There seem to be a lot of posts stating that the current OpenGL implementation is good enough but I question whether or not these people are developing software with the latest graphics features.
Vendor specific extensions are making cross-vendor OpenGL development difficult. It is necessary to implement several different codepaths in order to achieve various effects on different hardware (bump mapping, cubic environment mapping, etc.) because each vendor wants to do it their own way to expose all of the new capabilities of their hardware. The SGI multitexture extension is probabily the only real exception to this since it seems to be supported by the bulk of cards on the market.
I don't know of any current AAA, A or B grade game that doesn't support at least one proprietary OpenGL extension.
DirectX8 exposes the hardware in an 'almost' abstract manner but again vendor specific features have started to creep into the mix (the different shader version support is something that comes to mind), meaning that developers still have to develop multiple versions of the same effect for different hardware.
This is definately a great move! I hope they succeed!
If someone wrote a worm that maintained encrypted peer-to-peer connections between machines or arbitrary ports and a host routing table (gnutella style), this worm would suddenly shift shape into something potentially a lot worse.
If this was then coupled with a self-propagating plug-in system requiring public-key encryption to install plug-in modules, the worm's creator could effectively initiate and propagate counter attacks and defensive measures.
I find this an intriguing but incredibly scary concept.
I'm not American so perhaps someone else with some American history can answer this question.
Were constitutional rights instituted with corporate as well as citizens best interests in mind. I don't consider a corporation to be anything like a citizen. They have a different set of interests (profit/share value as opposed to freedom/quality of life). Why should they be given the same rights?
Tripwire is designed as a security tool to tell you what files have been added, deleted and changed on your system but it sounds like it would easily the job you're looking for.
You just run it once to generate a database of files on your system and again after installation to see what has changed. Easy!
I'm not American so I can't speak from experience here but it seems like the problem is that no-one keeps track of kids whilst at school. If they can run 'off the tracks' without anyone that is capable of stoping them noticing then how is knowing what they ate for lunch going to help?
While I think you could probably understand a great deal by looking at the parents, I'm sure there are cases where the parents simply can't connect with their kids through no real fault of their own.
Where are the teachers at this time? If the teachers don't know their students, I suggest that is the thing you first start addressing rather than taking away the privacy of students.
As a student I had a student mentor, a peer-support leader and a roll-call teacher. Most days I saw at least two of these people about (obviously roll-call was mandatory) - this is in a school of 1200 people. If a teacher knows a students personality, has day to day contact with them and teaches them, each student has a valuble long-term relationship with at least one person in their school and through the teacher the school has a better understanding of their students.
'Big-Brother' seems to be an answer to everything these days. I see it as a loss of privacy and an incredibly large cop out.
I felt that the movie was incredibly dumbed down. I don't know if this was to target a bigger demographic or what but the movie most definately did NOT do the book justice.
Starting off well, although slightly different from the book I was impressed at nearly all aspects of the movie. But, being Australian, the movies (grossly inferior) 4th July ending really ticked me off.
While I agree that the movie was ok it was no where near the callibre of the book.
My advice - see if it you want, just don't expect it to be great. You're better off spending a few nights reading the book.
I'm not sure how the rest of the world perceives us but I can't think of any Australian institution that is renowned for providing world-leading R&D, especially in the tech industry. The last survivor I can think of was the CSIRO (government funded research agency) but even they seem to be small scale these days. You can count our game development houses on one hand. I believe theres only a few that are actively producing A or AAA rated games out of a total of 5 or 6 'world class' developement houses in total.
Insufficient investment incentives
The government seems so preoccupied with their own internal expense account scandals, the introduction of GST and the preservation of their 4 year term to do anything for the long term future of the country.
Inadequate infrastructure and bandwith
Since the government floated Telstra and deregulated the telecom industry, service level has only dropped. Instead of investing in infastructure development, subsidies are given to Telstra to guarentee that remote regions will continue to receive the same service. This was necessary to convince the public to allow the float of the company (which was just a quick dash-for-cash to make them look like they're managing their money better) but doesn't really solve the problem. It just compensates for it.
Insufficient support for information economy R&D
See point one.
A skills shortage
If you're interested in getting Honours in Computer Science, Australia might just be the easiest place. At least in several Universities I know of, a credit average (65%) is all thats required to be eligable for Honours in CS Major degrees. Theres a huge number of people that seem to be doing computer science for the wrong reasons, bumming through the course and coming out with a degree but few skills. I personally have several Chinese friends doing their final Master's year in Computing Science who have never done a single year of CS prior to now whom will return to China at the end of the year to collect a wealthy salary. The government has it all wrong about the IT shortage. Theres plenty of people, just not enough GOOD people.
I won't go through all the other points but I agree whole-heartedly with all of them. On this issue Microsoft seems right on the mark so the MS bashing really is unjustified.
DVD's achieve a higher density of data on disk by using a blue laser as opposed to a red one that most CDROM's use. The blue laser allows it to focus on a much smaller point than a typical CDROM laser. As a side effect though, many of the (predominately blue) CDR's that you can buy wont work in these players.
I've heard previously that many of the DVD players that can play CDR's actually have two lasers.
It's not Sony quietly implementing piracy prevention technology into their products. It's just a limitation of the technology (and perhaps Sony being a cheapskate for not adding support for CDR's like many other brands do.)
I've had a 386 linux box beep various noises at me for a couple of years now whenever someone tries to connect to a port I'm not using (and I don't use many standard ones) and if they keep doing it, my little program firewalls their subnet.
Its really handy to know when you're being scanned and interesting to turn off the firewall and watch what happens when you scan them back!
Its not just NVidia and ATI who are left in the ring. Matrox is not far behind with their G400(and that has some cool features in their hardware that the others still dont!). As soon as they get up to speed with the whole hardware accelerated T&L thing they'll be back in the picture.
3DFX have a fair way more to catch up in terms of features. Their current chipsets don't have the raw power and features that their competitors do but they've got the industry experience on their side. I for one hope they get back on their feet!
In Australia, no phone provider (mobile or otherwise) charges for incoming calls (except for voicemail). Pre-paid plans that cut out are available and all the networks offer country wide coverage.
How can any large respectable business expect to gain anything from making life difficult for potential customers. If placed in this position, I would make it my business (no pun intended) never to purchase anything from Amazon again.
(BTW, since their 1-Click Patent fiasco, I havn't, and won't ever buy a book through them.)
I currently work for a rather large IT organisation (65,000 employees) and I'm currently rostered on-call for several systems I support.
My division is a result of a recent aquisition of a smaller company (1500 employees) at which we used to receive 10% of our standard hourly wage for every hour on call (that is, without even being called out). This amounted to 12.8hrs/wk extra pay.
If we were called out, we would get paid for a minimum of 4 hours work at time-and-a-half on weekdays and double-time on weekends.
It was a rather good deal!
Since the aquisition, we now get paid $300/wk to be on call and a minimum of 1 hr per a callout at standard rate weekdays and time-and-a-half on weekends.
We typically go on-call for two weeks at a time and cycle amongst 3 people.
Given that any basic encryption would yield the system useless, what do they hope to gain through this and what is stopping them from opening the source code?
Are they afraid of bugs being exploited, embarrased of sloppy code or just too tied up in the 'you don't need to know' mentality?
Linux has a great, easy to use, fast network filtering feature called netlink. You could filter out only mail traffic and then use a userspace program to do the same thing that carnivore is supposed to do with little more than a perl script!
Given that even light takes a while to get across an ocean, not to mention the time it takes to process and pass on data at routers, there likely won't be any *serious* Internet-based collaborative compositions anytime soon.
Versions of Outlook set up in Corporate/Group mode aren't affected. MS Exchange clients also aren't affected. This bug will only really affect POP3 and IMAP4 mail users.
My original post to bugtraq was not intended to happen yesterday. It was through some carelessness on my behalf that it got out (if you really must know, there's a post about it on the bugtraq mailing list).
Both USSR Labs and I found the bug and submitted it to Microsoft independently. Unfortunately, due to my release of the advisory, Microsoft is refusing to acknowledge me in their official credits.
The implications of this bug should be obvious to anyone. Being able to run code on someone else's machine without their input or realization puts this vulnerability some powers above the recent VB script worms by a large factor.
The scariest thing about this problem was that when I discovered it in early June was the amount of time it took to find it. Not long after the ILOVEYOU worm had been spread, my Outlook session crashed. I had this strange urge to look for a way to crash outlook with a corrupted header (call me weird...). 10-15 minutes later I had isolated the problem and 5-8 hours of work after that I had a working exploit for it.
I notified Microsoft in early July about the problem and had been keeping it to myself while they developed patches.
Another thing the media didn't pick up on was that Outlook plugin's such as PGP also seem to crash in the same DLL. I'm not sure what security implications this poses as I haven't looked into this one myself (again further info is on bugtraq) but it highlights the fact that you can't build something secure out of insecure components!
While its not as good as running a native X program, Wine will run quite a few windows programs natively. They also have a database on their site (www.winehq.com) dedicated to reporting which windows programs will run and how well. I suggest you check it out for those programs you can't get native equivilents for.
It seems to me that it comes down to that age old tradeoff between efficiency and flexability. You could implement a 'polygon soup' collision detection/response system in hardware but: a. It would require hardware to hold geometric details for the entire level (ie. lots more memory) b. It would require a lot of data to be sent back and forth across the bus to correctly pass relevant physics and in-game object collision information. c. Certain objects that are rendered shouldn't be colided with (for example some particles like smoke, semi-transparent polygon's like vines, etc..) d. Can't be used in all scenarios such as massive worlds as in these cases certain 'quick outs' are used to quickly discard the possiblity of colliding with areas of the scenery that can't possibly be colliding.
Physics lend themselves a little more to hardware acceleration (particularly with mathematical intergration and other cpu intensive operations) but still require close interaction with the collision detection system.
Consider a ball bouncing off the floor. This requires physics to drop the ball, collision detection to detect the collision of the ball with the floor and response by the physics code to handle the resulting bounce back up again. Moving this all to hardware would help a great deal in simple cases as above but due to the independant nature of collision detection/physics and graphics, something like this would likely involve some tradeoff in flexability when moving to more complicated scenarios.
To use EQL each modem must have the *same* IP and the remote site must also support EQL (such as Livingston's Portmaster series).
Equal-cost multipath routing (is that the right term?) will work on outgoing data but obviously you don't have access to your ISP's incoming data routing.
You're probabily best to talk witk some prospective ISP's before slashdot. It all depends on the equipment they use.
While I'm certain that in most cases age doesn't play a major role in the skillset of a programmer I'm certain that in many cases it influences creativity, knowledge in cutting-edge and upcoming technology and motivation.
I'm currently working for an 1800 employee IT company who's employees are predominately greater than 30 years old and I'm constantly frustrated with the level of incompetency and responsibility that certain 'technically adept' members of the organisation have.
We are currently still dealing with the 'ILOVEYOU' virus (we have a 6 hour time delay on incoming SMTP mail due to this). My boss doesn't know how to set up a yahoo.com or hotmail.com email account and couldn't figure it out if he needed to. He doesn't use the Internet. He doesn't understand TCP/IP. He prefered having dumb terminals because they presented less problems. The company has no record of internal resources, be that people or hardware. Moving a group of people around the building requires manually gathering phone ports, data ports and updating at least 5 different internal records that are NOT linked to a central database at all. Our firewall that management are proud to say is 'secure' is easily SSHed through to bypass the filtering/logging web proxy.
What particularly annoys me is that (BTW, I'm in Australia) the 'career ladder' in this orgranisation places current part-time university students and graduates well below the more senior members of staff and basically works on the old 'the longer you work here, the higher you climb' mentality.
A company where age is irrelevant and SKILLS provide the basis of rank/responsibility would be a godsent for both of us it seems.
So I have no formal training at any crypto what-so-ever but I thought I'd test my suspicions that this is a OTP (which would make it impossible to break) and while its not conclusive, or even credible by any means, the distribution of each of the five digits in each set (assuming the spaces aren't for added confusion) overall suggests that randomness plays a part, but not necessarily big enough part to prove it was a OTP (or at least a random OTP) used to encode the message. (Feel free to tread all over my ill-informed logic if need be)
Standard deviations for the frequency of each digit in the set are: 4.47, 4.42, 1.82, 3.94, and 4.27 for the first station's numbers.
Maybe some crypto expert could tell me if for a set of 200 numbers these variations are acceptable 'noise' in a random number generator?
I'm not too up on my statistics to know if the sample size is too small to give a good indication. The frequency of each of the numbers 0-9 in the fifth digit of each set gave a max value of 26 and a minimum value of 12 which is kinda weird for a random set. Each number should be appearing around 20 times I would assume.
I started programming in Logo before I could spell some of the commands (I had my father write the word 'circle' with a picture of a circle next to it) when I was in kindergarten.
Its very visual so kids will get feedback from their work straight away and it supports proceduralisation, loops, and in some of the later versions even sound.
Because its interpreted its very simple for a kid to run a program compared to compiled programs and you write, run and edit your programs from within the one (very simple) IDE.
VB and Python are both very easy to learn but probably not as well suited for children as something like logo which teaches the fundamentals of programming in a much more visual way.
Personally, I've gone from Logo on the Apple IIe to QuickBasic on PC, to C/C++, to Assembler to a whole range of other languages since then and I couldn't have hoped for a better place to start programming than logo.
I've grown up around computers and been programming now for 12 years (at the age of 20). My goals have matured and pushed me to further my skills and will continue to do so. There isn't a universal or ultimate set of programmers goals as such, instead your goals reflect your current skills and the direction you want to head into.
I've grown up with the goals varying from learning C/C++, learning how to use Mode-X graphics, doing cross-fading, writing in 8086 assembler, and programming a soundblaster in DMA mode to things like becoming fluent in Java, OpenGL and other higher-level systems.
Some of my current goals are to better logically deconstruct my tasks into the most simplistic and generic objects possible whilst still maintaining efficiency and intuitiveness. As you might have guessed, these goals are aimed primarily at C++ and Java.
My point is that everyone will set themselves different goals. Unlike the sports and other careers, computing doesn't really have any upper limit or Apex of acheivement other than what you set yourself. (In sport there is the Olympics. In most industries you can aim to be the best. In computing, there are so many skill combinations that there is no single 'best'.) Your goals are defined by your ambitions and your current skills.
Slashdot Mirror
Vendor specific extensions are making cross-vendor OpenGL development difficult. It is necessary to implement several different codepaths in order to achieve various effects on different hardware (bump mapping, cubic environment mapping, etc.) because each vendor wants to do it their own way to expose all of the new capabilities of their hardware. The SGI multitexture extension is probabily the only real exception to this since it seems to be supported by the bulk of cards on the market.
I don't know of any current AAA, A or B grade game that doesn't support at least one proprietary OpenGL extension.
DirectX8 exposes the hardware in an 'almost' abstract manner but again vendor specific features have started to creep into the mix (the different shader version support is something that comes to mind), meaning that developers still have to develop multiple versions of the same effect for different hardware.
This is definately a great move! I hope they succeed!
If someone wrote a worm that maintained encrypted peer-to-peer connections between machines or arbitrary ports and a host routing table (gnutella style), this worm would suddenly shift shape into something potentially a lot worse.
If this was then coupled with a self-propagating plug-in system requiring public-key encryption to install plug-in modules, the worm's creator could effectively initiate and propagate counter attacks and defensive measures.
I find this an intriguing but incredibly scary concept.
I'm not American so perhaps someone else with some American history can answer this question.
Were constitutional rights instituted with corporate as well as citizens best interests in mind. I don't consider a corporation to be anything like a citizen. They have a different set of interests (profit/share value as opposed to freedom/quality of life). Why should they be given the same rights?
Tripwire is designed as a security tool to tell you what files have been added, deleted and changed on your system but it sounds like it would easily the job you're looking for.
You just run it once to generate a database of files on your system and again after installation to see what has changed. Easy!
I'm not American so I can't speak from experience here but it seems like the problem is that no-one keeps track of kids whilst at school. If they can run 'off the tracks' without anyone that is capable of stoping them noticing then how is knowing what they ate for lunch going to help? While I think you could probably understand a great deal by looking at the parents, I'm sure there are cases where the parents simply can't connect with their kids through no real fault of their own. Where are the teachers at this time? If the teachers don't know their students, I suggest that is the thing you first start addressing rather than taking away the privacy of students. As a student I had a student mentor, a peer-support leader and a roll-call teacher. Most days I saw at least two of these people about (obviously roll-call was mandatory) - this is in a school of 1200 people. If a teacher knows a students personality, has day to day contact with them and teaches them, each student has a valuble long-term relationship with at least one person in their school and through the teacher the school has a better understanding of their students. 'Big-Brother' seems to be an answer to everything these days. I see it as a loss of privacy and an incredibly large cop out.
Even taking into account exchange rates, 80c per CD is still cheaper than retail here. Retail here can range from $1.20-$2.50AU per CD!!
You Americans have got it lucky!
I felt that the movie was incredibly dumbed down. I don't know if this was to target a bigger demographic or what but the movie most definately did NOT do the book justice.
Starting off well, although slightly different from the book I was impressed at nearly all aspects of the movie. But, being Australian, the movies (grossly inferior) 4th July ending really ticked me off.
While I agree that the movie was ok it was no where near the callibre of the book.
My advice - see if it you want, just don't expect it to be great. You're better off spending a few nights reading the book.
Insufficient investment incentives
The government seems so preoccupied with their own internal expense account scandals, the introduction of GST and the preservation of their 4 year term to do anything for the long term future of the country.
Inadequate infrastructure and bandwith
Since the government floated Telstra and deregulated the telecom industry, service level has only dropped. Instead of investing in infastructure development, subsidies are given to Telstra to guarentee that remote regions will continue to receive the same service. This was necessary to convince the public to allow the float of the company (which was just a quick dash-for-cash to make them look like they're managing their money better) but doesn't really solve the problem. It just compensates for it.
Insufficient support for information economy R&D
See point one.
A skills shortage
If you're interested in getting Honours in Computer Science, Australia might just be the easiest place. At least in several Universities I know of, a credit average (65%) is all thats required to be eligable for Honours in CS Major degrees. Theres a huge number of people that seem to be doing computer science for the wrong reasons, bumming through the course and coming out with a degree but few skills. I personally have several Chinese friends doing their final Master's year in Computing Science who have never done a single year of CS prior to now whom will return to China at the end of the year to collect a wealthy salary. The government has it all wrong about the IT shortage. Theres plenty of people, just not enough GOOD people.
I won't go through all the other points but I agree whole-heartedly with all of them. On this issue Microsoft seems right on the mark so the MS bashing really is unjustified.
DVD's achieve a higher density of data on disk by using a blue laser as opposed to a red one that most CDROM's use. The blue laser allows it to focus on a much smaller point than a typical CDROM laser. As a side effect though, many of the (predominately blue) CDR's that you can buy wont work in these players.
I've heard previously that many of the DVD players that can play CDR's actually have two lasers.
It's not Sony quietly implementing piracy prevention technology into their products. It's just a limitation of the technology (and perhaps Sony being a cheapskate for not adding support for CDR's like many other brands do.)
I've had a 386 linux box beep various noises at me for a couple of years now whenever someone tries to connect to a port I'm not using (and I don't use many standard ones) and if they keep doing it, my little program firewalls their subnet.
Its really handy to know when you're being scanned and interesting to turn off the firewall and watch what happens when you scan them back!
Its not just NVidia and ATI who are left in the ring. Matrox is not far behind with their G400(and that has some cool features in their hardware that the others still dont!). As soon as they get up to speed with the whole hardware accelerated T&L thing they'll be back in the picture.
3DFX have a fair way more to catch up in terms of features. Their current chipsets don't have the raw power and features that their competitors do but they've got the industry experience on their side. I for one hope they get back on their feet!
In Australia, no phone provider (mobile or otherwise) charges for incoming calls (except for voicemail). Pre-paid plans that cut out are available and all the networks offer country wide coverage.
How can any large respectable business expect to gain anything from making life difficult for potential customers. If placed in this position, I would make it my business (no pun intended) never to purchase anything from Amazon again.
(BTW, since their 1-Click Patent fiasco, I havn't, and won't ever buy a book through them.)
I currently work for a rather large IT organisation (65,000 employees) and I'm currently rostered on-call for several systems I support.
My division is a result of a recent aquisition of a smaller company (1500 employees) at which we used to receive 10% of our standard hourly wage for every hour on call (that is, without even being called out). This amounted to 12.8hrs/wk extra pay.
If we were called out, we would get paid for a minimum of 4 hours work at time-and-a-half on weekdays and double-time on weekends.
It was a rather good deal!
Since the aquisition, we now get paid $300/wk to be on call and a minimum of 1 hr per a callout at standard rate weekdays and time-and-a-half on weekends.
We typically go on-call for two weeks at a time and cycle amongst 3 people.
Given that any basic encryption would yield the system useless, what do they hope to gain through this and what is stopping them from opening the source code?
Are they afraid of bugs being exploited, embarrased of sloppy code or just too tied up in the 'you don't need to know' mentality?
Linux has a great, easy to use, fast network filtering feature called netlink. You could filter out only mail traffic and then use a userspace program to do the same thing that carnivore is supposed to do with little more than a perl script!
Given that even light takes a while to get across an ocean, not to mention the time it takes to process and pass on data at routers, there likely won't be any *serious* Internet-based collaborative compositions anytime soon.
Just a quick correction.
Versions of Outlook set up in Corporate/Group mode aren't affected. MS Exchange clients also aren't affected. This bug will only really affect POP3 and IMAP4 mail users.
I'm the author of the original bugtraq post.
My original post to bugtraq was not intended to happen yesterday. It was through some carelessness on my behalf that it got out (if you really must know, there's a post about it on the bugtraq mailing list).
Both USSR Labs and I found the bug and submitted it to Microsoft independently. Unfortunately, due to my release of the advisory, Microsoft is refusing to acknowledge me in their official credits.
The implications of this bug should be obvious to anyone. Being able to run code on someone else's machine without their input or realization puts this vulnerability some powers above the recent VB script worms by a large factor.
The scariest thing about this problem was that when I discovered it in early June was the amount of time it took to find it. Not long after the ILOVEYOU worm had been spread, my Outlook session crashed. I had this strange urge to look for a way to crash outlook with a corrupted header (call me weird...). 10-15 minutes later I had isolated the problem and 5-8 hours of work after that I had a working exploit for it.
I notified Microsoft in early July about the problem and had been keeping it to myself while they developed patches.
Another thing the media didn't pick up on was that Outlook plugin's such as PGP also seem to crash in the same DLL. I'm not sure what security implications this poses as I haven't looked into this one myself (again further info is on bugtraq) but it highlights the fact that you can't build something secure out of insecure components!
While its not as good as running a native X program, Wine will run quite a few windows programs natively. They also have a database on their site (www.winehq.com) dedicated to reporting which windows programs will run and how well. I suggest you check it out for those programs you can't get native equivilents for.
It seems to me that it comes down to that age old tradeoff between efficiency and flexability. You could implement a 'polygon soup' collision detection/response system in hardware but:
a. It would require hardware to hold geometric details for the entire level (ie. lots more memory)
b. It would require a lot of data to be sent back and forth across the bus to correctly pass relevant physics and in-game object collision information.
c. Certain objects that are rendered shouldn't be colided with (for example some particles like smoke, semi-transparent polygon's like vines, etc..)
d. Can't be used in all scenarios such as massive worlds as in these cases certain 'quick outs' are used to quickly discard the possiblity of colliding with areas of the scenery that can't possibly be colliding.
Physics lend themselves a little more to hardware acceleration (particularly with mathematical intergration and other cpu intensive operations) but still require close interaction with the collision detection system.
Consider a ball bouncing off the floor. This requires physics to drop the ball, collision detection to detect the collision of the ball with the floor and response by the physics code to handle the resulting bounce back up again. Moving this all to hardware would help a great deal in simple cases as above but due to the independant nature of collision detection/physics and graphics, something like this would likely involve some tradeoff in flexability when moving to more complicated scenarios.
To use EQL each modem must have the *same* IP and the remote site must also support EQL (such as Livingston's Portmaster series).
Equal-cost multipath routing (is that the right term?) will work on outgoing data but obviously you don't have access to your ISP's incoming data routing.
You're probabily best to talk witk some prospective ISP's before slashdot. It all depends on the equipment they use.
While I'm certain that in most cases age doesn't play a major role in the skillset of a programmer I'm certain that in many cases it influences creativity, knowledge in cutting-edge and upcoming technology and motivation.
I'm currently working for an 1800 employee IT company who's employees are predominately greater than 30 years old and I'm constantly frustrated with the level of incompetency and responsibility that certain 'technically adept' members of the organisation have.
We are currently still dealing with the 'ILOVEYOU' virus (we have a 6 hour time delay on incoming SMTP mail due to this). My boss doesn't know how to set up a yahoo.com or hotmail.com email account and couldn't figure it out if he needed to. He doesn't use the Internet. He doesn't understand TCP/IP. He prefered having dumb terminals because they presented less problems. The company has no record of internal resources, be that people or hardware. Moving a group of people around the building requires manually gathering phone ports, data ports and updating at least 5 different internal records that are NOT linked to a central database at all. Our firewall that management are proud to say is 'secure' is easily SSHed through to bypass the filtering/logging web proxy.
What particularly annoys me is that (BTW, I'm in Australia) the 'career ladder' in this orgranisation places current part-time university students and graduates well below the more senior members of staff and basically works on the old 'the longer you work here, the higher you climb' mentality.
A company where age is irrelevant and SKILLS provide the basis of rank/responsibility would be a godsent for both of us it seems.
So I have no formal training at any crypto what-so-ever but I thought I'd test my suspicions that this is a OTP (which would make it impossible to break) and while its not conclusive, or even credible by any means, the distribution of each of the five digits in each set (assuming the spaces aren't for added confusion) overall suggests that randomness plays a part, but not necessarily big enough part to prove it was a OTP (or at least a random OTP) used to encode the message. (Feel free to tread all over my ill-informed logic if need be)
Standard deviations for the frequency of each digit in the set are: 4.47, 4.42, 1.82, 3.94, and 4.27 for the first station's numbers.
Maybe some crypto expert could tell me if for a set of 200 numbers these variations are acceptable 'noise' in a random number generator?
I'm not too up on my statistics to know if the sample size is too small to give a good indication. The frequency of each of the numbers 0-9 in the fifth digit of each set gave a max value of 26 and a minimum value of 12 which is kinda weird for a random set. Each number should be appearing around 20 times I would assume.
Is this really a OTP? Am I missing something?
Logo is definately a good start!
I started programming in Logo before I could spell some of the commands (I had my father write the word 'circle' with a picture of a circle next to it) when I was in kindergarten.
Its very visual so kids will get feedback from their work straight away and it supports proceduralisation, loops, and in some of the later versions even sound.
Because its interpreted its very simple for a kid to run a program compared to compiled programs and you write, run and edit your programs from within the one (very simple) IDE.
VB and Python are both very easy to learn but probably not as well suited for children as something like logo which teaches the fundamentals of programming in a much more visual way.
Personally, I've gone from Logo on the Apple IIe to QuickBasic on PC, to C/C++, to Assembler to a whole range of other languages since then and I couldn't have hoped for a better place to start programming than logo.
I've grown up around computers and been programming now for 12 years (at the age of 20). My goals have matured and pushed me to further my skills and will continue to do so. There isn't a universal or ultimate set of programmers goals as such, instead your goals reflect your current skills and the direction you want to head into.
I've grown up with the goals varying from learning C/C++, learning how to use Mode-X graphics, doing cross-fading, writing in 8086 assembler, and programming a soundblaster in DMA mode to things like becoming fluent in Java, OpenGL and other higher-level systems.
Some of my current goals are to better logically deconstruct my tasks into the most simplistic and generic objects possible whilst still maintaining efficiency and intuitiveness. As you might have guessed, these goals are aimed primarily at C++ and Java.
My point is that everyone will set themselves different goals. Unlike the sports and other careers, computing doesn't really have any upper limit or Apex of acheivement other than what you set yourself. (In sport there is the Olympics. In most industries you can aim to be the best. In computing, there are so many skill combinations that there is no single 'best'.) Your goals are defined by your ambitions and your current skills.