As much as I may be slowing down the workings of the computer, there is constantly less and less that I have to do - in fact, my interferance with the computers workings is probably becoming an annoyance to it.
Software will still grow more complicated and more powerful, slowly but surely taking over a lot of the tasks which the computer currently replies on me to provide input on. For supercomputing projects, human intervention has long been seen as a drawback, so most of the time we're just feeding the computers batch jobs that they go off and churn on for ages.
The person who wrote that article may have been focusing on desktop computing, but even if he was, he obviously hasn't considered other facets of home computing than writing silly articles in a word processor. Gaming, image and video manipulation and several other passtimes of home computer users continue to demand more power, and the high tech industry is all to happy to provide.
Well, no. Here in Iceland, it's quite common for people to screw the language up - some on purpose, others without knowing. Example: In Icelandic there are four cases. These also exist in English to some historical extent, but they're so translucent that your common English speaker will never have to know anything about them. In Icelandic there's a "linguistic disease" known as "águfallssýki" (e. Accusitive Disorder), which describes itsself by people using a lot of words in accusative case rather than nominative - e.g. "Ég hlakka" (I can't wait) is changed into "Mér hlakkar" (literally: My can't wait).
But here's the thing - in a sibling post somebody mentioned that immigrants in Stockholm are not adapting to the language properly, and that others are learning bad grammar, spelling, etc. from them. Here I can testify that your average immigrant, once he or she has overcome the hurdles of the new language, pays more respect to the language than your native - he is more likely to spend an extra second pondering upon the correct spelling of a word, the right case, compound, whatever. The natives that are fucking the language over are typicly learning their bad habits from television, music, internet, mass media in general - most of which comes from grammaticly challanged Americans in the first place.
I was reading an Icelandic news paper (alas, a tabloid) the other day, and was shocked to find quite an abundance of spelling errors. I didn't quite go at them with a highlighting marker and mail the paper back to the company, but if I had had such a pen, I would have. Is proof reading a thing of the past? Is it so difficult to spell correctly that even journalists - the fucking professionals, no less - are having a hard time doing it? From which evil is this carelessness stemming?
Personaly, I'm bilingual by upbringing, and have become a polyglot since - I've been speaking both English and Icelandic since long before I could walk or retain my feces, albeit not very well. Spelling has always been a bit of a problem for me, owing to slightly different phonetic values of the characters in the languages rather than any form of dyslexia - but I try, damnit. I try.
Finally, a word on dyslexia. It seems that 1 in 10 people are dyslexic in your average classroom these days. Back when I was in school, there was nobody. Is dyslexia on a rise? No. Is it being noticed more now than before? A bit. What is the cause of the rise? In my most humble opinion, dicipline, or rather an utter lack there of. Dicipline and dyslexia are both far more common in Iceland than say, Denmark or Great Britain... and I think it's primarily due to the lax dicipline in schools. Not that flogging people will help them read, but slightly better dicipline will teach people to respect others, and to respect themselves, which will lead to more people trying harder before giving up on reading. Some people truly are dyslexic, and it's as simple as that.. but I am certain that 9 out of 10 dyslexic people are merely unconfident, lazy or see that they can get away with anything these days.
Phew. That was enough of that. And imagine... if somebody ever does read this post, which is later than late, and longer than long, they're probably going to notice those five very subtle spelling errors I purposefully inserted at strategic places, plus a few that were completely my mistake.
Version management systems, as a rule of the thumb, suck. SubVersion seems to suck quite a lot less than other sucky sucky systems like CVS. Now, this is not CVS to blame, nor is it RCS or any of those other systems.. it's the fact that this is something that hasn't been given all that much thought because of people who are used to using these systems, terrible or not, screaming "it's not broken, so don't fix it".
As for CVS, I use it on a few projects, with good results. Like I said, it's far from optimal, but I'm used to it, and I think I've only had about 20 or 30 corrupt repositories. I've got one project running on SubVersion, but it's got little experience yet.
KDE's upgrade went well as far as I know, but a lot of the branch tags got screwed up, vis-á-vis an e-mail from Stephan Kulow dated Thu, 31 Mar 2005 11:56:05 +0200. Check out the mailing list, or be a bastard and contact him.:P... and sorry if somebody interpreted that as a troll. I should collect my thoughts about *why* version management systems suck and post them properly.:P
I recall Quarashi giving out their stuff a while back for a remixing contest. Not as big as NiN by far, but hey, it sure means that it isn't the _first time_. I prefer NiN myself though.
I hate to break it to you, but we got Electricity relatively late.
When Icelandic people say things like "If it wasn't for our geo-thermal and our glaciers that give you hydro-eletricity we would all be long gone.", it makes me wonder why we bother maintaining an educational system.
Whatever it was that kept us here, it surely wasn't the natural resources.
Norsk Hydro? Where do you get that from? As far as I know, the hydrogen used by the Reykjavík busses is "made" (electrolyzed) in Iceland by the oil companies (Shell, &c), not by Norsk Hydro - and certainly not in Norway (although Norsk Hydro has some stuff in Iceland)
But geothermal energy is used in thus manner:
1) Drill a hole down into the ground. Typical depth of the holes in question is 1.5 to 3 kilometers.
2) Check the temperature of whatever there is in the hole. What's in the hole, you may ask? Water, sometimes, steamy hot and ready to do some funky business; else it may be silicon encrusted goo, or something similar - quite frequently laced with gold or other interesting materials. Worst case scenario: Magma. Now, don't be fooled - magma isn't under pressure most of the time.. it won't come up. You will lose your drill bit though and the hole will be useless.
3) Whatever comes up, you don't care, as long as it's hot.. because hot things have a tendancy to boil water. If water comes up, fine, you can use that, but in the case of goo, just run it through some pipes inside a water tank.
4) Take the hot water, and use the steam to turn a generator, which in turn makes electricity. If the water is clean, run it through the water mains and give people hot water for their houses. If not, dump it, along with the goo, into a highly overrated pond, and make it into a major tourist attraction: The Blue Lagoon.
I hope you feel a bit better. I do. (btw, I'm not an authority on these matters; the process may be wrong at one point or another - but I do work in relation to this stuff, in Iceland, so I guess I'm more of an authority than the previous 100 posters;))
Recent? The island I live on "exploded" in 1973... since then we've had Hekla erupt thrice (1991, 1995 and 2001, if I recall correctly), and it's far away from any noteworthy towns. People are expecting Katla to errupt any day now, but that's the height of it. Seriously.. Iceland may be more volcanicly active than your back yard, but it's still a pretty safe place to live.
Living in Iceland myself, I've been promoting this idea for a couple of years with no luck whatsoever. I'm not just talking about the illegal stuff... the entirety of the Icelandic legal system is so liberal with regards to copyright law and privacy that Iceland could serve as a perfect data haven.
I can't say I wasn't personally affected by the raids the other day... almost all of the twelve in question are friends of friends, and most people I know have been rather paranoid. But I've kept a calm head, because I know that the percentage of Icelandic people dealing in 'illegal goods' is so high that they could never procecute everybody.. they're just making some examplary busts in order to scare people. I like it... Icelandic pirates have become way too indiscreet!
Anyway, I have more pirating to do.. I mean.. uhm. Something. Yes. Peace, yarr!!
I personally have never liked Java, but it's hard to dislike... it's a nice syntax, and makes for nice clean code.
What bugs me about Java is the virtual machine. Native code please! The "compile once, run anywhere" idea is good enough, but Perl is definately a much better candidate for such things, wheras it is open source and therefore portable to _anywhere_ without the folks at Sun having to give their approval.
Okay, I read the article. It may well have been a laser? Intentional... I doubt it. Have you ever tried pointing a laser at a specific letter on a whiteboard? Try hitting somebody's eye through the window of a jet that's up in the sky, and furthermore moving, presumably right in your general direction. Takes a skill. These evil terrorists are so skilled these days!
How can they be sure it's a laser? Can't directional intense light come from a number of places... like, for example, the sun? (Yeah yeah, the sun is anything but directional, but you get my point..)
And what pisses me off more is the fact that a lot of clients order something extremely high-tech, and then they completely ignore the "using it" part, calling up once in a while asking why it's not working.
A counterquestion: Have you ever been forced to use low quality applications designed for multipurpose messing-things-up because it's easier for people with no programming knowledge to maintain than specificly designed applications that it takes less time to write? (For the record, I'm talking about Access + Visual Basic versus anything else.. my suggestion was PHP + MySQL)
I remember when Cassini was launched - I considered it my birthday present from NASA at the time. Now, it's not long to go... suspense is rising.
Let's hope they find something that gives the general public a run for their money; We need another space race or something to get people out of bed in the mornings.
When was the last time you saw a teenager staring at the sky in awe?
It's been quite a few years since I was active on their mailing list.. in those days people were still arguing over the minor details. I can't remember why I unsubscribed, but it's nice to know that they're alive and well and doing a wonderful job. Congrats ppl.:)
Java was the popular thing of it's time. If you didn't know it at the apogee of the internet bubble, you didn't get a job in the computer idustry; it's a lot easier to say that you know it, and hope that you never have to use it. I for one hope that I don't have to write Java code again...
Now things are pointing similarly towards C# and.NET - buzzwords rule the market from the big business' point of view.
However, those who really know their stuff normally stick to the older languages... hype is good in some ways, but in the grand scheme of things, it's the older, better stuff that will prevail.
Having participated in a number of OSS projects, and even led/maintained a few, I can't see how Extreme Programming can help - the model is clearly better suited for in-house programming than distributed programming. Many of the same techniques are used in OSS projects though. "Release early, release often" is almost biblical to people from what can soon be called a Linux-background, and another rule is "No functionality is added early.", which fits my personal design philosophy pretty well, and a lot of OSS projects: I can't remember the last time I added functionality to a program.
Lucky for all humanity, APA = American Psychology Association. For one, most people aren't American. Second of all, NASA folks' are Scientists, not Psychologists (thank heavens), and thirdly: The APA Style really sucks.
Psychology is a science, of course.. but it doesn't matter. The APA rules are evil.
Re:here in partyplace
on
Assembly '03
·
· Score: 1
I'm sitting here in the public access computers, having just arrived after a three day trip from Iceland. I'm dead tired.. but too hyped to sleep any more (I fell asleep as soon as I entered the arena)
This is going to rock immensely... just need to get some more damned caffine into my system:-)
People playing with 802.11 allways manage strange and amazing things... I've done a bit of wardriving in Reykjavík, Iceland, and pinpointed 31 access point.. but hell would I like to do some funky stuff like that directional antenna buisness!:)
Actually, I heard on Icelandic media that the Talibans have offered to help with anything they can, INCLUDING handing over Bin Ladin over to the US, provided they give proof of him being guilty.
Bash me if I'm wrong, which I am not, but okey:
1. In HP4, at least two people I can remember the names of, probably closer to five though, are brutally murdered - one of them being a main character (I'm not going to say which one, don't want to piss anyone off).
2. The first book was *NOTHING* compared to the rest. The first book _IS_ a childrens book, okey, but then again, the rest are very dark indeed.
3. In the end of HP4, Harry has to summon his Patronus at one point, and at annother, Lord Voldemort got reincarnated (sorry), which means to me that the last thee books will be them trying to kill him - all out war. What do you say about that?
- On annother front, I'd like to slip in that the Harry Potter books are in fact the second-best set of books I've ever read, the best being HHGTTG. Damnit, I want more books!! =)
At my school we used netvoting in the student council elections. It worked like this:
1. We logged on with our "Kennitala", this countries equivelant of a SSN, and recieved a password.
2. Logged on again, using our password (not very well written =) and were provided with an input form over SSL.
3. After typing out the form and submitting, our SSN/password could only be used to view statistics.
It was pretty good, but the people who wrote the code weren't very good at it, and the whole idea of the system suffered. Let real programmers create something simelar, and you've got my vote!
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I may be slowing down the workings of the computer, there is constantly less and less that I have to do - in fact, my interferance with the computers workings is probably becoming an annoyance to it.
Software will still grow more complicated and more powerful, slowly but surely taking over a lot of the tasks which the computer currently replies on me to provide input on. For supercomputing projects, human intervention has long been seen as a drawback, so most of the time we're just feeding the computers batch jobs that they go off and churn on for ages.
The person who wrote that article may have been focusing on desktop computing, but even if he was, he obviously hasn't considered other facets of home computing than writing silly articles in a word processor. Gaming, image and video manipulation and several other passtimes of home computer users continue to demand more power, and the high tech industry is all to happy to provide.
Well, no. Here in Iceland, it's quite common for people to screw the language up - some on purpose, others without knowing. Example: In Icelandic there are four cases. These also exist in English to some historical extent, but they're so translucent that your common English speaker will never have to know anything about them. In Icelandic there's a "linguistic disease" known as "águfallssýki" (e. Accusitive Disorder), which describes itsself by people using a lot of words in accusative case rather than nominative - e.g. "Ég hlakka" (I can't wait) is changed into "Mér hlakkar" (literally: My can't wait).
But here's the thing - in a sibling post somebody mentioned that immigrants in Stockholm are not adapting to the language properly, and that others are learning bad grammar, spelling, etc. from them. Here I can testify that your average immigrant, once he or she has overcome the hurdles of the new language, pays more respect to the language than your native - he is more likely to spend an extra second pondering upon the correct spelling of a word, the right case, compound, whatever. The natives that are fucking the language over are typicly learning their bad habits from television, music, internet, mass media in general - most of which comes from grammaticly challanged Americans in the first place.
I was reading an Icelandic news paper (alas, a tabloid) the other day, and was shocked to find quite an abundance of spelling errors. I didn't quite go at them with a highlighting marker and mail the paper back to the company, but if I had had such a pen, I would have. Is proof reading a thing of the past? Is it so difficult to spell correctly that even journalists - the fucking professionals, no less - are having a hard time doing it? From which evil is this carelessness stemming?
Personaly, I'm bilingual by upbringing, and have become a polyglot since - I've been speaking both English and Icelandic since long before I could walk or retain my feces, albeit not very well. Spelling has always been a bit of a problem for me, owing to slightly different phonetic values of the characters in the languages rather than any form of dyslexia - but I try, damnit. I try.
Finally, a word on dyslexia. It seems that 1 in 10 people are dyslexic in your average classroom these days. Back when I was in school, there was nobody. Is dyslexia on a rise? No. Is it being noticed more now than before? A bit. What is the cause of the rise? In my most humble opinion, dicipline, or rather an utter lack there of. Dicipline and dyslexia are both far more common in Iceland than say, Denmark or Great Britain... and I think it's primarily due to the lax dicipline in schools. Not that flogging people will help them read, but slightly better dicipline will teach people to respect others, and to respect themselves, which will lead to more people trying harder before giving up on reading. Some people truly are dyslexic, and it's as simple as that.. but I am certain that 9 out of 10 dyslexic people are merely unconfident, lazy or see that they can get away with anything these days.
Phew. That was enough of that. And imagine... if somebody ever does read this post, which is later than late, and longer than long, they're probably going to notice those five very subtle spelling errors I purposefully inserted at strategic places, plus a few that were completely my mistake.
Version management systems, as a rule of the thumb, suck. SubVersion seems to suck quite a lot less than other sucky sucky systems like CVS. Now, this is not CVS to blame, nor is it RCS or any of those other systems.. it's the fact that this is something that hasn't been given all that much thought because of people who are used to using these systems, terrible or not, screaming "it's not broken, so don't fix it".
:P ... and sorry if somebody interpreted that as a troll. I should collect my thoughts about *why* version management systems suck and post them properly. :P
As for CVS, I use it on a few projects, with good results. Like I said, it's far from optimal, but I'm used to it, and I think I've only had about 20 or 30 corrupt repositories. I've got one project running on SubVersion, but it's got little experience yet.
KDE's upgrade went well as far as I know, but a lot of the branch tags got screwed up, vis-á-vis an e-mail from Stephan Kulow dated Thu, 31 Mar 2005 11:56:05 +0200. Check out the mailing list, or be a bastard and contact him.
I recall Quarashi giving out their stuff a while back for a remixing contest. Not as big as NiN by far, but hey, it sure means that it isn't the _first time_. I prefer NiN myself though.
I hate to break it to you, but we got Electricity relatively late.
When Icelandic people say things like "If it wasn't for our geo-thermal and our glaciers that give you hydro-eletricity we would all be long gone.", it makes me wonder why we bother maintaining an educational system.
Whatever it was that kept us here, it surely wasn't the natural resources.
Norsk Hydro? Where do you get that from? As far as I know, the hydrogen used by the Reykjavík busses is "made" (electrolyzed) in Iceland by the oil companies (Shell, &c), not by Norsk Hydro - and certainly not in Norway (although Norsk Hydro has some stuff in Iceland)
;))
But geothermal energy is used in thus manner:
1) Drill a hole down into the ground. Typical depth of the holes in question is 1.5 to 3 kilometers.
2) Check the temperature of whatever there is in the hole. What's in the hole, you may ask? Water, sometimes, steamy hot and ready to do some funky business; else it may be silicon encrusted goo, or something similar - quite frequently laced with gold or other interesting materials. Worst case scenario: Magma. Now, don't be fooled - magma isn't under pressure most of the time.. it won't come up. You will lose your drill bit though and the hole will be useless.
3) Whatever comes up, you don't care, as long as it's hot.. because hot things have a tendancy to boil water. If water comes up, fine, you can use that, but in the case of goo, just run it through some pipes inside a water tank.
4) Take the hot water, and use the steam to turn a generator, which in turn makes electricity. If the water is clean, run it through the water mains and give people hot water for their houses. If not, dump it, along with the goo, into a highly overrated pond, and make it into a major tourist attraction: The Blue Lagoon.
I hope you feel a bit better. I do. (btw, I'm not an authority on these matters; the process may be wrong at one point or another - but I do work in relation to this stuff, in Iceland, so I guess I'm more of an authority than the previous 100 posters
Recent? The island I live on "exploded" in 1973... since then we've had Hekla erupt thrice (1991, 1995 and 2001, if I recall correctly), and it's far away from any noteworthy towns. People are expecting Katla to errupt any day now, but that's the height of it. Seriously.. Iceland may be more volcanicly active than your back yard, but it's still a pretty safe place to live.
Living in Iceland myself, I've been promoting this idea for a couple of years with no luck whatsoever. I'm not just talking about the illegal stuff... the entirety of the Icelandic legal system is so liberal with regards to copyright law and privacy that Iceland could serve as a perfect data haven.
I can't say I wasn't personally affected by the raids the other day... almost all of the twelve in question are friends of friends, and most people I know have been rather paranoid. But I've kept a calm head, because I know that the percentage of Icelandic people dealing in 'illegal goods' is so high that they could never procecute everybody.. they're just making some examplary busts in order to scare people. I like it... Icelandic pirates have become way too indiscreet!
Anyway, I have more pirating to do.. I mean.. uhm. Something. Yes. Peace, yarr!!
Shit. I know one of those guys. It's messed up to read something like that on /.
No.. say I want to port Perl to my ToasterOS. I download Perl, compile it on ToasterOS (Presuming ToasterOS has all the prerequisites), and voila.
Java is not open source, hence I do not go around compiling it anywhere.. I just wait and hope that Mr. Star gives a yellow light on the project.
I personally have never liked Java, but it's hard to dislike... it's a nice syntax, and makes for nice clean code.
What bugs me about Java is the virtual machine. Native code please! The "compile once, run anywhere" idea is good enough, but Perl is definately a much better candidate for such things, wheras it is open source and therefore portable to _anywhere_ without the folks at Sun having to give their approval.
Uhh ohh, I'm replying to myself again...
Okay, I read the article. It may well have been a laser? Intentional... I doubt it. Have you ever tried pointing a laser at a specific letter on a whiteboard? Try hitting somebody's eye through the window of a jet that's up in the sky, and furthermore moving, presumably right in your general direction. Takes a skill. These evil terrorists are so skilled these days!
How can they be sure it's a laser? Can't directional intense light come from a number of places... like, for example, the sun? (Yeah yeah, the sun is anything but directional, but you get my point..)
And what pisses me off more is the fact that a lot of clients order something extremely high-tech, and then they completely ignore the "using it" part, calling up once in a while asking why it's not working.
A counterquestion: Have you ever been forced to use low quality applications designed for multipurpose messing-things-up because it's easier for people with no programming knowledge to maintain than specificly designed applications that it takes less time to write? (For the record, I'm talking about Access + Visual Basic versus anything else.. my suggestion was PHP + MySQL)
I remember when Cassini was launched - I considered it my birthday present from NASA at the time. Now, it's not long to go... suspense is rising.
Let's hope they find something that gives the general public a run for their money; We need another space race or something to get people out of bed in the mornings.
When was the last time you saw a teenager staring at the sky in awe?
It's been quite a few years since I was active on their mailing list.. in those days people were still arguing over the minor details. I can't remember why I unsubscribed, but it's nice to know that they're alive and well and doing a wonderful job. :)
Congrats ppl.
Java was the popular thing of it's time. If you didn't know it at the apogee of the internet bubble, you didn't get a job in the computer idustry; it's a lot easier to say that you know it, and hope that you never have to use it. I for one hope that I don't have to write Java code again...
.NET - buzzwords rule the market from the big business' point of view.
Now things are pointing similarly towards C# and
However, those who really know their stuff normally stick to the older languages... hype is good in some ways, but in the grand scheme of things, it's the older, better stuff that will prevail.
Having participated in a number of OSS projects, and even led/maintained a few, I can't see how Extreme Programming can help - the model is clearly better suited for in-house programming than distributed programming.
Many of the same techniques are used in OSS projects though. "Release early, release often" is almost biblical to people from what can soon be called a Linux-background, and another rule is "No functionality is added early.", which fits my personal design philosophy pretty well, and a lot of OSS projects: I can't remember the last time I added functionality to a program.
Lucky for all humanity, APA = American Psychology Association. For one, most people aren't American. Second of all, NASA folks' are Scientists, not Psychologists (thank heavens), and thirdly: The APA Style really sucks.
Psychology is a science, of course.. but it doesn't matter. The APA rules are evil.
I'm sitting here in the public access computers, having just arrived after a three day trip from Iceland. I'm dead tired.. but too hyped to sleep any more (I fell asleep as soon as I entered the arena)
:-)
This is going to rock immensely... just need to get some more damned caffine into my system
Finaly people will stop looking at the urinal I'm using!
People playing with 802.11 allways manage strange and amazing things... I've done a bit of wardriving in Reykjavík, Iceland, and pinpointed 31 access point.. but hell would I like to do some funky stuff like that directional antenna buisness! :)
Actually, I heard on Icelandic media that the Talibans have offered to help with anything they can, INCLUDING handing over Bin Ladin over to the US, provided they give proof of him being guilty.
Bash me if I'm wrong, which I am not, but okey:
1. In HP4, at least two people I can remember the names of, probably closer to five though, are brutally murdered - one of them being a main character (I'm not going to say which one, don't want to piss anyone off).
2. The first book was *NOTHING* compared to the rest. The first book _IS_ a childrens book, okey, but then again, the rest are very dark indeed.
3. In the end of HP4, Harry has to summon his Patronus at one point, and at annother, Lord Voldemort got reincarnated (sorry), which means to me that the last thee books will be them trying to kill him - all out war. What do you say about that?
- On annother front, I'd like to slip in that the Harry Potter books are in fact the second-best set of books I've ever read, the best being HHGTTG. Damnit, I want more books!! =)
At my school we used netvoting in the student council elections. It worked like this:
1. We logged on with our "Kennitala", this countries equivelant of a SSN, and recieved a password.
2. Logged on again, using our password (not very well written =) and were provided with an input form over SSL.
3. After typing out the form and submitting, our SSN/password could only be used to view statistics.
It was pretty good, but the people who wrote the code weren't very good at it, and the whole idea of the system suffered. Let real programmers create something simelar, and you've got my vote!