Mmmhhh.... been reading some of your past posts, and I have to say that you sound quite bitter... If you don't like programming and hate most of the IT business so much, you should maybe look for another job.
As for the monkey with a keyboard thing... mmhhh... could you define what a real programmer is to you first please?
I like the long names. You can always use a decent development environment (eclipse, emacs, jEdit, ANYTHING basically) that provides code completion. The long names are there to make it easier to understand what a particular function does if you're not familiar with it. If you feel that having your functions and variables named Xx1 and Xy2 is a good thing, that's a problem.
real criminals won't be hindered by these new invasions...
I think that more than 90% of "real criminals" would not have the time/skill/means/opportunity to create a fake identity for themselves. Let's get real. Not everyone is Ted Bundy. And, BTW, it's a lot easier to have someone killed than to destroy their lives by making them into a false personna by means of altering their police/insurance/job/federal records (if you have the means to do one of the two) so perhaps we could tone down the paranoia just a bit.
Hey! I agree with you in that Alien 4 was pretty much... crap. But Alien 3 was great! I've always thought that what makes that series so good is that each is a different genre (Alien - terror, Aliens - action, Alien 3 - suspense/drama), and each is very good in its own right (well, except for the fourth one with that hideous mammal alien thingie)
The therac-25 incident (where a failure in the software of a radiation therapy machine caused the death or serious injury of six people) is a harsh reminder of the lack of liability companies have over the software they produce, since the people involved didn't go to jail or get proper trial/punishment due to negligence and lack of proper development and testing procedures (link here).
I agree that it would be an extremely bad idea to use NT / Windows 2000 for anything that is mission critical (such as running a semaphore network), and that would be a misuse of the product, but there are plenty of proper uses that can produce really bad results due to software failure, and companies should be held accountable for these failures.
Blender has matured A LOT in the past two years. I'm not a regular Blender user, but I introduced it to a friend and he became quite attached to the thing in less than a month. The interface is extremely weird, but it really shines once you get to understand it. Its main purpose, I think, is to keep you focused on the work at all times, and with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse, kind of what Macintosh or Linux do with their CTRL/APPLE+Left click interfaces.
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the size of the program. It is hardly more than one Megabyte!!!!! and once you get to know how to use it, there's practically nothing you can't achieve with, say, 3dStudio that blender can't do one way or the other (considering 3dS's signature of around 300 megs, that's saying something).
Finally, for those interested, it's a free download in here: Blender site (no, I'm in no way associated with the company that makes it, I just think it's one hell of a product). Plus, there are a lot of tutorials at their site you can check out to sort out that freaky interface. (oh, and it runs on linux quite well, too);-)
I agree with the poster. There is a very clear example for this: in "the book of laughs and forgetfulness" (loose translation, I'm mexican) Milan Kundera ("the unbearable lightness of being") devotes an entire chapter to explain "litost", a feeling that can only be expressed easily in czech (it is a complex combination of shame at one's self shortcomings being exposed involuntarily by another person's attempt at not exposing them and so on and so on).
The Czech language is full of these deeply emotional words, and therefore, czechs have a waaay easier time feeling and communicating feelings. Same can be said of other languages, that specialize in different areas of human thought. Any person that is a polyglot can attest to that (have you never stumbled in mid sentence when you want to convey something that does not exist as a word in the language you're speaking in?, but is very clear in another one?).
Wouldn't the religion be just "Jedi"?
Good point. I think the believers of this philosophy would only be "jedi". The knights would be perhaps something like the "illuminated" ones (ones that have attained a really high level of perfection in the ways of the force)
Does this cover the dark side of the force as well?
It would certainly have to. Note that I'm not at all sure about that "religion" status, I think it should be more a way of life, a philosophy, somewhat like Tai Chi. Certainly, the jedi knights themselves don't treat it like a religion (which doesn't mean the lower-standing followers of the movement couldn't). Anyway, the dark side of the force is a really important part of the whole balance thing, and the force is just there, waiting to be used. It's the use you give to it that takes you to one or the other side.
Can you be of the Jedi religion without being a knight?
I think you could. Certainly, there is a viable system of beliefs and general way of determining the "good way" of behaviour for a believer, regardless of his status within the "religion" (knight, follower, priest -- are there priests?)
What's the official Jedi position on abortion, contraception and religious killing?
I don't think they have strong positions on these issues. They have never killed for religious reasons, but instead to preserve the balance of the universe. In this matter, the funny thing is, were the light side to become dominant, perhaps it would be best to throw some dark action in just to even the thing a bit, the way I see the belief system. Anyway, this would be a really difficult thing to happen, given the attraction and power of the dark side (in the movies, the dark side adepts fight against a whole bunch of light side pansies and give them a good whipping). Maybe any issue would have to be seen in this light, not as a preset stand.
How do you make those lightsabers anyway?
The technique is not a secret in it's totality, but a big part of it is the exact alignment of a set of crystals in order to attain the highly focused light beam, and it cannot be achieved by any other means than a great dominance of the force, which is why part of the jedi knight training is building their own light saber.
Thus proving I have no important things to do with my time right now....
In slashdot, this kind of reaction is typical. Poor kid, he's just an innocent geek and will suffer sooo much. Fact is: he directed an attack toward commercial sites and made them lose a hell of a lot of money in the process!. There's no educational purpose in this. If he's such a bright kid, he should have set up a server in his own machine (or some other place) and experimented with it all he wanted.
There's nothing innocent about this, and the punishment was well earned.
Solution to the large base problem.
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 1
Not very nice to reply to my own comment, but I just thought of this: When using a very large base, you have a symbol to represent each character. Granted, this is stored in n bytes, which increase as the base does, thus making this impractical, but what if you were to make a.gif out of it? you could generate the very large base number, make a gif (or any kind of image for that matter, preferrably 2 bits per pixel) of it, and send it over. There's a base number (would have to calculate that) where this would actually make sense (the image representation of the character takes up less space than the computer representation of it). Just a thought.
First example of pi-based compression.
on
Share The Pi!
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· Score: 1
I saw a comment about using this to compress information, and set out to compress something with pi (using the great pi-search page of course). Since there's a limit to the digits of pi it searches, I couldn't find my first or second names, but I did find my second last name ("pou" -- from Spain, Cataluña I think) as a position in pi digits. Here's how:
We take the word pou and get it's binary form (in ASCII). This is 011100000110111101110101 then we convert that to decimal, getting 7368565 and then we search pi for that number, which we do find (yay!) at digit 4602166
Now all we have to do is transmit the digit number and the number of digits after it you have to read. That would be something like 4602166/7 Granted, that's not much of a compression system, since the whole message takes up 9 bytes in ASCII and the "decompressed" one (pou) takes up only 3. But, given larger messages, and converting these numbers to a large base (how many characters can unicode represent?) this could be a really useful compression system, provided you can indeed find the sequence you are looking for in pi (which is really hard right now)
Why not use a very large base?
on
Share The Pi!
·
· Score: 1
I may be wrong here, but since you're just expressing a very very large number couldn't you express it using a very large base so it would not take that much space?
For instance, the number 15485741351654 in decimal converts to e158ecc2e6 in hex (base 16). Now, this is a 4 character saving in plain text. If you used unicode and a large base (say, to the order of 2^9 or something) to encode the number would be much smaller, and thus would only have to be converted to decimal, located in pi and the message read. The large base could be a standard (because arbitrarily selecting and transmitting a very large base could be as cumbersome as putting the number in decimal in the first place).
Great questions. I always get asked stuff like What would be your ideal job, regardless of the one we're offering? I guess they expect something other than "Ruler of the universe, part-time kick-ass pimp in charge of thumping stupid interviewers to death"
Seriously, what useful info do they expect to gain from these questions?
Everytime something like this pops up, all the old farts in slashdot tell us about the times when real programmers wrote binary code on the fly using their abacus. I really get a kick from those comments, but it would seem that these stories don't attract younger (20+) people.
Well, for what it's worth: My first computer was the commodore 64. And it was a beauty. Considering it had no hdd, and had 64k ram total, I'm still amazed at the programs this computer ran (and still did until last summer's house clean up). Plus, I remember my amazement at the totally unfriendly basic prompt it sported ( Ready. ) Didn't know what to do with it until after three days or so of typing crap and getting "command not found" (ahhh.... those were the days).
Slashdot Mirror
There are actually 60 seconds between those. Granted, it's not A LOT of time, but I wouldn't call it infinitesimal...
As for the monkey with a keyboard thing... mmhhh... could you define what a real programmer is to you first please?
I like the long names. You can always use a decent development environment (eclipse, emacs, jEdit, ANYTHING basically) that provides code completion. The long names are there to make it easier to understand what a particular function does if you're not familiar with it. If you feel that having your functions and variables named Xx1 and Xy2 is a good thing, that's a problem.
real criminals won't be hindered by these new invasions...
I think that more than 90% of "real criminals" would not have the time/skill/means/opportunity to create a fake identity for themselves. Let's get real. Not everyone is Ted Bundy. And, BTW, it's a lot easier to have someone killed than to destroy their lives by making them into a false personna by means of altering their police/insurance/job/federal records (if you have the means to do one of the two) so perhaps we could tone down the paranoia just a bit.
Automated way? what do they mean by that? that they did a search/replace of strcpy()?
Hey! I agree with you in that Alien 4 was pretty much... crap. But Alien 3 was great! I've always thought that what makes that series so good is that each is a different genre (Alien - terror, Aliens - action, Alien 3 - suspense/drama), and each is very good in its own right (well, except for the fourth one with that hideous mammal alien thingie)
I agree that it would be an extremely bad idea to use NT / Windows 2000 for anything that is mission critical (such as running a semaphore network), and that would be a misuse of the product, but there are plenty of proper uses that can produce really bad results due to software failure, and companies should be held accountable for these failures.
Blender has matured A LOT in the past two years. I'm not a regular Blender user, but I introduced it to a friend and he became quite attached to the thing in less than a month. The interface is extremely weird, but it really shines once you get to understand it. Its main purpose, I think, is to keep you focused on the work at all times, and with one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse, kind of what Macintosh or Linux do with their CTRL/APPLE+Left click interfaces.
;-)
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is the size of the program. It is hardly more than one Megabyte!!!!! and once you get to know how to use it, there's practically nothing you can't achieve with, say, 3dStudio that blender can't do one way or the other (considering 3dS's signature of around 300 megs, that's saying something).
Finally, for those interested, it's a free download in here: Blender site (no, I'm in no way associated with the company that makes it, I just think it's one hell of a product). Plus, there are a lot of tutorials at their site you can check out to sort out that freaky interface. (oh, and it runs on linux quite well, too)
I agree with the poster. There is a very clear example for this: in "the book of laughs and forgetfulness" (loose translation, I'm mexican) Milan Kundera ("the unbearable lightness of being") devotes an entire chapter to explain "litost", a feeling that can only be expressed easily in czech (it is a complex combination of shame at one's self shortcomings being exposed involuntarily by another person's attempt at not exposing them and so on and so on).
The Czech language is full of these deeply emotional words, and therefore, czechs have a waaay easier time feeling and communicating feelings. Same can be said of other languages, that specialize in different areas of human thought. Any person that is a polyglot can attest to that (have you never stumbled in mid sentence when you want to convey something that does not exist as a word in the language you're speaking in?, but is very clear in another one?).
Wouldn't the religion be just "Jedi"?
Good point. I think the believers of this philosophy would only be "jedi". The knights would be perhaps something like the "illuminated" ones (ones that have attained a really high level of perfection in the ways of the force)
Does this cover the dark side of the force as well?
It would certainly have to. Note that I'm not at all sure about that "religion" status, I think it should be more a way of life, a philosophy, somewhat like Tai Chi. Certainly, the jedi knights themselves don't treat it like a religion (which doesn't mean the lower-standing followers of the movement couldn't). Anyway, the dark side of the force is a really important part of the whole balance thing, and the force is just there, waiting to be used. It's the use you give to it that takes you to one or the other side.
Can you be of the Jedi religion without being a knight?
I think you could. Certainly, there is a viable system of beliefs and general way of determining the "good way" of behaviour for a believer, regardless of his status within the "religion" (knight, follower, priest -- are there priests?)
What's the official Jedi position on abortion, contraception and religious killing?
I don't think they have strong positions on these issues. They have never killed for religious reasons, but instead to preserve the balance of the universe. In this matter, the funny thing is, were the light side to become dominant, perhaps it would be best to throw some dark action in just to even the thing a bit, the way I see the belief system. Anyway, this would be a really difficult thing to happen, given the attraction and power of the dark side (in the movies, the dark side adepts fight against a whole bunch of light side pansies and give them a good whipping). Maybe any issue would have to be seen in this light, not as a preset stand.
How do you make those lightsabers anyway?
The technique is not a secret in it's totality, but a big part of it is the exact alignment of a set of crystals in order to attain the highly focused light beam, and it cannot be achieved by any other means than a great dominance of the force, which is why part of the jedi knight training is building their own light saber.
Thus proving I have no important things to do with my time right now....
There's nothing innocent about this, and the punishment was well earned.
Not very nice to reply to my own comment, but I just thought of this: When using a very large base, you have a symbol to represent each character. Granted, this is stored in n bytes, which increase as the base does, thus making this impractical, but what if you were to make a .gif out of it? you could generate the very large base number, make a gif (or any kind of image for that matter, preferrably 2 bits per pixel) of it, and send it over. There's a base number (would have to calculate that) where this would actually make sense (the image representation of the character takes up less space than the computer representation of it). Just a thought.
We take the word pou and get it's binary form (in ASCII). This is 011100000110111101110101 then we convert that to decimal, getting 7368565 and then we search pi for that number, which we do find (yay!) at digit 4602166
Now all we have to do is transmit the digit number and the number of digits after it you have to read. That would be something like 4602166/7 Granted, that's not much of a compression system, since the whole message takes up 9 bytes in ASCII and the "decompressed" one (pou) takes up only 3. But, given larger messages, and converting these numbers to a large base (how many characters can unicode represent?) this could be a really useful compression system, provided you can indeed find the sequence you are looking for in pi (which is really hard right now)
For instance, the number 15485741351654 in decimal converts to e158ecc2e6 in hex (base 16). Now, this is a 4 character saving in plain text. If you used unicode and a large base (say, to the order of 2^9 or something) to encode the number would be much smaller, and thus would only have to be converted to decimal, located in pi and the message read. The large base could be a standard (because arbitrarily selecting and transmitting a very large base could be as cumbersome as putting the number in decimal in the first place).
Seriously, what useful info do they expect to gain from these questions?
Well, for what it's worth: My first computer was the commodore 64. And it was a beauty. Considering it had no hdd, and had 64k ram total, I'm still amazed at the programs this computer ran (and still did until last summer's house clean up). Plus, I remember my amazement at the totally unfriendly basic prompt it sported ( Ready. ) Didn't know what to do with it until after three days or so of typing crap and getting "command not found" (ahhh.... those were the days).