There is, believe it or not, a code of ethics for software developers, developed by the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM)... In my ten years of experience, it was never once mentioned, nor did I ever come across it in a trade journal or programming magazine
Well, what do you expect? Just because some idiots manage to write some luser code of ethics, probably full of spelling errors too, doesn't mean we have all to follow it like slaves, man. Think of where we are coming from, the enlightening experiences that meet all who follow the IT path. You reach the inside of the IT industry and see that the aforesaid industry refuses to accept even the slightest responsability for the written code they are selling, and still people fights to buy the thing, instead of telling us to go fly a kite. And then you expect us to treat those meatbags as people?. Gimme a break! (In fact I need a break, some luser complaining about a crash in the new control software of the nuclear reactor has been botherin' me for hours now, before falling silent a couple of minutes ago. I suppose I might give the thing (meaning the user, not my shiny software) a bit of attention (if other proof of superiority was needed, it's here. Where else can you find people that writes using nested parentheses, uh? ) )
If the device streams video from the video output and doesn't care about the application that generates it, then it follows that you cannot have a remote control for pauses, jumps, etc (or have to provide and configure one yourself, and have some way of sending the signal to the PC, and then you probably can make your own setup to send the video to the TV).
For me, having a remote is important stuff when watching TV, I guess the average Joe would agree with me, specially if he has to climb some stairs to rewind the film every time he goes to the kitchen for another beer.
The device doesn't seem in this case particularly consumer-ready.
a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail
This team of neuroscientists obviouly never watched my uncle navigating the house floor to unfailingly reach the turkey leftovers, or they wouldn't be losing their time doing silly experiments.
So at last people are waking up to the hard DRM facts of life. I guess it took some time of real use to become aware that yes, they were now _paying_ to get _less_, uncredible but true. Probably they couldn't believe it before, after all, everybody was doing it, and it couldn't be that everybody was stupid. Somebody _surely_ had read the conditions before buying, and if nobody had found them bad (as evidenced by the number of iTunes downloads), then they were surely good enough. But the first time they cannot do something they want with "their" music file is I suppose for many the last time they buy anything from iTunes.
I don't think that's the proper question to ask. The proper question to ask, IMHO, is what you enjoy doing, and how you want to focus your life. I advice seriouly enjoying what you do at work. If not, change jobs. Specially if you like doing cool things. Because cool things are also (usually) difficult things, that are not so mainstream because most programmers (again in my experience) cannot/won't understand them. So if you like to do cool things you should be payed _more_ for doing them. If you aren't, is because you haven't found the proper employer, or you are rather obtusely working in a cool thing with no practical use whatsoever. If first, search a proper employer, if second, change cool thing, there are many and most of them with eminently practical (read valuable) content.
So my advice is search a place where you like what you are doing and are payed well for doing it. It may be self-employement, working in an insurance agency developing statistical models, working for IBM developing parallel processing algorithms, whatever. But whatever you love doing, try to leverage it into your revenue source, because usually days are too short to support a full-time work, a full-time hobby and a full-time relationship.
I don't know exactly how this controller-thing works, but the article got me interested. I mean, is there a Wii version of "Leisure Suit Larry", and corresponding controllers, or uhm, stuff?
What if Novell was simply used by Microsoft as a proxy for buying SUSE ? Perhaps everything was already prepared when Novell adquired SUSE. It would have been certainly much more difficult and expensive for Microsoft to attempt the deal. After all, it was just three years ago. The round number (almost exactly 3 years) is also suspicious.
I'm not following this too much, so if this conspiration theory has already been aired, just mod me down. If not, I require full bragging rights for it:o)
Will this be the beginning of more profound changes in the image of the cities between day and night?. Perhaps boutiques can hide underground to leave place to pubs, fountains can dissapear to leave place to an ice skating ring... The possibilities are endless:-)
HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection
Well, much depends on the codec you are using. I'm not an expert, but a properly coded film can be HD without taking such a lot of space as a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. Think H.264, or even XVid. And surely better methods will appear. I'm waiting to see in bittorrent the first 4Gb xvid files compressed from a Blue-Ray or HD-DVD. I don't think it'll take too long, and I guess the quality will be much better than a normal DVD.
True, latin has been preserved, but it's a relatively recent language. I'm sure that wikipedia will be accessible in some way in, say, two thousand years. I'm not sure about twenty thousand, and I'm fast sure two hundred thousand will do the trick of making it just a mythical reference. I agree with the idea that Wikipedia would of course be an incredible source for future historians, just as the Library of Alexandria would be for historians now, but one will in time be so inaccessible as the other is now.
My point is that, on one side, time is the supreme eraser, and something once erased cannot be willed back to life; and on the other side, that people has (with some logic) their own concerns as much more important as the lifes of dead people. Your last sentence even helps me prove my point. We are now studying how people ate in the past _because it's something of interest to us now_ . Many other parts of past times, that were probably very important to them at the moment, are to us but nothing because we don't have that problems anymore. I cannot put examples because we aren't aware of those examples, because there are no papers on them (nice trick, ah?:o) Many periods of the past are completely forgotten, sometimes due to lack of data, sometimes due to lack of interest. We have heard of the Byzantine debate about angels on the point of a needle or the head of a pin, but how many more of those debates, then probably so important to the debaters and to others, are now forgotten in dusty manuscripts, accessible but uninteresting?
To resume, I think that digs in the past will always be colored by our perception of reality, but are at least an easy activity, at least when compared with imagining the future.
a) The data will be preserved. There is no particular reason why it should. b) The data will be understood. There are many languages of the past that we cannot understand. The same will probably will be true in the future. c) They will have an interest. For us our particular time is interesting, but are we also interested in, say, the political views in the Kassite dinasty in Mesopotamia?. And that period took four centuries, surely many interesting things happened. The quantity of data to analyze in a distant future may make all but big overviews too much for a human mind. Something like "after the Middle-Ages, the so-called Modern-Ages (1500-2500) developed, with humanity developing a primary state of technology, but still lacking a conscience of ecology. The natural resources were depleted and the balance of Earth was tipped a bit too far, ending in the natural disasters that gave birth to the Interregnum (2500-2900)." I mean, nobody will be particularly interested in what the US thought about the obesity problem, compared to say, what the Germans did, in the beginning of the 21st century.
Wouldn't be much easier to put the data in a RFID chip? That could be easily integrated in a reader, and from the point of view of the user the only difference would be that the "new-improved" DVD would simply only play in the "new-improved" DVD-Player. Enough of a hassel, certainly, but if they started selling all new DVD players with that RFID-reading technology some years _before_ they brought one DVD film with the protection, then they would certainly have a chance. Spceially if they do that with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players. As the format is just-born, the people will just identify High-Definition-DVD with Copy-Protected-DVD.
Of course all that is moot, because you only need one person with a compliant DVD reader to extract the film data and compress it into a 4 Gb MPEG-4 film that will fit in a standard DVD, and then share it away.
I like simple games, like Tetris and MahJongg. But the best is a very simple one called "Color linez", that somebody sent me (is a little executable). You forget yourself moving balls here and there, with no time pressures and knowing that the machine is absolutely _not_ putting balls at random, nossire.
The two groups are sharing $7.6 million in grants for a year to find a way to give humans salamander-like abilities.
Am I out of whack or it's $7.6m like peanuts for this kind of research? I'd guess any serious effort on that would need to be in the billions level, and that likely for many years.
Slashdot Mirror
There is, believe it or not, a code of ethics for software developers, developed by the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) ... In my ten years of experience, it was never once mentioned, nor did I ever come across it in a trade journal or programming magazine
Well, what do you expect? Just because some idiots manage to write some luser code of ethics, probably full of spelling errors too, doesn't mean we have all to follow it like slaves, man. Think of where we are coming from, the enlightening experiences that meet all who follow the IT path. You reach the inside of the IT industry and see that the aforesaid industry refuses to accept even the slightest responsability for the written code they are selling, and still people fights to buy the thing, instead of telling us to go fly a kite. And then you expect us to treat those meatbags as people?. Gimme a break! (In fact I need a break, some luser complaining about a crash in the new control software of the nuclear reactor has been botherin' me for hours now, before falling silent a couple of minutes ago. I suppose I might give the thing (meaning the user, not my shiny software) a bit of attention (if other proof of superiority was needed, it's here. Where else can you find people that writes using nested parentheses, uh? ) )
If the device streams video from the video output and doesn't care about the application that generates it, then it follows that you cannot have a remote control for pauses, jumps, etc (or have to provide and configure one yourself, and have some way of sending the signal to the PC, and then you probably can make your own setup to send the video to the TV).
For me, having a remote is important stuff when watching TV, I guess the average Joe would agree with me, specially if he has to climb some stairs to rewind the film every time he goes to the kitchen for another beer.
The device doesn't seem in this case particularly consumer-ready.
How a pulsar gets its spin?
... from the Bush administration ?
a grid computing environment running Linux on more than 120 Dell servers
But did they got their 120 windows licenses money back?
... a software package will suck when the most exciting fact about it, is its new license.
Out of how many? Uh?
a team of neuroscientists and engineers, that demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail
This team of neuroscientists obviouly never watched my uncle navigating the house floor to unfailingly reach the turkey leftovers, or they wouldn't be losing their time doing silly experiments.
So at last people are waking up to the hard DRM facts of life. I guess it took some time of real use to become aware that yes, they were now _paying_ to get _less_, uncredible but true. Probably they couldn't believe it before, after all, everybody was doing it, and it couldn't be that everybody was stupid. Somebody _surely_ had read the conditions before buying, and if nobody had found them bad (as evidenced by the number of iTunes downloads), then they were surely good enough. But the first time they cannot do something they want with "their" music file is I suppose for many the last time they buy anything from iTunes.
I'd expect the trend to continue.
I don't think that's the proper question to ask. The proper question to ask, IMHO, is what you enjoy doing, and how you want to focus your life. I advice seriouly enjoying what you do at work. If not, change jobs. Specially if you like doing cool things. Because cool things are also (usually) difficult things, that are not so mainstream because most programmers (again in my experience) cannot/won't understand them. So if you like to do cool things you should be payed _more_ for doing them. If you aren't, is because you haven't found the proper employer, or you are rather obtusely working in a cool thing with no practical use whatsoever. If first, search a proper employer, if second, change cool thing, there are many and most of them with eminently practical (read valuable) content.
So my advice is search a place where you like what you are doing and are payed well for doing it. It may be self-employement, working in an insurance agency developing statistical models, working for IBM developing parallel processing algorithms, whatever. But whatever you love doing, try to leverage it into your revenue source, because usually days are too short to support a full-time work, a full-time hobby and a full-time relationship.
That's my experience, at least.
I don't know exactly how this controller-thing works, but the article got me interested. I mean, is there a Wii version of "Leisure Suit Larry", and corresponding controllers, or uhm, stuff?
What if Novell was simply used by Microsoft as a proxy for buying SUSE ? Perhaps everything was already prepared when Novell adquired SUSE. It would have been certainly much more difficult and expensive for Microsoft to attempt the deal. After all, it was just three years ago. The round number (almost exactly 3 years) is also suspicious.
:o)
I'm not following this too much, so if this conspiration theory has already been aired, just mod me down. If not, I require full bragging rights for it
Will this be the beginning of more profound changes in the image of the cities between day and night?. Perhaps boutiques can hide underground to leave place to pubs, fountains can dissapear to leave place to an ice skating ring... The possibilities are endless :-)
HD download of The Matrix, were it even available, could take all day over the average broadband connection
Well, much depends on the codec you are using. I'm not an expert, but a properly coded film can be HD without taking such a lot of space as a HD-DVD or Blue-Ray. Think H.264, or even XVid. And surely better methods will appear. I'm waiting to see in bittorrent the first 4Gb xvid files compressed from a Blue-Ray or HD-DVD. I don't think it'll take too long, and I guess the quality will be much better than a normal DVD.
True, latin has been preserved, but it's a relatively recent language. I'm sure that wikipedia will be accessible in some way in, say, two thousand years. I'm not sure about twenty thousand, and I'm fast sure two hundred thousand will do the trick of making it just a mythical reference. I agree with the idea that Wikipedia would of course be an incredible source for future historians, just as the Library of Alexandria would be for historians now, but one will in time be so inaccessible as the other is now.
:o) Many periods of the past are completely forgotten, sometimes due to lack of data, sometimes due to lack of interest. We have heard of the Byzantine debate about angels on the point of a needle or the head of a pin, but how many more of those debates, then probably so important to the debaters and to others, are now forgotten in dusty manuscripts, accessible but uninteresting?
My point is that, on one side, time is the supreme eraser, and something once erased cannot be willed back to life; and on the other side, that people has (with some logic) their own concerns as much more important as the lifes of dead people. Your last sentence even helps me prove my point. We are now studying how people ate in the past _because it's something of interest to us now_ . Many other parts of past times, that were probably very important to them at the moment, are to us but nothing because we don't have that problems anymore. I cannot put examples because we aren't aware of those examples, because there are no papers on them (nice trick, ah?
To resume, I think that digs in the past will always be colored by our perception of reality, but are at least an easy activity, at least when compared with imagining the future.
Good vibes.
That supposes that
a) The data will be preserved. There is no particular reason why it should.
b) The data will be understood. There are many languages of the past that we cannot understand. The same will probably will be true in the future.
c) They will have an interest. For us our particular time is interesting, but are we also interested in, say, the political views in the Kassite dinasty in Mesopotamia?. And that period took four centuries, surely many interesting things happened. The quantity of data to analyze in a distant future may make all but big overviews too much for a human mind. Something like "after the Middle-Ages, the so-called Modern-Ages (1500-2500) developed, with humanity developing a primary state of technology, but still lacking a conscience of ecology. The natural resources were depleted and the balance of Earth was tipped a bit too far, ending in the natural disasters that gave birth to the Interregnum (2500-2900)."
I mean, nobody will be particularly interested in what the US thought about the obesity problem, compared to say, what the Germans did, in the beginning of the 21st century.
Wouldn't be much easier to put the data in a RFID chip? That could be easily integrated in a reader, and from the point of view of the user the only difference would be that the "new-improved" DVD would simply only play in the "new-improved" DVD-Player. Enough of a hassel, certainly, but if they started selling all new DVD players with that RFID-reading technology some years _before_ they brought one DVD film with the protection, then they would certainly have a chance. Spceially if they do that with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD players. As the format is just-born, the people will just identify High-Definition-DVD with Copy-Protected-DVD.
Of course all that is moot, because you only need one person with a compliant DVD reader to extract the film data and compress it into a 4 Gb MPEG-4 film that will fit in a standard DVD, and then share it away.
people with a low body mass index (BMI) could recall 30% more words in a vocabulary test than those who were obese
Then perhaps people get fat because they can't remember they have already eaten.
Shocked, I tell ya. Goverments will tax! Unbelievable!
In related news, it's been proved that men are mortal, but behave as if they weren't.
I like simple games, like Tetris and MahJongg. But the best is a very simple one called "Color linez", that somebody sent me (is a little executable). You forget yourself moving balls here and there, with no time pressures and knowing that the machine is absolutely _not_ putting balls at random, nossire.
Quasi appears capable of holding intelligent conversations
Well, then this Quasi is far ahead of most people I know.
I'll be called "Core Lots Quad-Duodeca"
The two groups are sharing $7.6 million in grants for a year to find a way to give humans salamander-like abilities.
Am I out of whack or it's $7.6m like peanuts for this kind of research? I'd guess any serious effort on that would need to be in the billions level, and that likely for many years.
Yes, mainly, but also Space Cadet and some others I cannot pinpoint. It was a favorite idea of Heinlein :o)
She has clearly not read a lot of Heinlein before the trip. Tut, tut.
a sprawling, mind-boggling concoction of matchbox-size motors, plastic Lego-like parts, twisted wiring, 200 tiny screws and a 100-page manual
... Sounds like fun.