Communication would be a logistical nightmare as the radio waves need to be aimed at a tiny speck once the space craft wanted to relay information.
On the other hand, photon entanglement (or similar quantum-level entanglement <hand wave>) is (theoretically) unaffected by distance and does not have "aiming problems." This was SciFi when Ender's Game (1985) was written, but it has now been used at distances > 140km and rising. Give them a few more years and I'll bet we will see intra-solar system realtime communication.
This article was a genuine joy to read. This is like reading about the invention of the airplane...written in the first person by one of the Wright brothers.
I particularly liked the description of his visit to Bangalore -- it goes to the heart of why we do open source.
First, a joke circa 1983: a hardware guy and a software guy (remember, this was 1983) take an HP Unix system to the roof of a 5 story building. They connect a long extension cord, boot it up, and throw it off the roof. There is a resounding crash and they rush down to see the results. "Wow!" shouts the hardware guy, "it's still running!" The software guy shrugs and says, "Yeah, but it's still running HP-UX."
What's my point? It may be better than previous MSIE attempts, but it is still Microsoft, it's still IE, and it still only runs on Windows. As a web designer the rule is still: make it look right in Firefox, then unbreak it in MSIE{6,7,8}.
I'm not sure why someone modded the parent Funny. It's not.
The problem with ubiquitous surveillance (video, credit card, GPS, cellphone, etc.) is that it can be used for things other than simply providing date/time/place evidence of a crime. Aggregating and cross-correlating this information creates a detailed picture of someone's life and habits.
Those who spout the simplistic 'if you haven't done anything wrong...' not only miss the danger that ubiquitous, government-controlled surveillance represents to all of us, they demonstrate a disturbing lack of understanding of the right to privacy.
A gauntlet is "a heavy glove, often armored" or "a glove with a heavy cuff covering part of the arm." To throw down the gauntlet is to challenge someone; to pick up the gauntlet is to accept someone's challenge.
A gantlet is "a lane between two lines of people armed with staves or whips, through which someone being punished is forced to run while being clubbed or whipped by the people on either side" (run the gantlet) and, figuratively, "any series of trials and difficulties."
Just have Poppy buy you into office so that the people that have the strings attached to important parts of your body can pull what they want, when the want.
Seriously, we have just witnessed the greatest bald-faced rape of the Constitution since... forever. The thing (or the most recent thing) that turns my stomach is that there is a very good chance they will get away with it.
In 1986 I started work on the first commercial search engine that supported "similarity searching." This was based on the Cosine Coefficient of weighted attribute vectors. As we got deeper and deeper into what made one search successful and another a flop, it became obvious that there were two prime enemies of successful searching.
Very short queries.
Words with multiple, unrelated meanings. E.g., "bank" has more than a dozen meanings as both a noun and a verb.
For example, a query of "man versus machine" (actually run by Esther Dyson in our offices), produced an apparently random mix of articles about chess-playing computers, labor strikes over factory automation, and some guy towing a locomotive with his teeth (it's been over 20 years, so I don't remember the exact results). She hesitated for a moment, then said, "Oh! They really are all about people and machines, but how do I narrow it down to what I meant, which was more along the lines of the labor articles?"
We already had an answer to this by the time she visited us. Our solution (based on the work of Salton and Buckley) was to allow the user to say, "Results 1 and 3 are irrelevant, but result 2 is highly relevant." We would then take the attribute vectors for the articles and raise or lower the importance of those terms in the new query vector. After the first round of relevance feedback, the results often got downright spooky. Why? Because a) we now had a lot more terms to work with, and b) the additional terms helped to disambiguate terms like "bank." E.g., mention of levee construction probably meant this was a "river bank" and not a financial institution.
What does this have to do with what Google is doing? By reordering your results you are, in effect, giving user relevance feedback. I don't know what they are going to do with this information, but just getting your hands on it is a very important first step. And having you bring things to the top is doubly important, because positive relevance feedback is several times more important than negative. E.g. Tell me to drive towards San Francisco, rather than just saying I should leave Chicago.
On the downside, as mentioned by several previous posters, this opens the door to deep understanding of the user and what s/he is interest in. (Of course, they already get some of this when you click on items in a result list. They have a little JavaScript goody that records each and every click. Fortunately, there are GreaseMonkey scripts to disable this "feature.") One of my (few) customers back in the 80's and 90's said, "If you know only the questions I ask, you know too much." The customer? The NSA.
Actually, I'm so old I completely forgot about SCCS! The amazing thing was that RCS was a step *up* from SCCS. Gack!
A 360/75 is as far back as I go, along with those f*cking 029 card punches. The only good thing about them was at end-of-term we would take the Bit Bucket (ie. the chad bucket) and have confetti wars. You'd be pulling 0s and 9s out of unlikely places for the next week.
Most senior (read: geezer) geeks I know have firmly held opinions on... just about everything. In most cases these opinions are the distillation of decades of experience. This doesn't mean that they are (necessarily) stuck in a rut, but it does mean they are unlikely to be swayed by the language/methodology du jour.
So one thing I would want to know is can they work in the specific environment you have in place (or planned). I've got 35 years and N^2 languages behind me, but you say 'Java' and I say 'Life is too short'.
Another valuable trait in a senior member is the ability to pass on their experience to other members of the team. This can be as a role model, as a mentor, or even as someone who gives periodic instructional seminars. A way to keep balance might be to have some of the younger members give talks on things that are more cutting edge and that the seniors might enjoy learning. For example, I've been using RCS/CVS/SVN since God was a young child, but I had someone half my age sit me down and give me a real tour of Mercurial (hg) and it blew me away.
This is the sole focus of Microsoft with all of their code: give you something that works (mostly), and then make damn sure it (and you) can't work with anything else.
This allows <F4> to toggle highlighting on and off.
The <CR> ends the:let command, the / starts a new search (and therefore clears the command line), and the <BS> makes the / go away.
A little circumlocutious, but it works for me.
The following are also useful for search highlighting:
My employees used to joke that the company would make more money if we had a shower installed in my office. I claimed I would end up looking like a prune, but was told that that might also be an improvement.
I agree, go concrete. It's easy to forget that almost everything about a computer is abstract to a rank beginner.
One thing I have seen students get hung up on is:
x = x + 1
It looks like an equality statement that couldn't possibly be correct. Just telling them it's "an assignment statement" doesn't seem to penetrate. I have found a mailbox analogy to work about 95% of the time.
It goes like this: You are at the post office in front of a wall of mailboxes. The mailboxes have numbers on them (you could go into memory addressing if it was appropriate, but it's probably best to leave that out unless someone asks for a little more detail). One of the boxes has a label on it: 'x'. The statement "x = x + 1" means "take the current contents of the box labeled 'x', add '1' to it, then put the result back in the box labeled 'x'"
Often, about 60% of the students immediately go, "Oh. That's pretty straightforward." For the remainder, you could have 4 or 5 cardboard boxes. Write 'x' on a sticky note and put it on a box. Write '1' on a piece of paper... You get the idea. Seeing this very concrete representation of memory, and that the names are 'labels' on that memory, means that this thing they have been hearing about for years, 'memory', is now nothing but a bunch of boxes you can store stuff in. Simple.
You can elaborate on this by putting multiple labels on the same box, or putting special pieces of paper in some boxes that say 'don't use me, go get/set the value of some other box', thereby demonstrating pointers. You can also demonstrate type mismatches by putting a picture in a box and then ask a student what it means to 'add 1 to a picture'. Etc, etc.
This may sound like baby steps, but in 1/2 hour or less and you have given your students a real, usable model of one of the most fundamental concepts there is.
I sold a domain 2 years ago using escrow.com and everything went smooth as silk. To this day I do not know who the buyer was, but his agent handled a few details, and the money was wire transfered - ba da bing.
This was a domain I registered back in 1992 and I got an ridiculous amount for it. But if I knew then what I know now... Sigh. I could have had sex.com, auto.com, business.com, etc.com. Sigh. Back to working on the perpetual motion machine.
This is a UK company that does spectacular vinyl => digital transcriptions of out-of-copyright 78's and 33's.
As I write this I'm listening to a beautiful recording from April, 1954, of Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6.
It's not "free as in beer," but I have no problem with that when I think of the amount of effort they have put into making this music available. Prices vary depending on the length of the recording and the format you want it in. They offer the MP3 of this 4-disc set (74:52 play time) for 7 euros, 16 bit FLAC for 9 euros, and 24 bit FLAC for 15 euros.
We found these guys when we were trying to cleanly record a 1950's performance of a Requiem Mass by a monk's choir. We have the vinyl and it's in pretty good shape, but our recording of it still had a fair amount of pop and some hiss. On a lark I googled on the album name and, son-of-a-bitch!, there it was. I listened to about a minute of their file (they give loooong samples) and it was.... spectacular. I didn't think twice in paying them 9 euros for it.
Last month I gave a friend (who teaches jazz and plays marimba in small clubs) the 1953 Massey Hall concert recording "The Quintet -- The Trio." 76 minutes of the Masters playing together. Charlie Parker (alto saxophone), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (double bass), Max Roach (drums). He had heard bits of it before, but was blown away by having a quality recording of the entire concert.
The success of this company shows (yet again) just how stupid the RIAA really is. They have so much music locked away and they make only a small part of it available. If they spent a fraction of their enforcement budget on re-releasing classics they might find out the true meaning of Long Tail.
So you're saying you fail Rowell's Extension to Einstein's Test of Comprehension? Sad, sad day.
Einstein: You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. Rowell's Extension: You totally don't understand something if you can't even explain it to a bunch of geeks. Also, they'll probably laugh at you.
Huh. I was unaware of there being more than one variant of it. I had the "pleasure" of getting the original version straight from the horse's mouth.
Charles was a real piece of work. His PhD thesis was on MetaProgramming and made the claim that programmers were interchangeable cogs and only the Uber-programmer (who directed all the drones) mattered. He even claimed to have proved it with an experiment involving programmers A, B, and C. There was one little tiny flaw in his experiment (other than the ridiculously small sample set). I actually know all three of the programmers involved and drones they ain't: one of them is possibly the best hacker I have ever met, and the other two are probably in the top 20. So, I guess if you have nothing but rock stars working for you then, yeah, they're interchangeable.
Needless to say, Bill G. loved this idea and that's why Charles is now worth a few billion.
Humorous note: There were 8 of us + Charles on the BravoX project. He was so undisciplined in using our primitive "source code control system" that we eventually locked him out of the code and he could only check things out with the help of one of his employees.
But... but... I have a relationship with my mouse! It's one of the two things I have my hand on all day long. Oh, behave! I meant my keyboard.
Somewhat more seriously, do you really want your screen to have... stuff all over it? Personally, I don't let anyone touch my screen. Or imagine an office with everyone yelling at their computer, "No, God damn it! The other left!"
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, well that's very different. Never mind.
Communication would be a logistical nightmare as the radio waves need to be aimed at a tiny speck once the space craft wanted to relay information.
On the other hand, photon entanglement (or similar quantum-level entanglement <hand wave>) is (theoretically) unaffected by distance and does not have "aiming problems." This was SciFi when Ender's Game (1985) was written, but it has now been used at distances > 140km and rising. Give them a few more years and I'll bet we will see intra-solar system realtime communication.
I love seeing SciFi turn into RL stuff!
This article was a genuine joy to read. This is like reading about the invention of the airplane...written in the first person by one of the Wright brothers.
I particularly liked the description of his visit to Bangalore -- it goes to the heart of why we do open source.
+1 joke #2.
First, a joke circa 1983: a hardware guy and a software guy (remember, this was 1983) take an HP Unix system to the roof of a 5 story building. They connect a long extension cord, boot it up, and throw it off the roof. There is a resounding crash and they rush down to see the results. "Wow!" shouts the hardware guy, "it's still running!" The software guy shrugs and says, "Yeah, but it's still running HP-UX."
What's my point? It may be better than previous MSIE attempts, but it is still Microsoft, it's still IE, and it still only runs on Windows. As a web designer the rule is still: make it look right in Firefox, then unbreak it in MSIE{6,7,8}.
This stuff really pisses me off. Google use to hide their dirty little perversions using an onclick event and I had a GM script to disable it.
Now they don't even bother hiding it. But that's OK because we have Firefox and GreaseMonkey and we can just Make It Go Away®
New greasemonkey script to cleanup all of the googly perverted URLs. Enjoy.
I'm not sure why someone modded the parent Funny. It's not.
The problem with ubiquitous surveillance (video, credit card, GPS, cellphone, etc.) is that it can be used for things other than simply providing date/time/place evidence of a crime. Aggregating and cross-correlating this information creates a detailed picture of someone's life and habits.
Those who spout the simplistic 'if you haven't done anything wrong ...' not only miss the danger that ubiquitous, government-controlled surveillance represents to all of us, they demonstrate a disturbing lack of understanding of the right to privacy.
Arrrrgggghhhh! From Bartleby.com:
A gauntlet is "a heavy glove, often armored" or "a glove with a heavy cuff covering part of the arm." To throw down the gauntlet is to challenge someone; to pick up the gauntlet is to accept someone's challenge.
A gantlet is "a lane between two lines of people armed with staves or whips, through which someone being punished is forced to run while being clubbed or whipped by the people on either side" (run the gantlet) and, figuratively, "any series of trials and difficulties."
Grumble grumble ...
Beware! Frozen Bubble is the most addictive computer game I have ever played. Be prepared to lose hours (and hours ...) of your life.
Sure you can!
Just have Poppy buy you into office so that the people that have the strings attached to important parts of your body can pull what they want, when the want.
Seriously, we have just witnessed the greatest bald-faced rape of the Constitution since ... forever. The thing (or the most recent thing) that turns my stomach is that there is a very good chance they will get away with it.
Three words: User Relevance Feedback.
In 1986 I started work on the first commercial search engine that supported "similarity searching." This was based on the Cosine Coefficient of weighted attribute vectors. As we got deeper and deeper into what made one search successful and another a flop, it became obvious that there were two prime enemies of successful searching.
For example, a query of "man versus machine" (actually run by Esther Dyson in our offices), produced an apparently random mix of articles about chess-playing computers, labor strikes over factory automation, and some guy towing a locomotive with his teeth (it's been over 20 years, so I don't remember the exact results). She hesitated for a moment, then said, "Oh! They really are all about people and machines, but how do I narrow it down to what I meant, which was more along the lines of the labor articles?"
We already had an answer to this by the time she visited us. Our solution (based on the work of Salton and Buckley) was to allow the user to say, "Results 1 and 3 are irrelevant, but result 2 is highly relevant." We would then take the attribute vectors for the articles and raise or lower the importance of those terms in the new query vector. After the first round of relevance feedback, the results often got downright spooky. Why? Because a) we now had a lot more terms to work with, and b) the additional terms helped to disambiguate terms like "bank." E.g., mention of levee construction probably meant this was a "river bank" and not a financial institution.
What does this have to do with what Google is doing? By reordering your results you are, in effect, giving user relevance feedback. I don't know what they are going to do with this information, but just getting your hands on it is a very important first step. And having you bring things to the top is doubly important, because positive relevance feedback is several times more important than negative. E.g. Tell me to drive towards San Francisco, rather than just saying I should leave Chicago.
On the downside, as mentioned by several previous posters, this opens the door to deep understanding of the user and what s/he is interest in. (Of course, they already get some of this when you click on items in a result list. They have a little JavaScript goody that records each and every click. Fortunately, there are GreaseMonkey scripts to disable this "feature.") One of my (few) customers back in the 80's and 90's said, "If you know only the questions I ask, you know too much." The customer? The NSA.
Actually, I'm so old I completely forgot about SCCS! The amazing thing was that RCS was a step *up* from SCCS. Gack!
A 360/75 is as far back as I go, along with those f*cking 029 card punches. The only good thing about them was at end-of-term we would take the Bit Bucket (ie. the chad bucket) and have confetti wars. You'd be pulling 0s and 9s out of unlikely places for the next week.
> How many is N^2?
Ah, grasshopper, the N that can be defined is not the True N. When you no longer ask "What is N?", then you will know the value of N^2.
Definitely an interesting question.
Most senior (read: geezer) geeks I know have firmly held opinions on ... just about everything. In most cases these opinions are the distillation of decades of experience. This doesn't mean that they are (necessarily) stuck in a rut, but it does mean they are unlikely to be swayed by the language/methodology du jour.
So one thing I would want to know is can they work in the specific environment you have in place (or planned). I've got 35 years and N^2 languages behind me, but you say 'Java' and I say 'Life is too short'.
Another valuable trait in a senior member is the ability to pass on their experience to other members of the team. This can be as a role model, as a mentor, or even as someone who gives periodic instructional seminars. A way to keep balance might be to have some of the younger members give talks on things that are more cutting edge and that the seniors might enjoy learning. For example, I've been using RCS/CVS/SVN since God was a young child, but I had someone half my age sit me down and give me a real tour of Mercurial (hg) and it blew me away.
I'll be interested in hearing what you come up.
So that got a +5 funny.
Well, it is funny . . . but then it's not.
This is the sole focus of Microsoft with all of their code: give you something that works (mostly), and then make damn sure it (and you) can't work with anything else.
Let us review some basic truths:
1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
I don't think 'wanting someone else to do it for you' quite falls into this category.
I have the following in my .vimrc file:
map <F4> :let &hlsearch=!&hlsearch<CR>/<BS>
This allows <F4> to toggle highlighting on and off. The <CR> ends the :let command, the / starts a new search (and therefore clears the command line), and the <BS> makes the / go away.
A little circumlocutious, but it works for me.
The following are also useful for search highlighting:
set hls
highlight Search term=standout ctermfg=4 ctermbg=7
highlight MatchParen ctermfg=1 ctermbg=8
My employees used to joke that the company would make more money if we had a shower installed in my office. I claimed I would end up looking like a prune, but was told that that might also be an improvement.
It looks like an equality statement that couldn't possibly be correct. Just telling them it's "an assignment statement" doesn't seem to penetrate. I have found a mailbox analogy to work about 95% of the time.
It goes like this: You are at the post office in front of a wall of mailboxes. The mailboxes have numbers on them (you could go into memory addressing if it was appropriate, but it's probably best to leave that out unless someone asks for a little more detail). One of the boxes has a label on it: 'x'. The statement "x = x + 1" means "take the current contents of the box labeled 'x', add '1' to it, then put the result back in the box labeled 'x'"
Often, about 60% of the students immediately go, "Oh. That's pretty straightforward." For the remainder, you could have 4 or 5 cardboard boxes. Write 'x' on a sticky note and put it on a box. Write '1' on a piece of paper ... You get the idea. Seeing this very concrete representation of memory, and that the names are 'labels' on that memory, means that this thing they have been hearing about for years, 'memory', is now nothing but a bunch of boxes you can store stuff in. Simple.
You can elaborate on this by putting multiple labels on the same box, or putting special pieces of paper in some boxes that say 'don't use me, go get/set the value of some other box', thereby demonstrating pointers. You can also demonstrate type mismatches by putting a picture in a box and then ask a student what it means to 'add 1 to a picture'. Etc, etc.
This may sound like baby steps, but in 1/2 hour or less and you have given your students a real, usable model of one of the most fundamental concepts there is.
+1 on escrow.com
I sold a domain 2 years ago using escrow.com and everything went smooth as silk. To this day I do not know who the buyer was, but his agent handled a few details, and the money was wire transfered - ba da bing.
This was a domain I registered back in 1992 and I got an ridiculous amount for it. But if I knew then what I know now ... Sigh. I could have had sex.com, auto.com, business.com, etc.com. Sigh. Back to working on the perpetual motion machine.
This is a UK company that does spectacular vinyl => digital transcriptions of out-of-copyright 78's and 33's. As I write this I'm listening to a beautiful recording from April, 1954, of Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6.
It's not "free as in beer," but I have no problem with that when I think of the amount of effort they have put into making this music available. Prices vary depending on the length of the recording and the format you want it in. They offer the MP3 of this 4-disc set (74:52 play time) for 7 euros, 16 bit FLAC for 9 euros, and 24 bit FLAC for 15 euros.
We found these guys when we were trying to cleanly record a 1950's performance of a Requiem Mass by a monk's choir. We have the vinyl and it's in pretty good shape, but our recording of it still had a fair amount of pop and some hiss. On a lark I googled on the album name and, son-of-a-bitch!, there it was. I listened to about a minute of their file (they give loooong samples) and it was .... spectacular. I didn't think twice in paying them 9 euros for it.
Last month I gave a friend (who teaches jazz and plays marimba in small clubs) the 1953 Massey Hall concert recording "The Quintet -- The Trio." 76 minutes of the Masters playing together. Charlie Parker (alto saxophone), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (double bass), Max Roach (drums). He had heard bits of it before, but was blown away by having a quality recording of the entire concert.
The success of this company shows (yet again) just how stupid the RIAA really is. They have so much music locked away and they make only a small part of it available. If they spent a fraction of their enforcement budget on re-releasing classics they might find out the true meaning of Long Tail.
> and ran all my traffic through thor.
Uh, that one stopped me for a moment.
Image having the Thunder God himself doing stateful packet inspection! Wow, talk about security!
So you're saying you fail Rowell's Extension to Einstein's Test of Comprehension? Sad, sad day.
Einstein: You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.
Rowell's Extension: You totally don't understand something if you can't even explain it to a bunch of geeks. Also, they'll probably laugh at you.
Huh. I was unaware of there being more than one variant of it. I had the "pleasure" of getting the original version straight from the horse's mouth.
Charles was a real piece of work. His PhD thesis was on MetaProgramming and made the claim that programmers were interchangeable cogs and only the Uber-programmer (who directed all the drones) mattered. He even claimed to have proved it with an experiment involving programmers A, B, and C. There was one little tiny flaw in his experiment (other than the ridiculously small sample set). I actually know all three of the programmers involved and drones they ain't: one of them is possibly the best hacker I have ever met, and the other two are probably in the top 20. So, I guess if you have nothing but rock stars working for you then, yeah, they're interchangeable.
Needless to say, Bill G. loved this idea and that's why Charles is now worth a few billion.
Humorous note: There were 8 of us + Charles on the BravoX project. He was so undisciplined in using our primitive "source code control system" that we eventually locked him out of the code and he could only check things out with the help of one of his employees.
But ... but ... I have a relationship with my mouse! It's one of the two things I have my hand on all day long. Oh, behave! I meant my keyboard.
Somewhat more seriously, do you really want your screen to have ... stuff all over it? Personally, I don't let anyone touch my screen. Or imagine an office with everyone yelling at their computer, "No, God damn it! The other left!"