My immediate reaction was that the survey shows that more and more people consider themselves to be "developers", just because they use computers to manage some content. Not a big deal, and its been going on for decades.
The other side of the coin is that a lot of actual developers find themselves adding a Macbook to their arsenal, simply because its the most convenient way of getting access to Xcode, doing a port to OSX, or compiling something for iOS. This would of course skew the results.
Bottom line - after 30 years of a fight to the death, Unix has won the platform wars. Total victory.
Not sure why anyone would care... the whole "Windows 10 experience" is such a horrific platform to try and do any work done on... fixing the shell is a noble step indeed, but there are so many other show stoppers on that system, that its just a drop in the ocean.
>> As far as I know, no F-22 has ever flown a combat mission.
The F-22 fought with some distinction against the decepticons in Transformers. They suffered heavy losses, but the proof of their effectiveness as shown in this documentary was enough to convince congress to keep funding the project.
There are also several novels out there that provide additional hard proof of their combat effectiveness.
I was thinking that this experiment would be a breeze, if you just filled the capsule with a small team of coders.. and gave them 100 days straight of peace and quiet to actually work on the completely unrealistic specifications and deadlines that they may have on their plate at the moment.
It would be most productive.
But I am sure some management types would interfere in devious ways, and install a telephone in the capsule, so the coders would constantly field calls like these :
- Hey guys, its me from accounts again. I know you are all 'busy' (suppressed chuckle), but could could just drop whatever you are doing, and have a look at my computer for a minute, I think I might have a virus.. just like I had last week. If its not too much effort, do you mind fixing it for me so I can get some 'real' work done. Thanks - oh, and make sure its fixed by lunchtime, because I have a dinner engagement tonight and have to leave at 5 on the dot.
- Hey guys, its me from sales again. We promised a customer several weeks ago that we would provide them with this 'feature' that doesn't exist, and its now overdue. I know this is the first time we have bothered to tell you guys about this, but hey, its really important, so please get on it to immediately. It has to be ready by first thing tomorrow morning.. OK.
- Hey guys, its me from customer support again. I know I have been doing this job for about 5 years now, but I still have no clue how the system operates. I have a customer on the phone you wants to know how they can change their account balance - but I cant find a field on the screen that lets them do that. They are getting irate !! Can you take the call for me please.. I am really busy with other stuff. Putting them through now, thanks.
- Hey guys, its the company director. I have some VIPs here at the moment for a meeting, and I need the boardroom setup so the projector is connected to the internets. And have a look at my laptop whilst you are at it - it still pops up all those windows with that porn stuff. I thought you fixed that for good last week ? I need it fixed properly this time ! And by the way - why weren't you in the office at 8am this morning ? We had so many phone calls to answer, and you guys were nowhere to be seen. My patience is really wearing thin, we have to act as a team here !
- Hey guys, its the company director's teenage son. Im playing CS at home and Im getting my ass handed to me by these n00bs. I reckon its because my gRaPhIcs card doesn't have enough memory. Can you guys pop down the computer shop and organise a decent upgrade part for me, ta. Dad said he would reimburse you next week, no probs. I need it ASAP, thanks guys.
100 days of this crap, and I would be surprised if a team of coders, even in the relative peace, quiet and isolation of a soviet space capsule, would make a significant dent in the growing pile of work on their plates. Werll, at least during 'office hours' that is.
In the summary is says "with their new product that they call knol (not yet publicly available)"
Did anyone else see this as an acronym, and then get all confused when the words didnt fit the letters ?
They should call it NYPA instead, and get the village people to sing the promo song.
Young man, there's no need to feel dumb. I said, young man, pick your brain off the ground. I said, young man, 'cause there's now a new site There's no need to be a dumb ass.
No man knows it all by himself. I said, young man, put your pride on the shelf, And just go there, to the n.y.p.a I'm sure they can teach you today.
It's fun to learn at the n-y-p-a It's fun to learn at the n-y-p-a
Just wondering - if a new customer buys a quad core phenom, just to run some super elite gamerz rig running Vista.... does it really matter if the CPU is going to generate bad results, or crash at some point ? Its not like the operating system and other code running on the buggy processor isnt equally likely to break something as well.
To use a car analogy... if a blind, retarded midget (Vista operating system), gets into a car with a broken crankshaft and square wheels (busted phenom CPU), then is anyone going to lose any sleep ?
Keep in mind to - 'they' have recently been using the term 'surge' as well to describe the 'troop surge' in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you keep hearing over and over again about a 'surge' of armed forces coming 'in' to the counrty... then its not surprising to think 'in'+'surge' when hearing 'insurgent'. Do check it out - notice how many times you hear the word "surge" on the news these days, its just not normal.
Im getting a bit old now (check my user id for instance), and remember quite well having the same problem understanding what was really happening back when Afghanistan was a hot potato. Honestly thought that me and my mates would eventually be sent to go fight there. But back then, it was the Russians (the Evil Empire) who were the invaders.
Its quite laughable in retrospect - we would watch the news at night, and they would show "The Brave Mujihadeen Freedom Fighters", and they would cheer to reports that these same freedom loving Taliban warriors had the latest stinger AA missiles, and had shot down patrolling helicopters, or blown up a column of tanks with improvised explosives. Cheer Cheer Cheer all the way on the news.
We get the exact same recycled footage on TV now, but the commentary has done a 180. I kid you not - some of the video being played is, I swear, the same video footage they played in 1984. Its almost like re-reading that old Orwell classic "1984", and think to yourself "The Eurasians are our allies, they have always been our allies in this war against the East Asians". Its also interesting to note that all the wars in 1984 are perpetually conducted in far away parts of the world that make up a triangle between Africa, the Middle East and SouthEast Asia.
Another interesting thing that was happening on the news in 1984 (the year, not the book), is watching footage of Saddam Hussein, our freedom loving ally in the Middle East, and his brave but tiny army take on the Evil Iranians. Constant talk of how we had to pitch in and help build up the army of democratic freedom loving Iraq to help stem the hordes of Persia from overunning the civilised world. Yes - there were glowing reports on the news in 1984 about how we would help equip Saddam with advanced weapons and chemical artillery shells to fight for freedom.
One of the interesting concepts in 1984 (the book not the year, although its all getting rather muddled now) is "Newspeak", which is an ongoing program by the 'Ministry of Truth' to simplify the existing body of language, and at the same time to reverse the meaning of some terms to suit the current political situation. So we have the real life 2007 example of taking the word INSURGANT, and making it IN-SURGE-NT, which serves to both make it etymologicaly simpler to grasp and reverse the meaning at the same time.
So you are not the only one thinking the same thing about this word, and you are right about the media's careful application and overuse of this word. The media is, after all, an instrument of the 'Inner Party' to which the 'Outer Party', or elected government, is answerable to.
Not a bad effort for a book written in 1948.. go google for info on it, there are some great sites out there about the book and its bizarre relevance to what is happening now. I love the job the protagonist Winston has with the Ministry of Truth - his job is to go through copies of old newspapers and edit old stories to make them 'true' - sort of like Wikipedia run by the government. Cameras on every street corner, constant wars in the distant triangle, old newspapers and histories that get edited after the event, newspeak, groupthink, doublethink, alliances that constantly change (but appear to be timeless and stable), the illusion of a constantly improving standard of living, 'unpeople' detained indefinitely without trial... and the occasional bomb to be heard falling on your city, courtesy of your own government. A daily terror alert rating courtesy of free TV, followed by a calming, mindless soap opera and pop melody.
And lastly... DONT BACK OFF AND LURK, partake in anything and everything !! Its all good.
On insurgent is one who is part of an insurgency - or an armed uprising against an established order. Insurgents are generally locals - it is NOT a term that infers some foreign element who slipped in across the border during the dark hours of the night.
Luke Skywalker for example was an insurgent, fighting against the Imperial Forces.
The French Resistance in WW2 were insurgents fighting against the National Socialists and their Vichy allies, as were the Algians later on in the peice fighting against the colonial French and their traitorous collaborators.
Polish fighters of the Home Army, born in Warsaw, bred in Warsaw, and fighting in Warsaw during the uprising of 1944.. were technically insurgents.
The Irish Republicans in Belfast fought an insurgency against the occupation British and their provo allies.
Soviet partisans were insurgents fighting against the multi-national occupation armies from the reactionary landowners of the West, and their 'white' turncoat allies during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.
Iraqi citizens, and their Islamic brothers from across the region, are insurgents fighting against the illegal zionist occupation forces led by the USA, and their apostate haram local police force who are running the show in their lands.
So an insurgent is generally - a local person, fighting an armed struggle to overthrow the current regime.. which in their own minds they may well believe is some foreign oppressor who has unrightfully marched into their homeland, and usually also targets those locals puppet authorities who have decided to cast their lot in with their new overlords.
The Mujihadeen of Afghanistan, Iraq (and lets not forget Chechnya).. meet that definition pretty clearly I think.
It shows very very strongly how the power of the media (Fox news, etc), has been able to take a well understood term such as 'insurgent', and twist it around to mean the complete opposite.
Are you seriously losing sleep over the existence of 200 lines of publically available code in your application ?
What makes you think that code of any volume is so sacred that it needs to be guarded like the family jewels anyway ? If you are really asking yourself these questions in the first place, then hey - YOU ARE IN THE WRONG GAME BUDDY. You should have studied law or commerce or something else. Forget worrying about 'who should I tell' - start worrying about changing your perspective about what source code is in the first place.
Producing computer software falls under the category of science, art and engineering. You are always building on existing ideas to create new things, or improve existing processes. The day someone else builds on top of your ideas or improves your processes is the day that you have achieved your goal.
You probably measure your success (as a programmer) by your next pay cheque, and your primary goal seems to be being seen as a good 'company man', willing to cause whatever damage is neccessary to win a gold star from the boss.
You must be young - life is just not about that.
Take a holiday, and look at the amazing beauty and abundance of the world and people around you. Ask yourself what can YOU do to add to that beauty. What can YOU create and share that is going to make this amazing world even better ?
Then come back to your cubicle after your break, and look at your question again.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it extremely ironic that Vista is suffering from having to compete with an entrenched WinXP market ?
That has been one of the big obstacles to Linux adoption - its a radical change to make for the sake of little short term gain. The rewards for going from Windows to open source are long term gains after some short term pain. Vista on the other hand offers some short term pain for no long term improvement.
However, they are still reporting millions of dollars in income - because of bundled deals, where Vista is often discarded and the system retrofitted with the more comfy XP.
So, if MS thought deeply about this, they would realise that they could simply release something new every 6 months, no matter how bad it was - just any old crap really - and make money by bundling it with everything from laptops, desktops, packets of cornflakes, and shoe laces. All they need to do from here on is make sure that whatever crap they throw out onto the market, they provide some mechanism to allow the hapless consumer to 'downgrade' back to XP, and pickup twice the income on each pass through the loop.
Its unlikely that the clueless consumers would ever wake up to the scam.
But still, it is ironic how they have been caught smack bang in the middle of a minefield that they themselves planted several years ago. One day though, they may wake up and see that Linux and Apple are not the only enemy - WindowsXP may be seen as the enemy as well. One day, out of frustration, they may start to play their usual dirty tricks on destroying the established base of XP. That will be a fun day indeed.
Look out for the following things in the future : - XP clients start having erratic problems connecting to windows servers. - IE8 only available for Vista/Win7 - Games companies releasing DX10 only games that wont work on XP - Office for XP occasionally generating random errors in documents.. no patch ever available - Price rises for XP - Major websites subsidized to only work for IE8 - Major titles (AutoCAD, Adobe, Quicken, etc) bribed into coding hacks into their products and file formats which break XP compatiblity - etc, etc, etc
Only then will Vista become as wildly popular as they NEED it to be in order to survive. But once they do that, the compelling reason for not moving to Linux is also removed (ie. Cant move to linux coz program XYZ is not available for linux.. but then again its not working for XP either.. so we have to make a decision and change everything anyway).
What can Microsoft possibly do to keep their income levels at such obscene levels that their shareholders remain happy ? No easy way out that I can see.
Well, OK, maybe apple sort of dominates the ipod market.. big deal.
MP3 players are NOT a critical component of the infrastructure of modern society. No matter how successful Apple is in dominating the ipod market.. it DOES NOT affect things like access to government documents and services, access to internet content, access to electronic lodgement of tax returns.
Your tax dollars are not voraciously consumed by Apple license fees because politicians promise "An MP3 player for every school child !!".
Apple does NOT receive licensing income from the sale of competing non-apple-ipod MP3 players, just in case those non-apple units are used to 'pirate' ipod toons.
Job adverts do not require submissions in "Apple iPod format", nor do the majority of jobs available today "require" experience with stated versions of licensed Apple ipod releases.
Worst of all - the world is NOT full of semi incompetent "professionals" working towards building critical multi-million dollar infrastructures for the future, who are incompetant because their only exposure to how things fit together is from what they learned on their ipod.
Its really not the same thing. There are plenty of benign and inneffectual monopolies around.. but we do cast serious ire on the MS monopoly, not because we are fanbois of the alternatives, but because the abusive MS monopoly is a dangerous thing that drags down on so many aspects of our modern society.
Monopolies on - food, water, electricity, oil, computers, transport, comunications, weapons, healthcare, legal services, education, etc can be potentially disastrous.
Monopolies on portable music players though ? Thats about as bad as a monopoly on ice cream. Lucrative maybe, but its not the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination. You are not exactly cut off from society if you refuse to buy into Apple's iPod dominance.
Or maybe - in the near utopian future - the 600 billion third world residents are going to have an unconstrained 100mbit network everywhere, one laptop per child, open source everything...
and the better off residents in the USA will using Vista to get their AOL.
So let me get this right - Firstly, 2000 Microsoft programmers spend 3 years developing MS Office, and then lock it up with some sort of secret code, and proceed to make money selling it as a desktop application.
After that, 32 software engineers in India put in many hard hours over a 4 year period to "crack the code" of MS Office. Thats like 4 years of tedious mathematical analysis.. comparing ciphers, testing hypothesis, following hunches, kidnapping and interrogating suspects who may have had some involvement with the original Microsoft effort.
After 4 years of this seemingly endless and fruitless intellectual struggle.. this battle of wits and minds.. they make a breakthrough ! Excitedly, they gather together at 3am after an exhausting marathon code breaking session. Behind them the blackboard is covered in equations, diagrams, the chalk dust of many previous failures and deadends. Today's ciphers are layed out on a large table, aligned correctly, and checked and double checked once more. And then they place the ciphers one on top of another and roll the result into a single, extremely complex equation that just might work this time.
This new equation is fed into the computer banks and the hard disks begin whirring away for one more time.
Some hours later, as the sun is well on its journey into the sky, the hard drives stop whirring. Everyone in the team gathers around the green glow of the monitor in the dead silence, the sweat glistening on their faces drawn tight with exhaustion and tension. After a moment that lasts a lifetime.. the words :
C O D E - C R A C K E D
appear in capitals on the monitor, and the dusty old dot matrix printer begins printing out the secret Microsoft Office code word. But admist the jubilation, the computer hackers remain calm.. the world may now be theirs, but there is still remains work to do. Armed now with the secret code word to Microsoft Office, they skillfully manipulate the code word, shuffling and re-ordering the code word ever so slightly - like cyber Gods adjusting the DNA of a dangerous new species - until they are done.
Barely hours after breaking the secret code, the new modified code word is overlaid onto Microsoft Office and fed back into the computer. The hard drives whirr noisily one more time, and then the result appears on the screen. They now have Microsoft Office working as an online application !!!
Im glad that the times newspaper in the UK decided to print this story.. because it gives the inside view on how IT really is.. this tense, frustrating, demanding, clandestine and often dangerous occupation that we geeks take for granted. Its time for the common man in the street to give us the fear and respect that we so obviously deserve. We are programmers - We crack codes ! Be afraid - Be very afraid.
When I was at uni (bach maths sci degree).. i took a 1st year course in psychology, mainly because I was young and single, and there were no hot chicks in the other mainline science subjects that I was already enrolled in (physics, stats, astronomy, chem and maths)
Whilst I was fascinated with the impossibly hard questions that my chosen fields of study were setting out to unravel and comprehend... psychology was interesting in as much as it made use of a lot of statistical analysis as a form of proof. However, the questions that Psychology was attempting to answer were as lame as dishwater, especially compared to the great unanswered riddles that one finds in, say, physics or maths.
And yet somehow, professional Psychology academics would manage to get substantial grants to go ahead and prove such theories as "If someone is smacked over the head every day for the next 5 years, then they are more likely to believe that they are going to get smacked over the head tomorrow - compared to someone who has never been smacked over the head at all". Such theories could be proven (at great expense mind you) using the most thorough and rigorous statistical analysis.
Woop Dee do.
I made a comment to the head of the Psych department that Psychology was nothing more than the vieled scientific study of the completely fucking obvious. My grades in this particular subject towards the end of that year reflect that fact as well. Some of the other students in my psych group who handed up almost verbatim copies of the same written work during the same period predictably fared better in their marks.
OK then, so now we find that you can take a normal person off the street, give them anonymity and an audience - and viola - without the constraints of dealing with people face to face, with no embarrassment to deal with, they tend to get obnoxious. And this is news ? The big question is - how many months of study, and how much grant money was sucked up in proving this most valuable theory ?
Its amazing that we ever managed to build the pyramids, discover mathematics, communicate wirelessly across the globe, understand the quantum states of the atom, put a man on the moon, or map out the human genome.. before this greater internet fucktard theory was ever proven.
I wonder if those particularly nasty memories that I have of having once been forced to use windows, and not liking it at all, will be stored verbatim ? Or will they be re-interpreted in transit as some sort of WOW moment that made my whole life seem worthwhile ? No thanks. If I need to backup my brain, Ill just write a cron job myself to rsync it to another standby brain that I keep in the fridge (just in case).
This is why when Im communicating with my business associates in Columbia, or reporting to my controller in Moscow.. we choose to always stick with the good old one time pad.
Tiny little yellow Post-it-notes still beats elliptical curves anyday.
First image that jumped into my head was a perfectly uniformed Prussian corps for Might and Reason - even to the point of visualising a simple bash script to generate sets of figures with the correct regimental facing colors hot off the fab.
A few simple tweaks, and you have yourself a group of Austrian corps, Russians, the Swedes, the French and their dastardly Swiss/Irish mercenary allies....the Dutch and Spanish. All with perfect unblemished and unscratchable 'paint jobs'.
For WW1,2/modern figures - by applying the same principles that procedural graphics use to generate pseudo-random scenery, it would be possible to generate, say, 10,000 perfectly painted infantry figures, where no 2 figures are exactly alike. They would obviously need basing, some weathering, dry brushing and matte coating afterwards.. but geez, 90% of the work is done for you already.
Lets not forget that for miniatures & modelling fanatics, spending $300 on an alps printer to do custom decals is already a bargain. Spending $800 on a half decent camera to photo them is also cheap. Investing $5000+ per year on new kits and figures is normal. So spending $2500 on a computer controlled infinite painted figure generator is truly and utterly droolworthy.
This is truly worth murdering your neighbours over in order to get your hands on one.
Fortunately (for my neighbours), the resolution and quality of the existing fabathome kit isnt quite there yet to go nuts and start replacing real 15mm metal miniatures. Its good enough for Chees houses already, but pro quality 15mm armies isnt practical yet. So, good neighbours - sleep well tonight, but know that its only a matter of time before cost effective DIY fabrication reaches a tipping point, after which your lives will be worthless.
"...it's fundamentally unethical, illegal and immoral (depending on your particular morality, I suppose) to allow an autonomous machine to roam free with the capability (and intent) to kill human beings.
From the article, I gathered that they are only programmed to kill Pirates, or Human Beings who are breaking THE LAW.
So there is nothing to worry about at all. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
I am having a hard time feeling any sympathy for all these people who report anecdotes about getting less than what they paid for when buying computer equipment at best buy.
Computers and information technology are a critical part of modern society. And yet, even at the highest levels, its getting harder and harder to have a remotely sensible engineering discussion about incorporating computer technology in a new project.. simply because there are people in the room who honestly believe that they understand computers, just because their brother or cousin managed to upgrade their hard disk, or install the latest version of Vista on some dual core rig that they got from best buy.
Unless I go back 100% full time to working with PHD engineers on WMD's and other military applications, Im faced with the prospect of seeing so many dangerously stupid, over simplified plans for automation that completely miss all the basics of good design. And this is thanks to the existence of so many plebs in the industry that have totally misplaced confidence in the completeness of their own knowledge.
So thanks to Best Buy and Microsoft, there are now those who believe that because they upgraded their own hard disk and jumped the learning curve to Vista Ultimate, they are now qualified to design a transaction management system for a remote fuel distribution network. Because they learned how to knock up a web page and embed some flash applet that they rolled themselves in MX, they now understand the internet apparently, and they can 'web enable' your company's accounting system.
Look - good luck to them if they perceive value in buying at Best Buy, but the net effect on the rest of the world is becoming horribly dangerous. Mix in with that the appalling condition of public education (eg - have a look at this http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071029/D8SJ435G0.html), and you have to wonder how bad things are going to get before people really start to notice that we have gone backwards.
We also have a shortage of good doctors, and medical insurance in 1st world countries is something of a luxury. Free, first class medical care for all used to be considered normal for developed countries with a strong infrastructure, but not any more. It wont be long until the common uneducated pleb in the street, the product of the high school dropout factories and the proud owner of a Best Buy Vista gamerz rig, manages to save up his income to purchase an array of scalpels and surgical forceps. Your next invasive but life saving surgical procedure may well be in the hands of some know-it-all 'doctor' who "lernt wot he needz to no abuot surjury' from Best Buy's medical division.
God Help Us All !
So if Best Buy are substituting hard disks for bathroom tiles, then they may well be doing the rest of us a huge favour.
They are ProTools, Cubase SX3, FL Studio, SoundForge8, Reason 3, Rebirth 2, Flash MX, Illustrator, Vegas, and more.
Agree with you there. At least for sound apps things have been evolving quite rapidly lately :
Ardour, Rosegarden, LMMS (with VST and LADSPA), Hydrogen, AMS, Mixxx
Are not in the same ballpark as far as polish, consistency, printed manuals and a general sense of finishedness goes... but they are well on par (if not superior) in terms of functions. They are all miles ahead in terms of expandability compared to the existing big name applications.
For the brave, especially if you set yourself up with Qt4 and use SVN versions of all of the above, its quite a revelation to see where OpenSource 'pro audio' is actually up to today. And yet, its still in its infancy.
The important thing though is that these Open Source audio apps growing and getting better at a MUCH faster rate than the commercial offerings. Not saying that is a reason for you to go throw your existing stuff in the bin just yet.. but its very much worth getting your hands dirty with. I reckon you might really enjoy the experience too.
One minor area where Open Source audio apps absolutely kills the big name commercial apps is the online community - the users, experienced musos, and the developers are all one and the same people. They are not just composing music, they are reversing engineering hardware like the new Vestax mixing deck, they are doing spectrum analysis on Pioneer's deck to work out the freq cooefficients for the low/mid/hi filters, they are writing OpenGL visualisations and refactoring and redocumenting messy old C++. Its a different sort of user community, and it makes simply using the software an absolute blast. I think you would love it given your existing depth of knowledge with music tools.
Some of the audio tools are actually good enough and stable enough RIGHT NOW for live performance in front of real paying audiences. I use LMMS and Mixxx for live performances in nightclubs already, but Im still trying to get my head around Ardour at the moment for multi track recording. LearningCurve++.
Open source audio is not better or worse than commercial audio apps - but it is different enough in a worthwhile way.
For graphics work, blender + gimp has always been good enough for me, but Im not a graphics pro. I dont see that there is a problem with the vector graphics tools under linux though. There are scriptiong things I can do in python with both gimp and blender that dont have equivalents with the commercial side. Again, its not about being better or worse - its a different way of doing things that makes it worthwhile to get into.
For web stuff, Ive never seen the big need to use the full Macromedia tools to do any really flash stuff. The open source ways of achieving the same effects are all left brain tools (as opposed to the more right brain tools like MX).. but then again that suits me fine. Same comment applies - its about taking a different approach rather than trying to be better.
And look at everything that Google has been able to do on the web by using purely open methods, which is worth pondering.
Wow - and you write Java code, AND you do FPGA design as well as working on music. I would LURVE to spend a couple of days in the same office as you, and/or drink at the same places as you. Anytime you are in my town, please drop by and spend a couple of days with us here, its a very long journey by air, but it would be right up your alley Im sure.
PS: LOL over being modded Troll -1. There are some real losers on slashdot these days. Used to be good when my user ID made me stand out as a n00b:)
Even as a young child gazing into the skies at night, and marvelling at the bright rainbow coloured rings boldly circling the planet Saturn, I always thought to myself 'You know, there is probably a moon in them that rings'
Slashdot Mirror
My immediate reaction was that the survey shows that more and more people consider themselves to be "developers", just because they use computers to manage some content. Not a big deal, and its been going on for decades.
The other side of the coin is that a lot of actual developers find themselves adding a Macbook to their arsenal, simply because its the most convenient way of getting access to Xcode, doing a port to OSX, or compiling something for iOS. This would of course skew the results.
Bottom line - after 30 years of a fight to the death, Unix has won the platform wars. Total victory.
Not sure why anyone would care ... the whole "Windows 10 experience" is such a horrific platform to try and do any work done on ... fixing the shell is a noble step indeed, but there are so many other show stoppers on that system, that its just a drop in the ocean.
>> As far as I know, no F-22 has ever flown a combat mission.
The F-22 fought with some distinction against the decepticons in Transformers. They suffered heavy losses, but the proof of their effectiveness as shown in this documentary was enough to convince congress to keep funding the project.
There are also several novels out there that provide additional hard proof of their combat effectiveness.
I was thinking that this experiment would be a breeze, if you just filled the capsule with a small team of coders .. and gave them 100 days straight of peace and quiet to actually work on the completely unrealistic specifications and deadlines that they may have on their plate at the moment.
It would be most productive.
But I am sure some management types would interfere in devious ways, and install a telephone in the capsule, so the coders would constantly field calls like these :
- Hey guys, its me from accounts again. I know you are all 'busy' (suppressed chuckle), but could could just drop whatever you are doing, and have a look at my computer for a minute, I think I might have a virus .. just like I had last week. If its not too much effort, do you mind fixing it for me so I can get some 'real' work done. Thanks - oh, and make sure its fixed by lunchtime, because I have a dinner engagement tonight and have to leave at 5 on the dot.
- Hey guys, its me from sales again. We promised a customer several weeks ago that we would provide them with this 'feature' that doesn't exist, and its now overdue. I know this is the first time we have bothered to tell you guys about this, but hey, its really important, so please get on it to immediately. It has to be ready by first thing tomorrow morning .. OK.
- Hey guys, its me from customer support again. I know I have been doing this job for about 5 years now, but I still have no clue how the system operates. I have a customer on the phone you wants to know how they can change their account balance - but I cant find a field on the screen that lets them do that. They are getting irate !! Can you take the call for me please .. I am really busy with other stuff. Putting them through now, thanks.
- Hey guys, its the company director. I have some VIPs here at the moment for a meeting, and I need the boardroom setup so the projector is connected to the internets. And have a look at my laptop whilst you are at it - it still pops up all those windows with that porn stuff. I thought you fixed that for good last week ? I need it fixed properly this time ! And by the way - why weren't you in the office at 8am this morning ? We had so many phone calls to answer, and you guys were nowhere to be seen. My patience is really wearing thin, we have to act as a team here !
- Hey guys, its the company director's teenage son. Im playing CS at home and Im getting my ass handed to me by these n00bs. I reckon its because my gRaPhIcs card doesn't have enough memory. Can you guys pop down the computer shop and organise a decent upgrade part for me, ta. Dad said he would reimburse you next week, no probs. I need it ASAP, thanks guys.
100 days of this crap, and I would be surprised if a team of coders, even in the relative peace, quiet and isolation of a soviet space capsule, would make a significant dent in the growing pile of work on their plates. Werll, at least during 'office hours' that is.
In the summary is says "with their new product that they call knol (not yet publicly available)"
Did anyone else see this as an acronym, and then get all confused when the words didnt fit the letters ?
They should call it NYPA instead, and get the village people to sing the promo song.
Young man, there's no need to feel dumb.
I said, young man, pick your brain off the ground.
I said, young man, 'cause there's now a new site
There's no need to be a dumb ass.
No man knows it all by himself.
I said, young man, put your pride on the shelf,
And just go there, to the n.y.p.a
I'm sure they can teach you today.
It's fun to learn at the n-y-p-a
It's fun to learn at the n-y-p-a
etc etc
Yep, perfect.
.. severely marked down, dirt cheap quad cores ? :)
Cant wait to see the big price drop on the old stock - and get myself a carton load of quaddies.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of
Just wondering - if a new customer buys a quad core phenom, just to run some super elite gamerz rig running Vista .... does it really matter if the CPU is going to generate bad results, or crash at some point ? Its not like the operating system and other code running on the buggy processor isnt equally likely to break something as well.
... if a blind, retarded midget (Vista operating system), gets into a car with a broken crankshaft and square wheels (busted phenom CPU), then is anyone going to lose any sleep ?
To use a car analogy
Keep in mind to - 'they' have recently been using the term 'surge' as well to describe the 'troop surge' in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you keep hearing over and over again about a 'surge' of armed forces coming 'in' to the counrty ... then its not surprising to think 'in'+'surge' when hearing 'insurgent'. Do check it out - notice how many times you hear the word "surge" on the news these days, its just not normal.
.. go google for info on it, there are some great sites out there about the book and its bizarre relevance to what is happening now. I love the job the protagonist Winston has with the Ministry of Truth - his job is to go through copies of old newspapers and edit old stories to make them 'true' - sort of like Wikipedia run by the government. Cameras on every street corner, constant wars in the distant triangle, old newspapers and histories that get edited after the event, newspeak, groupthink, doublethink, alliances that constantly change (but appear to be timeless and stable), the illusion of a constantly improving standard of living, 'unpeople' detained indefinitely without trial ... and the occasional bomb to be heard falling on your city, courtesy of your own government. A daily terror alert rating courtesy of free TV, followed by a calming, mindless soap opera and pop melody.
... DONT BACK OFF AND LURK, partake in anything and everything !! Its all good.
Im getting a bit old now (check my user id for instance), and remember quite well having the same problem understanding what was really happening back when Afghanistan was a hot potato. Honestly thought that me and my mates would eventually be sent to go fight there. But back then, it was the Russians (the Evil Empire) who were the invaders.
Its quite laughable in retrospect - we would watch the news at night, and they would show "The Brave Mujihadeen Freedom Fighters", and they would cheer to reports that these same freedom loving Taliban warriors had the latest stinger AA missiles, and had shot down patrolling helicopters, or blown up a column of tanks with improvised explosives. Cheer Cheer Cheer all the way on the news.
We get the exact same recycled footage on TV now, but the commentary has done a 180. I kid you not - some of the video being played is, I swear, the same video footage they played in 1984. Its almost like re-reading that old Orwell classic "1984", and think to yourself "The Eurasians are our allies, they have always been our allies in this war against the East Asians". Its also interesting to note that all the wars in 1984 are perpetually conducted in far away parts of the world that make up a triangle between Africa, the Middle East and SouthEast Asia.
Another interesting thing that was happening on the news in 1984 (the year, not the book), is watching footage of Saddam Hussein, our freedom loving ally in the Middle East, and his brave but tiny army take on the Evil Iranians. Constant talk of how we had to pitch in and help build up the army of democratic freedom loving Iraq to help stem the hordes of Persia from overunning the civilised world. Yes - there were glowing reports on the news in 1984 about how we would help equip Saddam with advanced weapons and chemical artillery shells to fight for freedom.
One of the interesting concepts in 1984 (the book not the year, although its all getting rather muddled now) is "Newspeak", which is an ongoing program by the 'Ministry of Truth' to simplify the existing body of language, and at the same time to reverse the meaning of some terms to suit the current political situation. So we have the real life 2007 example of taking the word INSURGANT, and making it IN-SURGE-NT, which serves to both make it etymologicaly simpler to grasp and reverse the meaning at the same time.
So you are not the only one thinking the same thing about this word, and you are right about the media's careful application and overuse of this word. The media is, after all, an instrument of the 'Inner Party' to which the 'Outer Party', or elected government, is answerable to.
Not a bad effort for a book written in 1948
And lastly
On insurgent is one who is part of an insurgency - or an armed uprising against an established order. Insurgents are generally locals - it is NOT a term that infers some foreign element who slipped in across the border during the dark hours of the night.
.. were technically insurgents.
.. which in their own minds they may well believe is some foreign oppressor who has unrightfully marched into their homeland, and usually also targets those locals puppet authorities who have decided to cast their lot in with their new overlords.
.. meet that definition pretty clearly I think.
Luke Skywalker for example was an insurgent, fighting against the Imperial Forces.
The French Resistance in WW2 were insurgents fighting against the National Socialists and their Vichy allies, as were the Algians later on in the peice fighting against the colonial French and their traitorous collaborators.
Polish fighters of the Home Army, born in Warsaw, bred in Warsaw, and fighting in Warsaw during the uprising of 1944
The Irish Republicans in Belfast fought an insurgency against the occupation British and their provo allies.
Soviet partisans were insurgents fighting against the multi-national occupation armies from the reactionary landowners of the West, and their 'white' turncoat allies during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.
Iraqi citizens, and their Islamic brothers from across the region, are insurgents fighting against the illegal zionist occupation forces led by the USA, and their apostate haram local police force who are running the show in their lands.
So an insurgent is generally - a local person, fighting an armed struggle to overthrow the current regime
The Mujihadeen of Afghanistan, Iraq (and lets not forget Chechnya)
It shows very very strongly how the power of the media (Fox news, etc), has been able to take a well understood term such as 'insurgent', and twist it around to mean the complete opposite.
Are you seriously losing sleep over the existence of 200 lines of publically available code in your application ?
What makes you think that code of any volume is so sacred that it needs to be guarded like the family jewels anyway ? If you are really asking yourself these questions in the first place, then hey - YOU ARE IN THE WRONG GAME BUDDY. You should have studied law or commerce or something else. Forget worrying about 'who should I tell' - start worrying about changing your perspective about what source code is in the first place.
Producing computer software falls under the category of science, art and engineering. You are always building on existing ideas to create new things, or improve existing processes. The day someone else builds on top of your ideas or improves your processes is the day that you have achieved your goal.
You probably measure your success (as a programmer) by your next pay cheque, and your primary goal seems to be being seen as a good 'company man', willing to cause whatever damage is neccessary to win a gold star from the boss.
You must be young - life is just not about that.
Take a holiday, and look at the amazing beauty and abundance of the world and people around you. Ask yourself what can YOU do to add to that beauty. What can YOU create and share that is going to make this amazing world even better ?
Then come back to your cubicle after your break, and look at your question again.
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it extremely ironic that Vista is suffering from having to compete with an entrenched WinXP market ?
.. no patch ever available
.. but then again its not working for XP either .. so we have to make a decision and change everything anyway).
That has been one of the big obstacles to Linux adoption - its a radical change to make for the sake of little short term gain. The rewards for going from Windows to open source are long term gains after some short term pain. Vista on the other hand offers some short term pain for no long term improvement.
However, they are still reporting millions of dollars in income - because of bundled deals, where Vista is often discarded and the system retrofitted with the more comfy XP.
So, if MS thought deeply about this, they would realise that they could simply release something new every 6 months, no matter how bad it was - just any old crap really - and make money by bundling it with everything from laptops, desktops, packets of cornflakes, and shoe laces. All they need to do from here on is make sure that whatever crap they throw out onto the market, they provide some mechanism to allow the hapless consumer to 'downgrade' back to XP, and pickup twice the income on each pass through the loop.
Its unlikely that the clueless consumers would ever wake up to the scam.
But still, it is ironic how they have been caught smack bang in the middle of a minefield that they themselves planted several years ago. One day though, they may wake up and see that Linux and Apple are not the only enemy - WindowsXP may be seen as the enemy as well. One day, out of frustration, they may start to play their usual dirty tricks on destroying the established base of XP. That will be a fun day indeed.
Look out for the following things in the future :
- XP clients start having erratic problems connecting to windows servers.
- IE8 only available for Vista/Win7
- Games companies releasing DX10 only games that wont work on XP
- Office for XP occasionally generating random errors in documents
- Price rises for XP
- Major websites subsidized to only work for IE8
- Major titles (AutoCAD, Adobe, Quicken, etc) bribed into coding hacks into their products and file formats which break XP compatiblity
- etc, etc, etc
Only then will Vista become as wildly popular as they NEED it to be in order to survive. But once they do that, the compelling reason for not moving to Linux is also removed (ie. Cant move to linux coz program XYZ is not available for linux
What can Microsoft possibly do to keep their income levels at such obscene levels that their shareholders remain happy ? No easy way out that I can see.
Well, OK, maybe apple sort of dominates the ipod market .. big deal.
.. it DOES NOT affect things like access to government documents and services, access to internet content, access to electronic lodgement of tax returns.
.. but we do cast serious ire on the MS monopoly, not because we are fanbois of the alternatives, but because the abusive MS monopoly is a dangerous thing that drags down on so many aspects of our modern society.
MP3 players are NOT a critical component of the infrastructure of modern society. No matter how successful Apple is in dominating the ipod market
Your tax dollars are not voraciously consumed by Apple license fees because politicians promise "An MP3 player for every school child !!".
Apple does NOT receive licensing income from the sale of competing non-apple-ipod MP3 players, just in case those non-apple units are used to 'pirate' ipod toons.
Job adverts do not require submissions in "Apple iPod format", nor do the majority of jobs available today "require" experience with stated versions of licensed Apple ipod releases.
Worst of all - the world is NOT full of semi incompetent "professionals" working towards building critical multi-million dollar infrastructures for the future, who are incompetant because their only exposure to how things fit together is from what they learned on their ipod.
Its really not the same thing. There are plenty of benign and inneffectual monopolies around
Monopolies on - food, water, electricity, oil, computers, transport, comunications, weapons, healthcare, legal services, education, etc can be potentially disastrous.
Monopolies on portable music players though ? Thats about as bad as a monopoly on ice cream. Lucrative maybe, but its not the end of the world by any stretch of the imagination. You are not exactly cut off from society if you refuse to buy into Apple's iPod dominance.
No - the internet is growing at like, 100 times per annum .. so there are 600,000 billion ppl in the near utopian 3rd world future
Or maybe - in the near utopian future - the 600 billion third world residents are going to have an unconstrained 100mbit network everywhere, one laptop per child, open source everything ...
and the better off residents in the USA will using Vista to get their AOL.
So let me get this right - Firstly, 2000 Microsoft programmers spend 3 years developing MS Office, and then lock it up with some sort of secret code, and proceed to make money selling it as a desktop application.
.. comparing ciphers, testing hypothesis, following hunches, kidnapping and interrogating suspects who may have had some involvement with the original Microsoft effort.
.. this battle of wits and minds .. they make a breakthrough ! Excitedly, they gather together at 3am after an exhausting marathon code breaking session. Behind them the blackboard is covered in equations, diagrams, the chalk dust of many previous failures and deadends. Today's ciphers are layed out on a large table, aligned correctly, and checked and double checked once more. And then they place the ciphers one on top of another and roll the result into a single, extremely complex equation that just might work this time.
.. the words :
.. the world may now be theirs, but there is still remains work to do. Armed now with the secret code word to Microsoft Office, they skillfully manipulate the code word, shuffling and re-ordering the code word ever so slightly - like cyber Gods adjusting the DNA of a dangerous new species - until they are done.
.. because it gives the inside view on how IT really is .. this tense, frustrating, demanding, clandestine and often dangerous occupation that we geeks take for granted. Its time for the common man in the street to give us the fear and respect that we so obviously deserve. We are programmers - We crack codes ! Be afraid - Be very afraid.
After that, 32 software engineers in India put in many hard hours over a 4 year period to "crack the code" of MS Office. Thats like 4 years of tedious mathematical analysis
After 4 years of this seemingly endless and fruitless intellectual struggle
This new equation is fed into the computer banks and the hard disks begin whirring away for one more time.
Some hours later, as the sun is well on its journey into the sky, the hard drives stop whirring. Everyone in the team gathers around the green glow of the monitor in the dead silence, the sweat glistening on their faces drawn tight with exhaustion and tension. After a moment that lasts a lifetime
C O D E - C R A C K E D
appear in capitals on the monitor, and the dusty old dot matrix printer begins printing out the secret Microsoft Office code word. But admist the jubilation, the computer hackers remain calm
Barely hours after breaking the secret code, the new modified code word is overlaid onto Microsoft Office and fed back into the computer. The hard drives whirr noisily one more time, and then the result appears on the screen. They now have Microsoft Office working as an online application !!!
Im glad that the times newspaper in the UK decided to print this story
When I was at uni (bach maths sci degree) .. i took a 1st year course in psychology, mainly because I was young and single, and there were no hot chicks in the other mainline science subjects that I was already enrolled in (physics, stats, astronomy, chem and maths)
... psychology was interesting in as much as it made use of a lot of statistical analysis as a form of proof. However, the questions that Psychology was attempting to answer were as lame as dishwater, especially compared to the great unanswered riddles that one finds in, say, physics or maths.
.. before this greater internet fucktard theory was ever proven.
Whilst I was fascinated with the impossibly hard questions that my chosen fields of study were setting out to unravel and comprehend
And yet somehow, professional Psychology academics would manage to get substantial grants to go ahead and prove such theories as "If someone is smacked over the head every day for the next 5 years, then they are more likely to believe that they are going to get smacked over the head tomorrow - compared to someone who has never been smacked over the head at all". Such theories could be proven (at great expense mind you) using the most thorough and rigorous statistical analysis.
Woop Dee do.
I made a comment to the head of the Psych department that Psychology was nothing more than the vieled scientific study of the completely fucking obvious. My grades in this particular subject towards the end of that year reflect that fact as well. Some of the other students in my psych group who handed up almost verbatim copies of the same written work during the same period predictably fared better in their marks.
OK then, so now we find that you can take a normal person off the street, give them anonymity and an audience - and viola - without the constraints of dealing with people face to face, with no embarrassment to deal with, they tend to get obnoxious. And this is news ? The big question is - how many months of study, and how much grant money was sucked up in proving this most valuable theory ?
Its amazing that we ever managed to build the pyramids, discover mathematics, communicate wirelessly across the globe, understand the quantum states of the atom, put a man on the moon, or map out the human genome
Where would we be without Psychology ?
I wonder if those particularly nasty memories that I have of having once been forced to use windows, and not liking it at all, will be stored verbatim ? Or will they be re-interpreted in transit as some sort of WOW moment that made my whole life seem worthwhile ? No thanks. If I need to backup my brain, Ill just write a cron job myself to rsync it to another standby brain that I keep in the fridge (just in case).
This is why when Im communicating with my business associates in Columbia, or reporting to my controller in Moscow .. we choose to always stick with the good old one time pad.
Tiny little yellow Post-it-notes still beats elliptical curves anyday.
First image that jumped into my head was a perfectly uniformed Prussian corps for Might and Reason - even to the point of visualising a simple bash script to generate sets of figures with the correct regimental facing colors hot off the fab.
....the Dutch and Spanish. All with perfect unblemished and unscratchable 'paint jobs'.
.. but geez, 90% of the work is done for you already.
A few simple tweaks, and you have yourself a group of Austrian corps, Russians, the Swedes, the French and their dastardly Swiss/Irish mercenary allies
For WW1,2/modern figures - by applying the same principles that procedural graphics use to generate pseudo-random scenery, it would be possible to generate, say, 10,000 perfectly painted infantry figures, where no 2 figures are exactly alike. They would obviously need basing, some weathering, dry brushing and matte coating afterwards
Lets not forget that for miniatures & modelling fanatics, spending $300 on an alps printer to do custom decals is already a bargain. Spending $800 on a half decent camera to photo them is also cheap. Investing $5000+ per year on new kits and figures is normal. So spending $2500 on a computer controlled infinite painted figure generator is truly and utterly droolworthy.
This is truly worth murdering your neighbours over in order to get your hands on one.
Fortunately (for my neighbours), the resolution and quality of the existing fabathome kit isnt quite there yet to go nuts and start replacing real 15mm metal miniatures. Its good enough for Chees houses already, but pro quality 15mm armies isnt practical yet. So, good neighbours - sleep well tonight, but know that its only a matter of time before cost effective DIY fabrication reaches a tipping point, after which your lives will be worthless.
"...it's fundamentally unethical, illegal and immoral (depending on your particular morality, I suppose) to allow an autonomous machine to roam free with the capability (and intent) to kill human beings.
From the article, I gathered that they are only programmed to kill Pirates, or Human Beings who are breaking THE LAW.
So there is nothing to worry about at all. Nothing can possibly go wrong.
I am having a hard time feeling any sympathy for all these people who report anecdotes about getting less than what they paid for when buying computer equipment at best buy.
.. simply because there are people in the room who honestly believe that they understand computers, just because their brother or cousin managed to upgrade their hard disk, or install the latest version of Vista on some dual core rig that they got from best buy.
Computers and information technology are a critical part of modern society. And yet, even at the highest levels, its getting harder and harder to have a remotely sensible engineering discussion about incorporating computer technology in a new project
Unless I go back 100% full time to working with PHD engineers on WMD's and other military applications, Im faced with the prospect of seeing so many dangerously stupid, over simplified plans for automation that completely miss all the basics of good design. And this is thanks to the existence of so many plebs in the industry that have totally misplaced confidence in the completeness of their own knowledge.
So thanks to Best Buy and Microsoft, there are now those who believe that because they upgraded their own hard disk and jumped the learning curve to Vista Ultimate, they are now qualified to design a transaction management system for a remote fuel distribution network. Because they learned how to knock up a web page and embed some flash applet that they rolled themselves in MX, they now understand the internet apparently, and they can 'web enable' your company's accounting system.
Look - good luck to them if they perceive value in buying at Best Buy, but the net effect on the rest of the world is becoming horribly dangerous. Mix in with that the appalling condition of public education (eg - have a look at this http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071029/D8SJ435G0.html), and you have to wonder how bad things are going to get before people really start to notice that we have gone backwards.
We also have a shortage of good doctors, and medical insurance in 1st world countries is something of a luxury. Free, first class medical care for all used to be considered normal for developed countries with a strong infrastructure, but not any more. It wont be long until the common uneducated pleb in the street, the product of the high school dropout factories and the proud owner of a Best Buy Vista gamerz rig, manages to save up his income to purchase an array of scalpels and surgical forceps. Your next invasive but life saving surgical procedure may well be in the hands of some know-it-all 'doctor' who "lernt wot he needz to no abuot surjury' from Best Buy's medical division.
God Help Us All !
So if Best Buy are substituting hard disks for bathroom tiles, then they may well be doing the rest of us a huge favour.
They are ProTools, Cubase SX3, FL Studio, SoundForge8, Reason 3, Rebirth 2, Flash MX, Illustrator, Vegas, and more.
... but they are well on par (if not superior) in terms of functions. They are all miles ahead in terms of expandability compared to the existing big name applications.
.. but its very much worth getting your hands dirty with. I reckon you might really enjoy the experience too.
.. but then again that suits me fine. Same comment applies - its about taking a different approach rather than trying to be better.
:)
Agree with you there. At least for sound apps things have been evolving quite rapidly lately :
Ardour, Rosegarden, LMMS (with VST and LADSPA), Hydrogen, AMS, Mixxx
Are not in the same ballpark as far as polish, consistency, printed manuals and a general sense of finishedness goes
For the brave, especially if you set yourself up with Qt4 and use SVN versions of all of the above, its quite a revelation to see where OpenSource 'pro audio' is actually up to today. And yet, its still in its infancy.
The important thing though is that these Open Source audio apps growing and getting better at a MUCH faster rate than the commercial offerings. Not saying that is a reason for you to go throw your existing stuff in the bin just yet
One minor area where Open Source audio apps absolutely kills the big name commercial apps is the online community - the users, experienced musos, and the developers are all one and the same people. They are not just composing music, they are reversing engineering hardware like the new Vestax mixing deck, they are doing spectrum analysis on Pioneer's deck to work out the freq cooefficients for the low/mid/hi filters, they are writing OpenGL visualisations and refactoring and redocumenting messy old C++. Its a different sort of user community, and it makes simply using the software an absolute blast. I think you would love it given your existing depth of knowledge with music tools.
Some of the audio tools are actually good enough and stable enough RIGHT NOW for live performance in front of real paying audiences. I use LMMS and Mixxx for live performances in nightclubs already, but Im still trying to get my head around Ardour at the moment for multi track recording. LearningCurve++.
Open source audio is not better or worse than commercial audio apps - but it is different enough in a worthwhile way.
For graphics work, blender + gimp has always been good enough for me, but Im not a graphics pro. I dont see that there is a problem with the vector graphics tools under linux though. There are scriptiong things I can do in python with both gimp and blender that dont have equivalents with the commercial side. Again, its not about being better or worse - its a different way of doing things that makes it worthwhile to get into.
For web stuff, Ive never seen the big need to use the full Macromedia tools to do any really flash stuff. The open source ways of achieving the same effects are all left brain tools (as opposed to the more right brain tools like MX)
And look at everything that Google has been able to do on the web by using purely open methods, which is worth pondering.
Wow - and you write Java code, AND you do FPGA design as well as working on music. I would LURVE to spend a couple of days in the same office as you, and/or drink at the same places as you. Anytime you are in my town, please drop by and spend a couple of days with us here, its a very long journey by air, but it would be right up your alley Im sure.
PS: LOL over being modded Troll -1. There are some real losers on slashdot these days. Used to be good when my user ID made me stand out as a n00b
Getting a Nuke would be tricky, but I hear that the Uni of NC as the most powerful antimatter ray gun - Ever.
Even as a young child gazing into the skies at night, and marvelling at the bright rainbow coloured rings boldly circling the planet Saturn, I always thought to myself 'You know, there is probably a moon in them that rings'
Ill have a crack at this too .. another more obscure Queen song
Keep Passing the Open Windows
Yeah Baby, thats gotta be the one !!
http://www.pemcom.demon.co.uk/queen/works/windows.html