I saw that interview (presumably the same one) on BBC News 24 last night (17/12/06), but the "superstitious nonsense" line wasn't in it. Perhaps it's been edited out since.
I suspect they have tried that. I also suspect it will not work. Mobile phone tracking is just not that accurate. In my last job I was involved in a project to track machines (to prevent theft) using embedded GSM modems (The phone company had a service where you could get the equivalent of GPS coordinates and we would draw the location on a map in a web page.) You could tell which cell was nearest and the approximate distance from it but because cells are so thinly spread in the British countryside you could end up with a large crescent-shaped area that covered half the town. I have a vague memory of a paedophile and/or murderer being caught in the mid-1990s in the UK based on a mobile phone trace that supposedly pinned down his location to a particular corner of a field. I can't seem to find anything using Google now though. Anyone else remember this? I'm pretty sure it wasn't Roy Whiting (who murdered Sarah Payne) - it was a year or two earlier. Perhaps they are able to track locations more accurately if requested by the police, but I fear it may just be that an "expert witness" drew a point on a map and noone questioned the accuracy.
"Best reuse of existing code" has been done in at least one programming contest: http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/
According to some of the postings on the mailing list it didn't work too well though.
Outside help of any kind is not permitted. This means: no assistance of any kind from any other person; also no books, calculators, computers, or tools other than items explicitly permitted. You are allowed to use writing implements, erasers, paper, and any items explicitly required to solve a specific problem. (All such items are listed on the Hints and Tips page.)
Maybe this means they are not trying to find people who can come up with algorithmic solutions. Or maybe they are but they don't want fast coding ability to be a factor.
The phrase "computer crash" has become a generic term, referring to anything that makes the computer freeze or stop operating. But the term actually refers to a mechanical breakdown. When a computer hard drive literally crashes, the head mechanism that reads the data physically crashes into the spinning platter that stores the data. Is this really true? I'm sure I heard the term around 1980. I believe hard disks were pretty rare then.
sqlite has its own performance weaknesses. Last time I looked at the source (about 6 months ago), ORDER BY was handled by buffering the results in memory and sorting them before returning them. You might expect that an index on the column(s) you are sorting by would be used to order the results, but it isn't.
I use assertions to document assumptions in the code. Just occasionally they are useful for debugging. I tend to keep them enabled anyway otherwise they get out of date (referring to variables that no longer exist etc.)
You know the ones. Where you build queries by dragging from one box to another to create a SQL join etc.
You could call that visual programming (though of course you can't write your whole program with it)
And the "visual" representation updates itself when you modify the code (which the procedural/OO visual programming systems seem to have trouble with).
They haven't improved the speed of the background compilation (that is used to update the code completion database). One of my more complex files (which contains 9 inner classes) still takes about 15 seconds to rescan whenever I change anything.
And theres still no 'exclude from.WAR' option on individual files.
A method that works well for addresses posted to newsgroups: Require the subject line to start with "Don't buy this: " Spammers aren't going to put that in their subject lines.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw that interview (presumably the same one) on BBC News 24 last night (17/12/06), but the "superstitious nonsense" line wasn't in it. Perhaps it's been edited out since.
I suspect they have tried that. I also suspect it will not work. Mobile phone tracking is just not that accurate.
In my last job I was involved in a project to track machines (to prevent theft) using embedded GSM modems (The phone company had a service where you could get the equivalent of GPS coordinates and we would draw the location on a map in a web page.) You could tell which cell was nearest and the approximate distance from it but because cells are so thinly spread in the British countryside you could end up with a large crescent-shaped area that covered half the town.
I have a vague memory of a paedophile and/or murderer being caught in the mid-1990s in the UK based on a mobile phone trace that supposedly pinned down his location to a particular corner of a field. I can't seem to find anything using Google now though. Anyone else remember this? I'm pretty sure it wasn't Roy Whiting (who murdered Sarah Payne) - it was a year or two earlier.
Perhaps they are able to track locations more accurately if requested by the police, but I fear it may just be that an "expert witness" drew a point on a map and noone questioned the accuracy.
"Best reuse of existing code" has been done in at least one programming contest:
http://icfpc.plt-scheme.org/
According to some of the postings on the mailing list it didn't work too well though.
Maybe this means they are not trying to find people who can come up with algorithmic solutions.
Or maybe they are but they don't want fast coding ability to be a factor.
The phrase "computer crash" has become a generic term, referring to anything that makes the computer freeze or stop operating. But the term actually refers to a mechanical breakdown. When a computer hard drive literally crashes, the head mechanism that reads the data physically crashes into the spinning platter that stores the data.
Is this really true? I'm sure I heard the term around 1980. I believe hard disks were pretty rare then.
sqlite has its own performance weaknesses.
Last time I looked at the source (about 6 months ago), ORDER BY was handled by buffering the results in memory and sorting them before returning them.
You might expect that an index on the column(s) you are sorting by would be used to order the results, but it isn't.
I wonder if this will lead to more effort being spent on free JVM clones.
Or even diverting effort from mono.
Could Sun have planned it that way?
I use assertions to document assumptions in the code. Just occasionally they are useful for debugging. I tend to keep them enabled anyway otherwise they get out of date (referring to variables that no longer exist etc.)
You know the ones. Where you build queries by dragging from one box to another to create a SQL join etc.
You could call that visual programming (though of course you can't write your whole program with it)
And the "visual" representation updates itself when you modify the code (which the procedural/OO visual programming systems seem to have trouble with).
They haven't improved the speed of the background compilation (that is used to update the code completion database). One of my more complex files (which contains 9 inner classes) still takes about 15 seconds to rescan whenever I change anything.
.WAR' option on individual files.
And theres still no 'exclude from
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~mbsclass/hall_of_fame/cod d.htm
I wouldn't want to start a flame war by implying that certain languages/technologies are passing fads :-)
...into two parts.
1. Early pioneers (Turing etc), and possibly designers of the languages (C etc) that have stood the test of time.
This list will probably be roughly the same this time next year.
2. Inventors of recent, fashionable languages & technologies (better not mention them by name though)
This list will probably look very different this time next year.
A method that works well for addresses posted to newsgroups: Require the subject line to start with "Don't buy this: "
Spammers aren't going to put that in their subject lines.
The dog is on fire.
Last game I played lasted more like 4-5 months!
Logging everything, over a serial cable, to another machine that just appends it to a file, is not expensive and not easy to tamper with.