I know exactly where you are with this..
on
Working with ADHD?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I just want to clear up some of the preconceptions of this awful mental problem so that we don't get 101 trolls and joke-masters scoring mod points.
Basically, ADHD stands for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder.. oh my god, this is so boring, let's talk about Perl!! NO! NO! NO! Let's talk about Java!! Oh that's off topic, I gotta go program, no I gotta go eat, yes eat lots of stuff!
I'm getting so sick of sitting at this computer I'm gunna go and ta
The article asserts: In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.
So there is a place where everyone on Slashdot is getting laid! Quick, let's fire up the old improbability drive and head out there and join them!
Seriously though, this is no major jump in thinking, and is rather flawed when you stick to the basics. Just because something may be infinite in size does not necessarily mean there are an infinite number of events taking place within that space. There is no such thing as a probability of exactly 1 or exactly 0. That's why we have probability theory in the first place.
Just incase it sounded like I was blowing my own trumpet in the parent post, I wanted to point out that I haven't become some sort of master coder simply because I started early.
Infact, I've met coders with just a few years' experience who can kick my ass. Despite the early grounding, it appears I turned into a generalist rather than a specialist. Perhaps this proves that nurture is not everything..
You don't need to molly-coddle most inquisitive children on technical issues. At a young age they WANT to learn technical stuff, and they find it easy.
Back in the early 80's, my parents gave me a computer in reward for learning to count to 20 (the number of stairs in our house). I don't actually remember this (I was about 3?) but supposedly I just played games on it and crap for a while.
However, I do remember that I was programming when I was 5. Sure, it was crappy BBC BASIC, and my programming was all:
IF PRINT
Hardly any understanding of loops, GOTOs everywhere, but it was a start. I don't remember my mentality as a child, but I must have been interested in it to continue with it and to play with it.
I started to learn 6502 assembler at age 7 (there was a thread about this on here a few days ago!!), C at 9, and then, bizarrely, I stopped programming for a while.
Now, at 21, I'm a full-on Perl programmer. So perhaps my story is not that great, cuz they could end up as quiche-eating bearded Perl programmers, but you hopefully see my point;-)
I'd personally recommend Perl as a starting language. I'm biased, but I think it has the flexibility and weak syntax that kids need. There's 'more than one way' to do everything, and you don't have to declare variables and crap. It's like a modern day powerful BASIC.
It's not like they need to be doing regexes on the first day either:-)
I'm quite surprised at the reaction of whiny liberal lefties that this Iraqi invasion is so bad.
We did EXACTLY THE SAME THING in the late 90's with Kosovo, and no-one was whining then! We were stopping Muslims from being killed! The UN did not approve of the NATO invasion then either! How many people whined about Serbian children getting bombed?
But now that the USA is threatened, rather than some cute ethnic minority, oh no we musn't defend ourselves.
Er, and desktops can also reuse old TFT displays. Infact, my multiple input TFT can handle a couple of machines, and I don't need to ditch the TFT everytime I upgrade.
A TFT is no different to a monitor in terms of upgradability.
Learning 6502 was my first foray into assembly language programming in 1988/89 on the BBC Micro. It was so basic that even I could understand it at the time as a youngster.
The 6502 was beautiful in its simplicity, and I have to second the comments above about it almost bieng like a RISC chip.
And after all this time, there's still a spelling error in the book:;DEFINE LABLE "TWO" AS 2. I do think this book is way too Atari specific though. I had a 6502 book that was platform independent.
(BTW, I think the NES also used the 6502. So this book should be handy for people coding NES games for the emulators:-))
I rarely post offtopic, but because there's no where on Slashdot for 'free discussion', I figured I might as well (listen up editors, if we had a 'MetaSlashdot' there might be less off-topic posts).
Is there a Slashdot style site specifically for coders? I like Slashdot, but as a coder I'm not so interested in reading about PDAs, politics, and stuff like that.
I want stories about virtual machines, Perl, C++, people's attempts at writing compilers, discussion of the latest computer science theory.
I'd love a site like that, yet I seem unable to find one. Does anyone know of something that'd fit the bill?
You know, that page reinforces my belief that Bill is a 'good guy', even if his business may have some rather shady practices and dodgy products.
My laptop computer has 12 megs.
Okay, it was eight years ago, but this still seems hard to believe. I was around then, but I really can't remember the technology limits of the time (I had a 4Mb laptop in 1995!) as memory was expensive.
Was 12Mb the limit? After all, the richest guy in the world would have as much memory in his laptop as possible, right?
Some great technology and concepts exist within social-network mapping tools, but really it's totally useless to us geeks. Our social maps are built up like this:
Computer <--(attachment)--> Geek
Some of the slightly more warped geeks here have it like this:
Wife <--(guardian/moderator)--> Computer
|
| (controlled via sex)
|
V
Chump (a.k.a. geek)
That's not quite true.
on
Lucky Wander Boy
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Disco might not be the same as it was in the 70's, but disco music has consistently proven to be a money spinner.
Many of the latest cuts from the top DJs are remixes of older tracks, and in the late 90's there was a definite 'disco vibe' to a lot of the commercial club output.
Recent club music seems to be having a bit of an 80's resurgence (as does European pop music in general - for proof, listen to 'Freak Like Me' by the Sugababes).
Disco culture, however, has proven popular since the 70's. If you're in the US, just take a look at some of those candy ravers and you'll see what I mean.
I am a Perl fanatic. I love Perl. But what is going on with Perl 6? The guys working on the Parrot VM for Perl 6 are doing such an amazing job, but I'm pretty dismayed about the language development on Perl 6 itself.
Perl 6 was meant to be a total rewrite. Nothing was meant to be sacred, cruft could disappear, and we'd be left with a mean language, true to its roots, and working on a hot new VM.
Instead we get stuff like this:
sub *print (*@list)
Talk about confusing! * signifies a glob, but in the above example the first * signifies a sort of 'package wildcard' meaning that the subroutine is global! The second *, however, is a glob, as in Perl 5. WTF? Perl 6 looks almost as inconsistent as PHP already, and it's only in draft!
Each page of this Apocalypse presented me with a new piece of cruft to look horrified about. Slurpy arrays!? Oh my god. Wall even goes on about 'psychological reasons' for syntax! 'Default values' and 'Rules' are things that are easily done with existing code.. it's not even as if they result in particularly crufty code in Perl 5.
I'm still looking forward to Perl 6, but it really does seem as if Parrot is where the true action is. Perl 6 really does look as if it is being designed by committee.
This is undoubtedly a cool phone, and adds a bit of flair to Nokia's now-tired cellphone design (we've had to put with it for about 6 years here in Europe) but relating this to our previous discussion, are these features actually any use to business users?
I'm undecided. Stereo sound is pretty useless, color screens are pretty useless, FM radio is useless, and multiple color schemes? Please. Business users don't need that crap.
It seems like this phone has been decided to be the 'latest trendy thing' rather than something a nerd could have any real use for.
Having a tiny digital camera on hand is a great idea, to take pictures of number plates, crooks, and what not.. but it's not good enough res to be used professionally.
Tri-band is useful for the international traveller.. but where's the 3G? 3G is going live in the UK as we speak, and it's a waste of money buying a phone that can't deal with it.
Yup, this is just a phone for the socialites.
(P.S. Did you realise there's a $10,000 Nokia cellphone made in gold with encrusted diamonds.. not bullshitting, seen a number of stories about celebrities buying them. Anyone know what they're called?)
Move the onus from the recipient to the sender.
on
IETF to Look at Spam
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Someone posted a response to another spam story a few weeks ago, sadly I can't find it, but they described an interesting mail delivery system they'd created.. and it sounded, to me, as if it could certainly be the future of mail delivery.
They said that when someone sent a mail, it simply went to the local server, and no further.
It sounded like a 'reverse IMAP' style system to me. That is, your outgoing mail simply went to a folder on your server, which allowed you to edit and even delete mails BEFORE they were picked up by the recipient. The recipient's e-mail server would only receive a 'notice' that someone had mail for them.
When the recipient went to collect their mail, their own mail server would then have a basic list of where the e-mails for the recipient are, and then it'd go ask for them from the remote servers and feed them through.
So, how does this help spam?
It allows spam to be truly filtered on the OUTGOING rather than the incoming!
Why's that a great thing? Well, it means that if you're an AOL or MSN user, you're not going to lose 80% of your mail simply because of over-zealous filtering by your ISP. Instead, spam mail will not even be sent, let alone received!
Of course, bad eggs could always set up servers with no filtering systems on them and send their spam that way.. but BECAUSE e-mail will be picked up FROM the senders server with this system, it means blacklisting is a whole lot easier! You just ban a server and you know you've got rid of the bad eggs.. whereas the current SMTP system allows open relays and all sorts of 'trickery' to get around filtering systems.
So.. the conclusion is.. make e-mail stay on the sender's server until it's time for it to be collected. It allows you to edit or delete mail before the recipient collects it, it stops spam, and it reduces bandwidth(!) -- if someone never collects their mail, then the mail has never gone across the net.. it's still on the sender's server.
I hope the original poster of this idea will pop up here again and correct me if I got his ideas wrong, but he was certainly on to something.
Does anyone remember the episode of The Fresh Prince of Belair where Carlton goes to sulk in the treehouse and Will follows? That place was massive! It was like a reduced version of the summerhouse.
The Will Smith quip was when someone else got into the treehouse and asked if there was a toilet in there.. and he said.. 'yeah, third door on the right down the corridor'.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to clear up some of the preconceptions of this awful mental problem so that we don't get 101 trolls and joke-masters scoring mod points.
Basically, ADHD stands for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder.. oh my god, this is so boring, let's talk about Perl!! NO! NO! NO! Let's talk about Java!! Oh that's off topic, I gotta go program, no I gotta go eat, yes eat lots of stuff!
I'm getting so sick of sitting at this computer I'm gunna go and ta
Just as Philo T. Farnsworth "invented" television
Ex-squeeze me? John Logie Baird demonstrated the first television at the Royal Institute several months before Farnsworth ever completed his.
The article asserts: In infinite space, even the most unlikely events must take place somewhere.
So there is a place where everyone on Slashdot is getting laid! Quick, let's fire up the old improbability drive and head out there and join them!
Seriously though, this is no major jump in thinking, and is rather flawed when you stick to the basics. Just because something may be infinite in size does not necessarily mean there are an infinite number of events taking place within that space. There is no such thing as a probability of exactly 1 or exactly 0. That's why we have probability theory in the first place.
Just incase it sounded like I was blowing my own trumpet in the parent post, I wanted to point out that I haven't become some sort of master coder simply because I started early.
Infact, I've met coders with just a few years' experience who can kick my ass. Despite the early grounding, it appears I turned into a generalist rather than a specialist. Perhaps this proves that nurture is not everything..
You don't need to molly-coddle most inquisitive children on technical issues. At a young age they WANT to learn technical stuff, and they find it easy.
;-)
:-)
Back in the early 80's, my parents gave me a computer in reward for learning to count to 20 (the number of stairs in our house). I don't actually remember this (I was about 3?) but supposedly I just played games on it and crap for a while.
However, I do remember that I was programming when I was 5. Sure, it was crappy BBC BASIC, and my programming was all:
IF PRINT
Hardly any understanding of loops, GOTOs everywhere, but it was a start. I don't remember my mentality as a child, but I must have been interested in it to continue with it and to play with it.
I started to learn 6502 assembler at age 7 (there was a thread about this on here a few days ago!!), C at 9, and then, bizarrely, I stopped programming for a while.
Now, at 21, I'm a full-on Perl programmer. So perhaps my story is not that great, cuz they could end up as quiche-eating bearded Perl programmers, but you hopefully see my point
I'd personally recommend Perl as a starting language. I'm biased, but I think it has the flexibility and weak syntax that kids need. There's 'more than one way' to do everything, and you don't have to declare variables and crap. It's like a modern day powerful BASIC.
It's not like they need to be doing regexes on the first day either
I have to admit this, as a sick bastard, that seeing the Iraqi War start up again made me want to buy C&C Generals, so I did.
Now I can live my own battles, and kick Iraq's ass.
Sad, but true.
I'm quite surprised at the reaction of whiny liberal lefties that this Iraqi invasion is so bad.
We did EXACTLY THE SAME THING in the late 90's with Kosovo, and no-one was whining then! We were stopping Muslims from being killed! The UN did not approve of the NATO invasion then either! How many people whined about Serbian children getting bombed?
But now that the USA is threatened, rather than some cute ethnic minority, oh no we musn't defend ourselves.
Are they also going to ban 90% of the rest of the games where conflict is the only option?
:-)
GTA3 will fall squarely into your 10% of 'good games' by that definition.
After all, you can earn megabucks by just being a taxi driver, and you can play as the police fighting evil on the streets
Oh, wait.. fighting evil in GTA3 involves conflict.. much like fighting evil in the real world. Ah.
Vous etes un pedant. Je sais que aucune des americanes parlent français plus fort. ;-)
Okay, name one progressive career where you don't need a degree or an official trade qualification to practice (yes, like programming).
People without trade qualifications tend to become self-employed or burger flippers. Sad, but true. (I'm self employed myself.)
whereas desktops can reuse old CRTs.
Er, and desktops can also reuse old TFT displays. Infact, my multiple input TFT can handle a couple of machines, and I don't need to ditch the TFT everytime I upgrade.
A TFT is no different to a monitor in terms of upgradability.
Learning 6502 was my first foray into assembly language programming in 1988/89 on the BBC Micro. It was so basic that even I could understand it at the time as a youngster.
;DEFINE LABLE "TWO" AS 2. I do think this book is way too Atari specific though. I had a 6502 book that was platform independent.
:-))
The 6502 was beautiful in its simplicity, and I have to second the comments above about it almost bieng like a RISC chip.
And after all this time, there's still a spelling error in the book:
(BTW, I think the NES also used the 6502. So this book should be handy for people coding NES games for the emulators
I am so ashamed at many of the posters above for their "it's a vacation, don't program!" attitudes. WTF? This isn't Kuro5hin! This is Slashdot!
Clearly we're seeing the true geeks wandering from the flock and getting married and laid. Let's hope we get some new replacements soon.
Some of us enjoy programming as a hobby y'know.
I rarely post offtopic, but because there's no where on Slashdot for 'free discussion', I figured I might as well (listen up editors, if we had a 'MetaSlashdot' there might be less off-topic posts).
Is there a Slashdot style site specifically for coders? I like Slashdot, but as a coder I'm not so interested in reading about PDAs, politics, and stuff like that.
I want stories about virtual machines, Perl, C++, people's attempts at writing compilers, discussion of the latest computer science theory.
I'd love a site like that, yet I seem unable to find one. Does anyone know of something that'd fit the bill?
You know, that page reinforces my belief that Bill is a 'good guy', even if his business may have some rather shady practices and dodgy products.
My laptop computer has 12 megs.
Okay, it was eight years ago, but this still seems hard to believe. I was around then, but I really can't remember the technology limits of the time (I had a 4Mb laptop in 1995!) as memory was expensive.
Was 12Mb the limit? After all, the richest guy in the world would have as much memory in his laptop as possible, right?
The sig was in need of an update, so thanks to you, Sir, it has.
Beware thermal runaway problems.
New Social-Network Mapping Tools Compared
Oh, come on. This is Slashdot!
Some great technology and concepts exist within social-network mapping tools, but really it's totally useless to us geeks. Our social maps are built up like this:
Computer <--(attachment)--> Geek
Some of the slightly more warped geeks here have it like this:
Wife <--(guardian/moderator)--> Computer
|
| (controlled via sex)
|
V
Chump (a.k.a. geek)
Disco might not be the same as it was in the 70's, but disco music has consistently proven to be a money spinner.
Many of the latest cuts from the top DJs are remixes of older tracks, and in the late 90's there was a definite 'disco vibe' to a lot of the commercial club output.
Recent club music seems to be having a bit of an 80's resurgence (as does European pop music in general - for proof, listen to 'Freak Like Me' by the Sugababes).
Disco culture, however, has proven popular since the 70's. If you're in the US, just take a look at some of those candy ravers and you'll see what I mean.
I am a Perl fanatic. I love Perl. But what is going on with Perl 6? The guys working on the Parrot VM for Perl 6 are doing such an amazing job, but I'm pretty dismayed about the language development on Perl 6 itself.
Perl 6 was meant to be a total rewrite. Nothing was meant to be sacred, cruft could disappear, and we'd be left with a mean language, true to its roots, and working on a hot new VM.
Instead we get stuff like this:
sub *print (*@list)
Talk about confusing! * signifies a glob, but in the above example the first * signifies a sort of 'package wildcard' meaning that the subroutine is global! The second *, however, is a glob, as in Perl 5. WTF? Perl 6 looks almost as inconsistent as PHP already, and it's only in draft!
Each page of this Apocalypse presented me with a new piece of cruft to look horrified about. Slurpy arrays!? Oh my god. Wall even goes on about 'psychological reasons' for syntax! 'Default values' and 'Rules' are things that are easily done with existing code.. it's not even as if they result in particularly crufty code in Perl 5.
I'm still looking forward to Perl 6, but it really does seem as if Parrot is where the true action is. Perl 6 really does look as if it is being designed by committee.
Another post typical of American arrogance.
;-)
Wow, I'm honored. My attempts, as a European, to appear American are not going unnoticed!
Drop the arrogance bit though, us wannabe-Americans aren't arrogant, we're direct.
Remember just two days ago when we were discussing the negative social effects of cellphones? Yet when something with all these flashy features comes out, everyone is *drool* *drool* *drool* :-)
This is undoubtedly a cool phone, and adds a bit of flair to Nokia's now-tired cellphone design (we've had to put with it for about 6 years here in Europe) but relating this to our previous discussion, are these features actually any use to business users?
I'm undecided. Stereo sound is pretty useless, color screens are pretty useless, FM radio is useless, and multiple color schemes? Please. Business users don't need that crap.
It seems like this phone has been decided to be the 'latest trendy thing' rather than something a nerd could have any real use for.
Having a tiny digital camera on hand is a great idea, to take pictures of number plates, crooks, and what not.. but it's not good enough res to be used professionally.
Tri-band is useful for the international traveller.. but where's the 3G? 3G is going live in the UK as we speak, and it's a waste of money buying a phone that can't deal with it.
Yup, this is just a phone for the socialites.
(P.S. Did you realise there's a $10,000 Nokia cellphone made in gold with encrusted diamonds.. not bullshitting, seen a number of stories about celebrities buying them. Anyone know what they're called?)
Incase anyone's wondering, yeah, Art Pollard was the original poster, the name rings a bell now :-) Thanks Art!
The original post is still available to read.
Someone posted a response to another spam story a few weeks ago, sadly I can't find it, but they described an interesting mail delivery system they'd created.. and it sounded, to me, as if it could certainly be the future of mail delivery.
They said that when someone sent a mail, it simply went to the local server, and no further.
It sounded like a 'reverse IMAP' style system to me. That is, your outgoing mail simply went to a folder on your server, which allowed you to edit and even delete mails BEFORE they were picked up by the recipient. The recipient's e-mail server would only receive a 'notice' that someone had mail for them.
When the recipient went to collect their mail, their own mail server would then have a basic list of where the e-mails for the recipient are, and then it'd go ask for them from the remote servers and feed them through.
So, how does this help spam?
It allows spam to be truly filtered on the OUTGOING rather than the incoming!
Why's that a great thing? Well, it means that if you're an AOL or MSN user, you're not going to lose 80% of your mail simply because of over-zealous filtering by your ISP. Instead, spam mail will not even be sent, let alone received!
Of course, bad eggs could always set up servers with no filtering systems on them and send their spam that way.. but BECAUSE e-mail will be picked up FROM the senders server with this system, it means blacklisting is a whole lot easier! You just ban a server and you know you've got rid of the bad eggs.. whereas the current SMTP system allows open relays and all sorts of 'trickery' to get around filtering systems.
So.. the conclusion is.. make e-mail stay on the sender's server until it's time for it to be collected. It allows you to edit or delete mail before the recipient collects it, it stops spam, and it reduces bandwidth(!) -- if someone never collects their mail, then the mail has never gone across the net.. it's still on the sender's server.
I hope the original poster of this idea will pop up here again and correct me if I got his ideas wrong, but he was certainly on to something.
Does anyone remember the episode of The Fresh Prince of Belair where Carlton goes to sulk in the treehouse and Will follows? That place was massive! It was like a reduced version of the summerhouse.
The Will Smith quip was when someone else got into the treehouse and asked if there was a toilet in there.. and he said.. 'yeah, third door on the right down the corridor'.