't say whether testing for bugs is what's keeping Longhorn back, or if its simply a matter of waiting for the hardware to catch back up, so this item may not be as strong as you might think. But in general time to market is VITAL to sales, and investments in general. You can't start recouping costs until you start selling.
The nail in the coffin of software liability is Free Software. How much does it cost to fix a remote hole in the default install of OpenBSD? Or any of the various problems plaguing Linux recently? They're doing it for free, so asking them to pay you for your troubles as part of an implicit cost of their hobby likely means they'll stop. And all the arguments in the above paragraph apply to commercial linux vendors as well, if not more so. They've already found a market willing to pay for service plans and uptime contracts and maintaince, without legislating their wants into needs. Putting concerns of quality into law is going to lead to problems of flexibility. Not all software is written to run on computers that have CD drives. Not all software CAN be patched. Your system may need everyone who touches it to have Security clearances, while your boss is mandating Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) solutions, when available.
To answer your question, if required to mail patches to your office and pay for a service technician to apply or replace their product, Microsoft, and the vast majority of software companies, would be left without a customer.
Well if its truely compatible, then I've simply found a bug. See, the conversion system apparently doesn't like tables very much. Which is too bad, because they're incredibly useful for things like resumes. I also hear they're great for data. But when I use nested tables, apparently that's not okay to export. I know Word can do it, since I originally wrote my resume in Word. When I rewrote it in OOo, I get a nice [Frame1] where a table is supposed to be highlighting my courses. Whats more interesting is that a.html conversion leaves the inner table as a.gif.
I know compatibility isn't easy, especially with a piece of software notoriously incompatible with previous versions. But here's the deal. I can't submit "[Frame1]" to recruiters. And their lazy.doc scanning program asses can't be bothered to accept a perfectly readable, perfectly portable pdf. So I can't just leave it be, writing files in OOo means going back and double checking that the results look okay in Word. All the space savings in the world don't compare to losing a job because the person viewing my resume thinks I'm a total dumbass who can't even bother to slap together a decent resume.
Ah, now I see the incentive. Shut out the piracy competition, while making money at the same time! I mean its not like projectionists don't have a week to prescreen the movie for flaws privately or anything...
The problem is, how often do you take time off to play a round of golf? If the company's doing their job viciously, never. Game companies especially, are not kind in the hours dept. They're typically understaffed and over worked. Once a game ships, you might get a week, or perhaps a month, off. Or you might complete Myst 3 and find yourself fired because your bosses aren't competent enough to keep the work coming in at a regular pace.
Basically, employers too often want to work a salaried employee like an hourly without the hassle of overtime.
well, aside from putting nuclear material on the moon, there's the matter of getting in/out. Also im sure your electronics would love to float on the moon from incredible magnetism.
"2) People drive 'em like goddamned Miatas... ATTENTION NEW SUV PEOPLE: It's a 4 ton vehicle, fucking slow down in the turns!"
You mean I can't drive them like in the commercials? Hell, its not even offroad! Its not like these things might be dangerously unbalanced or anything!
Maybe that's because they keep monkeying around with the controller and marketing themselves as a family oriented company, while families across the world are strapped for cash in the middle of a global recession, while 3rd party games are continuing to fight over the few segments of the market that seem to purchase.
If nintendo really wants to break a mold, they'll have to start actively advertising to women and girls without patronizing them. I'm not sure its possible (the subject came up at a GDC lecture, with no answer) but its nessecary for a company who aims broadly to land some broads =0.
Maybe that's a bit extreme. Seriously, software is way more complex than a car. Who among you would bet your entire net worth that you haven't shipped code with potentially serious bugs in it? There are always bugs.
I only have a little experience with the design of cars, I can't accurately judge your claim of complexity. But remember that cars are only about 40 years older than computers but are a far more understood beast than software. Automotive and mechanical engineers know where to expect things to break. Its a straightforward application of physics struggling against cost. The greatest pressure facing automobile designers is entropy. Your engine slowly corrodes, and parts wear. They search for ways to slow these forces, build prototypes, and measure the test results.
On the other hand software failures are relatively unknown. You can point to buffer overflows and be half-right. But those are just security vulnerabilities. Not to diminish their severity or importantce, but they're just one kind of software failure. The nature of software failures is largely one of human error. Surely bits flip on occasion, and drives fail, but there are reportedly few occasions where this has happened and then led to failure. Sometimes software just yields inaccurate results, maybe calculating estimate with the wrong formula and the consulant wins with a considerable underbid. Enough to short him the last two year's revenue.
Part of the problem is that software has a high degree of context. Maybe you won't trigger a certain bug if you use the keyboard as a method of input rather than the mouse. Perhaps a bug is hidden within a sub dialog box. You can't just take a piece of software out on the road, make a left turn, a right turn, test the lights and call it good. To extend the analogy, there's a possiblity in software that when your left blinker is on, you can't make right turns. There's hardly a way for that to happen with your car, but software interconnects so vaguely it might.
I don't particularly like the idea of living with software written by people who don't understand why their software fails, or how they intend to prevent future bugs of a similar nature, or follow through to see how their efforts to alleviate the problem have worked. I agree that it's difficult, but I don't expect the design of a rotational engine to be a cake walk either.
Your resume is basically one or two sheets of paper you've sent in as part of an application. What happens is this gets torn apart, possibly duplicated and passed around. Objectives are useful, if written appropriately. An objective isn't a one-liner to show how big of a goody goody two shoes you are, it lets the reader know what job you are applying for. In practice your resume gets a scant few seconds of recognition before it gets placed into a "keep" pile or the popular "on file for 3 months" pile. Once it gets to the keep pile it will whorl around several people's desk and they may or may not keep track of it very well or what it pertains to. Hence a specific objective, like "a career as a Software Engineer at Obscene Quantities of Money Investments." But how can you write a general resume and have a specific objective? Answer: you don't.
You should definately have a general resume for uses like your webpage and for unexpected solicitations. There shouldn't be an objective on it like "a job in a challenging environment where I learn new things all the time", or any objective at all. But when you send a resume to someone, it should be TARGETED to them. An objective for starters. And certifications that count help as well. If you're applying for a military software job, maybe a gun cert would be helpful, though usually service counts far more, and
But remember that a resume is supposed to be curt. Extras like your hobbies and maritial status are extraneous and come off as padding and awkward.
Technically, cheat software like OGL can be considered derivative work. Under US copyright law, derivative works require permission, otherwise its a form of copyright infringement. Of course, the same can be said of all those console cheating devices like.
Furthermore, CS uses a key permission infrastructure to play online. Some cheaters use software to switch won IDs to evade bans and the like. This can also be used to find valid keys, which might qualifty as some sort of copyright protection circumvention.
While I don't like cheating, I'm not sure a non-techincal solution is going to work. The only surefire way to stop cheating like that is to only send data to clients they should be seeing or hearing. That eliminates see through walls cheats, a significant kind of cheat for CS. I've been accused of cheating when I shot through some permeable materials to kill people, accusations are nearly a big a problem as cheating itself. Hopefully Valve is taking as many steps as possible to alleviate this problem.
It bears mentioning that about half of XBox's platinum edition games are multiplatform games available on all three consoles, and often the GBA as well (at least the title's the same...). If there's any real sales requirement to be added to the list of 20 dollar games, that can speak volumes about your risk taking xbox crowd.
If this function is rather complex, it soon becomes the single most important factor determining the calculation cost of the algorithm.
Not to mention, the fitness function is the basis for correctness. If the function is misleading, or if its broken under certain circumstances, then there's a good chance your genetic solution will result in something tailor made for the fitness function, bugs intact. As an example, my professor mentioned a robotic soccer competition with a bug that resulted in a high velocity movement of the kicking robot and the ball (I think if the ball was wedged between the bot and the wall). As a result, many genetic algorithms quickly learned to exploit this behavior, making real life solutions from this simulation problematic.
So you're saying what's needed is an inverse Dating Sim? Where the end payoff isn't an anime girl's face full of spunk but maybe a shiny diamond ring from a Brad Pitt lookalike?
As I recall, it was published by Atlus, but written by Quest, who was recently purchased by Square. Nintendo published the game in Japan, but I guess NOA either didn't want it to succeed or didn't think they could promote it effectively, so they let it slide. Atlus picks up a lot of games that would otherwise slip through. Unfortunately, they have yet to pick up on the kind of distribution power of Nintendo or EA, so finding their games can be difficult. Hell, they really don't put down the kind of money they should and often you won't even know about a new game they brought over!
Sure, if they enjoy legal fees associated with defending themselves in the matter. Hell, Nintendo used to sue rental stores for renting out their games; I'm sure the same logic was behind it but it still fell flat in court.
Yes, if you're programming for popular UNIX or PC platforms, ASM really can't gain you much. Many free compilers already come with a strong set of optimization rules that can pretty much match handwritten code. And really, you have to go out of your way to write horrible code that translates poorly. I mean, compilers these days are pretty good about caching expression evaluatoins and inlining function calls. Where assembly language really counts is those instruction extensions. Especially with older compilers that maybe you haven't bought the new version of (why you're paying for one, got me). Fortunately, most people who need instruction set optimized code often turn to libraries written with that specific purpose in mind. There's a couple MD5 libraries for sale that have mmx, sse, or sse2 optimizations, for example. So learning ASM probably won't help you write faster code for your desktop, nessecarily.
On the other hand, a large quantity of high paying software engineering jobs don't use the UNIX or PC platforms. PowerPC's often have specialized hardware that you want to access, as do several other kinds of boards and microcontrollers. Furthermore, you might not even have a C compiler target available. And even if you do, it's almost certainly not as dependable as gcc. In this arena, knowing how to write and read assembly code is vital. Hell, when I wrote the code for my selective weed sprayer, it read pretty much like ASM would. Set a few register values, read some other ones, then reset a timer to do it again later. And when it doesn't work, its often helpful to check the ASM output to see if perhaps something's going wrong either in your mind or the compiler's mind =).
Jesus no. It's bad enough that KU's radio station converted to top40 after a surprising summer phone poll result, I don't think we need any more incentive to standardize five songs across all publicly liscenced airwaves. I mean, do you think that they'll get rid of regular ads if more stations and labels adopt the scheme?
Well, its known to be slower in implementation. It also forces lighting on the rendering. After all, we're tracing rays of light, here. But in theory, raytracing is where the future resides. I'm told, though I don't fully understand the logic behind it, that raytracing should scale to higher poly scenes than rasterizing. The big problem it seems is that its difficult to find hacks to speed up rendering. Most speed enhancements are data restructuring, like subregion partitioning. The idea being that if a ray doesn't intersect a region, it can't intersect anything in the subregion and you don't need to test it.
The real benefit is free occulsion culling, shadows, lighting, reflections, and essentially a physical simulation of how things actually work in life. There's been a few boards prototyped to do ray-tracing. Just google for Real-Time Raytracing. The paper behind it suggests that a hardware raytracer scales nearly linearly with the amount of tracer units behind it. These days its difficult to take a hardware prototype and beat the market standard with a wholly different paradigm, especially when the benchmark is OpenGL based. OpenGL only provides for 4 light sources, and little point. The prototype that exists is incredibly large and not well suited to current small desktop cases. But given the right set of talent, this is an interesting concept that could prove to take over poly pushers eventually.
Strange that the ordering length is so long on a prius, its been like that for a while now. You'd think they'd catch on to demand and schedule more production time for it. Its in their benefit, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that the American election this November will offer a catalyst. Electronic voting is far, FAR more complicated than most people suspect. Even those well versed in cryptography only know have the problem. You have to deal with both the problem, the people and the politics. A very tall order.
The fundamental problem is the Austrailian ballot wants to provide two things, that repel each other like the north ends of two magnets: anonymity and accountability. We want a system that can accurately tally the votes in all races (itself a difficult problem domain), while divorcing the vote itself from the fact a vote was cast. With a paper ballot, its easy enough to have a tear tab that visually confirms receipt of a specific ballot while divorcing the vote from the receipt. Computers offer the task of accounting for nearly the entire process without need for human overview. I don't think I can visually inspect a hard drive for its contents, can you?
The problem itself seems daunting enough, but you're hardly finished if you've got a solution. You'll need to promote and sell this thing without alienating the people running the show (I hope that phrase isn't offensive). They want paperless voting real, real bad. And age demographic of voters is in need of things like visual enhancements and handicapped accessibility. So you're gonna have to break the news to them that they can't have their pie today.
Then theres the politics of it all. First, the special interests groups. Understandably, groups that promote the interests of the blind, and the elderly are in favor of the machines. What's a little more intriguing is where the ACLU comes down on this. I was under the impression that the national group had sided with the impaired voters, but I can't seem to find any supporting evidence. On the other hand, I can find some local chapters in technologically affluent states rejecting them. Another odd opponent is the Women's League of Voters or some such (its been a while since I last dealt with the issue and I've tragically misplaced my main references on it =/) . They really want those machines. One of their big deals is volunteering to run the place. Again, some of the local chapters have disagreed with the statements of the national organization, which helps show the characteristic of a national lobby organization, even one as seemingly benign as a women's right to vote group.
Finally, there's the matter of party politics. The owners of voting machine manufactuers are overwhelmingly Republican. This seems pretty suspicious, but you gotta realize that the owners of anything are overwhemingly Republican. Thats a deep statement, perhaps deeper than I had originally thought. Anyways, as highly compensated officers of a profitable corporation, owners, presidents and CE?'s are prone to political donations and lobbying, especially given the nature of their business. Some have even gone on to successfully win the bid for office in DC. This is something they don't want out, simply because its an election year, and implications of wrongdoing aren't well recieved, even if they're found innocent in the court of public opinion in the long run.
Digital voting today has solved the people problem and the politics problem, but I think we'll find they haven't yet addressed the problem problem (I think if I have to present this to someone in the field I'll have to rework that one...). If digital voting fouls up the presidential election, there will be a shitstorm, and lucky will be the person who walks away with a clean face and a bright smile. Bugs alone are enough to really make a mess of things, but there's unlimited potential for intentional abuse, be it someone out to prove a point about computer security or someone who believes just a little bit more in a pet cause than in fundamental American democracy.
And Opera stole the gesture idea from Black and White. I'm pretty sure tabbed broswing/MDI was a popular feature in other applications like Microsoft Office and others. They also were the first to recognize the utility behind getright, and provide some of the functionality there.
The one innovation i'm surpised few people bring up is the f2 command. it seems innocous at first but at a single button press it can be configured to open a new tab with the provided url. It happens that they've upped the parser to actually do things as though in a command line, like "g opera sucks" will bring up a new window with the search results from google on the downsides of opera. I've loved that button since 3.51 and I wrote this comment today in opera 7.51.
They'd be in a different market. I'm sure they'd argue that providing the kind of system this onerous burden is supposed to produce (a system that doesn't have regular problems) is costly and not what consumers are paying for.
If you think of Microsoft as a software development firm, you've thought of them completely wrong. They're a software trading and branding machine. I shouldn't need to tell anyone reading this the relationship between MS and DOS. Most of the code they write is glue. Somehow they took a piece of standalone software purchased from a 3rd party, and managed to integrate it with the Operating System called Windows such that its now inseperable.
The cost of a car repair is probably about 10 percent or so. The cost of fixing one bug as proposed would eat the entire profit on the sale, and two would probably be a loss for the sale. So either Microsoft starts charging twenty (or possibly two hundred) times the current price of software, or spends twenty to two hundred times the current cost of development and testing to reduce the likelyhood of these errors. I'm pretty sure we're all in favor of more engineers, it means more software jobs, less bugs, and happier techs. But a fixed cost is still a cost that needs to be recouped in revenue. Its incredibly hard to estimate the amount per unit you'll need to charge to recoup the extra work, since the more you raise the price, the fewer purchases you'll see, resulting in having to charge more per unit, and so on. Finally, it WILL affect time to market. I can't say whether testing for bugs is what's keeping Longhorn back, or if its simply a matter of waiting for the hardware to catch back up, so this item may not be as strong as you might think. But in general time to market is VITAL to sales, and investments in general. You can't start recouping costs until you start selling.
The nail in the coffin of software liability is Free Software. How much does it cost to fix a remote hole in the default install of OpenBSD? Or any of the various problems plaguing Linux recently? They're doing it for free, so asking them to pay you for your troubles as part of an implicit cost of their hobby likely means they'll stop. And all the arguments in the above paragraph apply to commercial linux vendors as well, if not more so. They've already found a market willing to pay for service plans and uptime contracts and maintaince, without legislating their wants into needs. Putting concerns of quality into law is going to lead to problems of flexibility. Not all software is written to run on computers that have CD drives. Not all software CAN be patched. Your system may need everyone who touches it to have Security clearances, while your boss is mandating Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) solutions, when available.
To answer your question, if required to mail patches to your office and pay for a service technician to apply or replace their product, Microsoft, and the vast majority of software companies, would be left without a customer.
Well if its truely compatible, then I've simply found a bug. See, the conversion system apparently doesn't like tables very much. Which is too bad, because they're incredibly useful for things like resumes. I also hear they're great for data. But when I use nested tables, apparently that's not okay to export. I know Word can do it, since I originally wrote my resume in Word. When I rewrote it in OOo, I get a nice [Frame1] where a table is supposed to be highlighting my courses. Whats more interesting is that a .html conversion leaves the inner table as a .gif.
.doc scanning program asses can't be bothered to accept a perfectly readable, perfectly portable pdf. So I can't just leave it be, writing files in OOo means going back and double checking that the results look okay in Word. All the space savings in the world don't compare to losing a job because the person viewing my resume thinks I'm a total dumbass who can't even bother to slap together a decent resume.
I know compatibility isn't easy, especially with a piece of software notoriously incompatible with previous versions. But here's the deal. I can't submit "[Frame1]" to recruiters. And their lazy
Ah, now I see the incentive. Shut out the piracy competition, while making money at the same time! I mean its not like projectionists don't have a week to prescreen the movie for flaws privately or anything...
The problem is, how often do you take time off to play a round of golf? If the company's doing their job viciously, never. Game companies especially, are not kind in the hours dept. They're typically understaffed and over worked. Once a game ships, you might get a week, or perhaps a month, off. Or you might complete Myst 3 and find yourself fired because your bosses aren't competent enough to keep the work coming in at a regular pace.
Basically, employers too often want to work a salaried employee like an hourly without the hassle of overtime.
well, aside from putting nuclear material on the moon, there's the matter of getting in/out. Also im sure your electronics would love to float on the moon from incredible magnetism.
"2) People drive 'em like goddamned Miatas... ATTENTION NEW SUV PEOPLE: It's a 4 ton vehicle, fucking slow down in the turns!"
You mean I can't drive them like in the commercials? Hell, its not even offroad! Its not like these things might be dangerously unbalanced or anything!
Maybe that's because they keep monkeying around with the controller and marketing themselves as a family oriented company, while families across the world are strapped for cash in the middle of a global recession, while 3rd party games are continuing to fight over the few segments of the market that seem to purchase.
If nintendo really wants to break a mold, they'll have to start actively advertising to women and girls without patronizing them. I'm not sure its possible (the subject came up at a GDC lecture, with no answer) but its nessecary for a company who aims broadly to land some broads =0.
Maybe that's a bit extreme. Seriously, software is way more complex than a car. Who among you would bet your entire net worth that you haven't shipped code with potentially serious bugs in it? There are always bugs.
I only have a little experience with the design of cars, I can't accurately judge your claim of complexity. But remember that cars are only about 40 years older than computers but are a far more understood beast than software. Automotive and mechanical engineers know where to expect things to break. Its a straightforward application of physics struggling against cost. The greatest pressure facing automobile designers is entropy. Your engine slowly corrodes, and parts wear. They search for ways to slow these forces, build prototypes, and measure the test results.
On the other hand software failures are relatively unknown. You can point to buffer overflows and be half-right. But those are just security vulnerabilities. Not to diminish their severity or importantce, but they're just one kind of software failure. The nature of software failures is largely one of human error. Surely bits flip on occasion, and drives fail, but there are reportedly few occasions where this has happened and then led to failure. Sometimes software just yields inaccurate results, maybe calculating estimate with the wrong formula and the consulant wins with a considerable underbid. Enough to short him the last two year's revenue.
Part of the problem is that software has a high degree of context. Maybe you won't trigger a certain bug if you use the keyboard as a method of input rather than the mouse. Perhaps a bug is hidden within a sub dialog box. You can't just take a piece of software out on the road, make a left turn, a right turn, test the lights and call it good. To extend the analogy, there's a possiblity in software that when your left blinker is on, you can't make right turns. There's hardly a way for that to happen with your car, but software interconnects so vaguely it might.
I don't particularly like the idea of living with software written by people who don't understand why their software fails, or how they intend to prevent future bugs of a similar nature, or follow through to see how their efforts to alleviate the problem have worked. I agree that it's difficult, but I don't expect the design of a rotational engine to be a cake walk either.
Your resume is basically one or two sheets of paper you've sent in as part of an application. What happens is this gets torn apart, possibly duplicated and passed around. Objectives are useful, if written appropriately. An objective isn't a one-liner to show how big of a goody goody two shoes you are, it lets the reader know what job you are applying for. In practice your resume gets a scant few seconds of recognition before it gets placed into a "keep" pile or the popular "on file for 3 months" pile. Once it gets to the keep pile it will whorl around several people's desk and they may or may not keep track of it very well or what it pertains to. Hence a specific objective, like "a career as a Software Engineer at Obscene Quantities of Money Investments." But how can you write a general resume and have a specific objective? Answer: you don't.
You should definately have a general resume for uses like your webpage and for unexpected solicitations. There shouldn't be an objective on it like "a job in a challenging environment where I learn new things all the time", or any objective at all. But when you send a resume to someone, it should be TARGETED to them. An objective for starters. And certifications that count help as well. If you're applying for a military software job, maybe a gun cert would be helpful, though usually service counts far more, and
But remember that a resume is supposed to be curt. Extras like your hobbies and maritial status are extraneous and come off as padding and awkward.
You do realize that part of Azimov's theme behind the laws was that they are inevitably contradictory, just as we humans have moral dilemmas, right?
Technically, cheat software like OGL can be considered derivative work. Under US copyright law, derivative works require permission, otherwise its a form of copyright infringement. Of course, the same can be said of all those console cheating devices like .
Furthermore, CS uses a key permission infrastructure to play online. Some cheaters use software to switch won IDs to evade bans and the like. This can also be used to find valid keys, which might qualifty as some sort of copyright protection circumvention.
While I don't like cheating, I'm not sure a non-techincal solution is going to work. The only surefire way to stop cheating like that is to only send data to clients they should be seeing or hearing. That eliminates see through walls cheats, a significant kind of cheat for CS. I've been accused of cheating when I shot through some permeable materials to kill people, accusations are nearly a big a problem as cheating itself. Hopefully Valve is taking as many steps as possible to alleviate this problem.
Wouldn't the Federalist Papers count as anonymous speech?
-Publius
It bears mentioning that about half of XBox's platinum edition games are multiplatform games available on all three consoles, and often the GBA as well (at least the title's the same...). If there's any real sales requirement to be added to the list of 20 dollar games, that can speak volumes about your risk taking xbox crowd.
sweet mother of jesus, skies of arcadia has finally fallen in price. I must have missed that!
If this function is rather complex, it soon becomes the single most important factor determining the calculation cost of the algorithm.
Not to mention, the fitness function is the basis for correctness. If the function is misleading, or if its broken under certain circumstances, then there's a good chance your genetic solution will result in something tailor made for the fitness function, bugs intact. As an example, my professor mentioned a robotic soccer competition with a bug that resulted in a high velocity movement of the kicking robot and the ball (I think if the ball was wedged between the bot and the wall). As a result, many genetic algorithms quickly learned to exploit this behavior, making real life solutions from this simulation problematic.
So you're saying what's needed is an inverse Dating Sim? Where the end payoff isn't an anime girl's face full of spunk but maybe a shiny diamond ring from a Brad Pitt lookalike?
As I recall, it was published by Atlus, but written by Quest, who was recently purchased by Square. Nintendo published the game in Japan, but I guess NOA either didn't want it to succeed or didn't think they could promote it effectively, so they let it slide. Atlus picks up a lot of games that would otherwise slip through. Unfortunately, they have yet to pick up on the kind of distribution power of Nintendo or EA, so finding their games can be difficult. Hell, they really don't put down the kind of money they should and often you won't even know about a new game they brought over!
Sure, if they enjoy legal fees associated with defending themselves in the matter. Hell, Nintendo used to sue rental stores for renting out their games; I'm sure the same logic was behind it but it still fell flat in court.
Yes, if you're programming for popular UNIX or PC platforms, ASM really can't gain you much. Many free compilers already come with a strong set of optimization rules that can pretty much match handwritten code. And really, you have to go out of your way to write horrible code that translates poorly. I mean, compilers these days are pretty good about caching expression evaluatoins and inlining function calls. Where assembly language really counts is those instruction extensions. Especially with older compilers that maybe you haven't bought the new version of (why you're paying for one, got me). Fortunately, most people who need instruction set optimized code often turn to libraries written with that specific purpose in mind. There's a couple MD5 libraries for sale that have mmx, sse, or sse2 optimizations, for example. So learning ASM probably won't help you write faster code for your desktop, nessecarily.
On the other hand, a large quantity of high paying software engineering jobs don't use the UNIX or PC platforms. PowerPC's often have specialized hardware that you want to access, as do several other kinds of boards and microcontrollers. Furthermore, you might not even have a C compiler target available. And even if you do, it's almost certainly not as dependable as gcc. In this arena, knowing how to write and read assembly code is vital. Hell, when I wrote the code for my selective weed sprayer, it read pretty much like ASM would. Set a few register values, read some other ones, then reset a timer to do it again later. And when it doesn't work, its often helpful to check the ASM output to see if perhaps something's going wrong either in your mind or the compiler's mind =).
Jesus no. It's bad enough that KU's radio station converted to top40 after a surprising summer phone poll result, I don't think we need any more incentive to standardize five songs across all publicly liscenced airwaves. I mean, do you think that they'll get rid of regular ads if more stations and labels adopt the scheme?
Well, its known to be slower in implementation. It also forces lighting on the rendering. After all, we're tracing rays of light, here. But in theory, raytracing is where the future resides. I'm told, though I don't fully understand the logic behind it, that raytracing should scale to higher poly scenes than rasterizing. The big problem it seems is that its difficult to find hacks to speed up rendering. Most speed enhancements are data restructuring, like subregion partitioning. The idea being that if a ray doesn't intersect a region, it can't intersect anything in the subregion and you don't need to test it.
The real benefit is free occulsion culling, shadows, lighting, reflections, and essentially a physical simulation of how things actually work in life. There's been a few boards prototyped to do ray-tracing. Just google for Real-Time Raytracing. The paper behind it suggests that a hardware raytracer scales nearly linearly with the amount of tracer units behind it. These days its difficult to take a hardware prototype and beat the market standard with a wholly different paradigm, especially when the benchmark is OpenGL based. OpenGL only provides for 4 light sources, and little point. The prototype that exists is incredibly large and not well suited to current small desktop cases. But given the right set of talent, this is an interesting concept that could prove to take over poly pushers eventually.
Strange that the ordering length is so long on a prius, its been like that for a while now. You'd think they'd catch on to demand and schedule more production time for it. Its in their benefit, after all.
I've read that AMD knew about the pentium slip up before it was announced to the public.