Back at the now-defunct Pico Communications, I implemented one of those (for a Bluetooth access point) doing a TCP "man in the middle attack" that redirected their first outgoing TCP connection on port 80, then gave them back their regular net connection. They even made me write it up for a patent application, though I don't know if it was ever granted. It's interesting seeing all the different ways people have implemented the same technique...
Hitting the Google glossary
yielded a New Zild Glossary which defines a "larrikin" as an "unruly person", a term which originated in 19th century Melbourne.
For all you americans out there, sue a spammer, make him/her pay for all loss of productivity he/she has caused. It'll make you rich, and perhaps make spammers think twice before clicking that send button.
So here's a challenge for someone with the wherewithal to create a startup: create a company that makes a business of suing spammers. Charge nothing to the end customer-- just claim a portion of the settlements as legal fees. Then set yourself up like SpamCop. Whenever you get enough evidence to make a case against a spammer, take them to court on behalf of all the people sending in complaints to your site. Make sure that everyone is clear that the company is a short-term venture that will vanish after it is no longer economical to be a spammer.
I've seen the original game as something you can play in an ordinary DVD player, using the menu navigation buttons in place of the arcade game console.
What happens when the plant or bug dies? You still have the question of collecting the remains and then doing something safe with them.
An article I read in Science News many years ago suggested that the plants could then be carefully incinerated (at an optimal temperature, filters on the smokestack, etc.) and the heavy metals retrieved for later use. (This was on using particular varieties of weeds to pull heavy metals out of toxic waste sites.)
Fish is a wonderfully healthy food, but a friend of mine can't stand the characteristic flavor of fish. Can you recommend any cooking processes that diminish that "fishy" taste, or particular types of fish that lack it?
Jack Womack has a set of novels set in an amazingly unpleasant, inhumane future. Ambient, Terraplane, Elvissey, and more. His future includes everything from a debased English language to women creating the equivalent of thalidomide babies as "art".
Most of these attacks are coming over TCP connections. If you want to impede someone else who's spreading their worm across the Internet, you could use the underlying TCP protocol to tie up their connection by simulating a very, very slow, error-prone connection that stays just under the threshold of timing out, drawing out their connection as long as possible and lying to the worm machine about packets having gotten lost en route. This means that one of your ports and processes (or at least threads) would be tied up dealing with the whole mess, just as one of theirs would be on spreading it, but it would slow down the spread of the attack by that amount.
It's not as effective as attacking their machine in response, but it's completely legal.
For starters, try Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre; I'd recommend "Tangram" and "Oxygene" respectively, though they've each ranged far from those examples. If you like the really abstract, sonorous stuff (I'd call it "ambient" but that term is now effectively meaningless due to overuse), try Steve Roach's "Magnificent Void". One modern genre I've very much enjoyed is "Goa Trance", which tends to be much more melodic than most techno music; I've had a lot of good luck finding music starting from the Spirit Zone samplers, "Global Psychedelic Trance" volumes 1-8.
Also, check out Musical Starstreams, which is a weekly radio show that's been running since 1981; each week, they convert the most recent show to MP3 and add it to the archive. (Every six weeks, I burn a batch of shows to CD and throw them in my car MP3 player-- it's like having 12 hours of radio that I actually wanted to listen to.) Some good discoveries I've had from there were Global Communications' "76:14" and the two albums by Zero One.
The STL is very effective. Most of the problems
I've had with it involved cross-platform compatibility (as I tend to develop code that
has to run on a variety of platforms). Depending on your various STL versions and compiler versions, you can have to deal with the vagaries of the presence or lack thereof of namespaces, the availability of default template arguments (which has led me to typedefs like typedef map<RWCString, RWCString, less<RWCString>, allocator> NVPairMap;), and some real headaches figuring out how to get the #includes just right to deal with the way that Microsoft has two different versions of the iostream headers in MSVC.
Overall, I consider the STL well worth your while to learn and use.
I majored in Physics in college. I've had all of three semesters of computer science, of which two were mostly a matter of going "oh, that's what they call it" and one, lower-division Data Structures and Algorithms, was a source of valuable information.
Computer Science is a fascinating discipline that provides us with a lot of important aspects of our technology-- but studying Computer Science does not prepare you for a job in the real world doing software engineering. I regularly interview people with master's degrees and doctorates in Computer Science who don't understand simple, practical basics about how software works and how to build it. I'm generally suspicious of any resume that has lots of CS on it, though I'm content if they can pass my interview questions.
The most important thing to have if you want a career in computers is experience, not education. I took a free course in C programming in the Unix environment at UC Berkeley when I was 15 and got a summer job doing programming when I was 16. If you can find yourself an internship or other opportunity, that's valuable. Take your college's CS track through Data Structures and Algorithms; you may never have to implement more than a doubly linked list yourself, but it's convenient to know "oh, I'll just use an STL map, that gives me a red-black tree" when you're writing code. Major in something that interests you; minor or double-major in CS if you wish, but don't let that stop you from taking English Literature or Philosophy or whatever catches your fascination. Real-world software engineering experience will trump book learning on those job offers that ask for CS degrees.
How soon to run Xbox games on a regular computer?
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 1
So, is anyone working on making it possible to run Xbox games on a regular computer? If they're sharing a lot of technology with Windows, hopefully it should just be a matter of getting appropriate joystick hardware and having compatible video and sound cards. (And how long before we can run Xbox games under WINE on Linux?) I don't consider it worth my while to buy an Xbox just to play Oddworld, but I might as well make sure my next computer purchase is capable of running the games in some boot configuration.
I'm one of those quirky engineers out there; at 30 years old, I seem to be one of the last. Most of my co-workers don't seem to feel like bringing color into the workplace from any source, let alone Archie McPhee [www.mcphee.com] or Despair, Inc. [www.despair.com]. My manager was slightly worried when I arrived at work and promptly put up a fuzzy stuffed gargoyle "trophy" head on my cube wall with a Pointy-Haired Boss doll gripped in its jaws.
I get very little trouble for being quirky, though. I've even had jobs where they make a point of bringing interview candidates past my office.
The most important part of being a quirky engineer is being competent. You have to make it abundantly clear that your quirkiness doesn't detrimentally affect your job performance.
Raw productivity, though, is not enough. You also need to be present during reasonable hours to be accessible as a resource to the other engineers, to answer questions for folks from other parts of the company (such as Marketing and QA), and you have to make it to the meetings.
I'm not sure how long this is going to last as an available mode of operation. As more and more people become programmers because it's a job, rather than because they like messing around with computers and are willing to redirect their messing around for pay, the fraction of quirky programmers will diminish. (I've experimented with inducing it-- when one previous job changed buildings, I purchased the Medium-Sized Treasure Box, the Bag of Mystery, and a gallon of Tiny Treasures from Archie McPhee, spread them all out on a spare desk, and said "It's free!" Unbeknownst to me, a friend in QA spread a lie that I'd be terribly hurt if people didn't take at least one. Weird goodies spread over the entire company, and some people started bringing in some of their own.) As long as we can keep the correlation of quirkiness and competence high, though, we should be able to keep software engineering safe for weirdness for a good while yet.
Generally, I recommend that people learn C first. C is a form of portable assembly language, and is a good introduction to giving orders to a computer. I've found that far too many programmers these days have no idea what's going on down on the bare metal, and you need that understanding to be an effective engineer.
I get people coming in for interviews who don't understand why you would ever want to inline a function call.
Once you know C and have learned what it can do, C++ should be taught before Java. It gives you a lot of useful tools while keeping a fairly strict environment. In particular, it helps you think about memory management as you work with constructors and destructors.
Java insulates you from memory management, and pointer arithmetic, and the way it does so requires that you deal with its object-oriented libraries. As a language for teaching OO techniques, it could be effective once the student has learned the disciplines of C and C++.
(As an aside, the discipline taught by C and C++ is important when moving to more flexible C-based languages like JavaScript and Perl. Some people regard Perl as an abomination because it is extremely easy to write thoroughly obfuscated code in the language. I recommend that people writing Perl stick to C/C++ like syntax as much as is practical as a way of avoiding obfuscation. Once you take steps to avoid obfuscation-- which requires some discipline-- Perl is a very effective scripting tool.)
From what I've seen, there are competent chiropractors out there and quack chiropractors. My stepdad ran into one of the quacks years ago in New York-- the guy claimed he would be able to fix my stepdad's food allergies (to citrus and dairy) by waving an orange and a piece of cheese over him and adjusting his feet. Over in Santa Clara, CA, we've got a competent one-- Dr. David Hoewisch-- who was able to clear up a chronic problem of mine related to cracking a vertabra in a fall in 10th grade. My fiancee, who had been in some nasty car accidents that led to long term chronic back pain, was able to get a lot of those fixed up after the traditional doctors said she'd just have to live with the pain for the rest of her life.
Does that mean they can cure the common cold?
Not that I've seen. It's best to get a recommendation for a competent one from someone who's actually benefited from their attentions.
You may also want to look for an osteopath, rather than a chiropractor, if you want someone with greater training in other aspects of medicine.
(On a related note, I was able to get done
with a really nasty flu faster than expected with
the aid of a combination of acupuncture, massage,
and herbs from the acupuncturist my family sees--
Dr. Xiao Ping Wang of Cupertino. He only does
business through recommendations, and was able to
clear up my mother's carpal
tunnel syndrome in about 6 sessions. He uses
a combination of massage, acupuncture, herbal
packs, and herbal medicines, so the acupuncture
might be nothing more than a placebo effect on top of other things, but we have gotten good results from "alternative medicine". Again, good recommendations are important.)
For that matter, you could have entirely imaginary
landscapes and targets when you're playing paintball. Add subtle bone-conduction headphones
and you can walk around talking with an imaginary
friend that you can see and hear and,
with some body position sensors, get in fistfights
with. If you thought Tamagotchi was distracting,
just wait for these apps!
Slashdot Mirror
Back at the now-defunct Pico Communications, I implemented one of those (for a Bluetooth access point) doing a TCP "man in the middle attack" that redirected their first outgoing TCP connection on port 80, then gave them back their regular net connection. They even made me write it up for a patent application, though I don't know if it was ever granted. It's interesting seeing all the different ways people have implemented the same technique...
Hitting the Google glossary yielded a New Zild Glossary which defines a "larrikin" as an "unruly person", a term which originated in 19th century Melbourne.
Or, translated to Slashdotese:
I've seen the original game as something you can play in an ordinary DVD player, using the menu navigation buttons in place of the arcade game console.
Fish is a wonderfully healthy food, but a friend of mine can't stand the characteristic flavor of fish. Can you recommend any cooking processes that diminish that "fishy" taste, or particular types of fish that lack it?
Jack Womack has a set of novels set in an amazingly unpleasant, inhumane future. Ambient, Terraplane, Elvissey, and more. His future includes everything from a debased English language to women creating the equivalent of thalidomide babies as "art".
It's not as effective as attacking their machine in response, but it's completely legal.
For starters, try Tangerine Dream and Jean-Michel Jarre; I'd recommend "Tangram" and "Oxygene" respectively, though they've each ranged far from those examples. If you like the really abstract, sonorous stuff (I'd call it "ambient" but that term is now effectively meaningless due to overuse), try Steve Roach's "Magnificent Void". One modern genre I've very much enjoyed is "Goa Trance", which tends to be much more melodic than most techno music; I've had a lot of good luck finding music starting from the Spirit Zone samplers, "Global Psychedelic Trance" volumes 1-8. Also, check out Musical Starstreams, which is a weekly radio show that's been running since 1981; each week, they convert the most recent show to MP3 and add it to the archive. (Every six weeks, I burn a batch of shows to CD and throw them in my car MP3 player-- it's like having 12 hours of radio that I actually wanted to listen to.) Some good discoveries I've had from there were Global Communications' "76:14" and the two albums by Zero One.
Overall, I consider the STL well worth your while to learn and use.
Computer Science is a fascinating discipline that provides us with a lot of important aspects of our technology-- but studying Computer Science does not prepare you for a job in the real world doing software engineering. I regularly interview people with master's degrees and doctorates in Computer Science who don't understand simple, practical basics about how software works and how to build it. I'm generally suspicious of any resume that has lots of CS on it, though I'm content if they can pass my interview questions.
The most important thing to have if you want a career in computers is experience, not education. I took a free course in C programming in the Unix environment at UC Berkeley when I was 15 and got a summer job doing programming when I was 16. If you can find yourself an internship or other opportunity, that's valuable. Take your college's CS track through Data Structures and Algorithms; you may never have to implement more than a doubly linked list yourself, but it's convenient to know "oh, I'll just use an STL map, that gives me a red-black tree" when you're writing code. Major in something that interests you; minor or double-major in CS if you wish, but don't let that stop you from taking English Literature or Philosophy or whatever catches your fascination. Real-world software engineering experience will trump book learning on those job offers that ask for CS degrees.
So, is anyone working on making it possible to run Xbox games on a regular computer? If they're sharing a lot of technology with Windows, hopefully it should just be a matter of getting appropriate joystick hardware and having compatible video and sound cards. (And how long before we can run Xbox games under WINE on Linux?) I don't consider it worth my while to buy an Xbox just to play Oddworld, but I might as well make sure my next computer purchase is capable of running the games in some boot configuration.
I get very little trouble for being quirky, though. I've even had jobs where they make a point of bringing interview candidates past my office.
The most important part of being a quirky engineer is being competent. You have to make it abundantly clear that your quirkiness doesn't detrimentally affect your job performance.
Raw productivity, though, is not enough. You also need to be present during reasonable hours to be accessible as a resource to the other engineers, to answer questions for folks from other parts of the company (such as Marketing and QA), and you have to make it to the meetings.
I'm not sure how long this is going to last as an available mode of operation. As more and more people become programmers because it's a job, rather than because they like messing around with computers and are willing to redirect their messing around for pay, the fraction of quirky programmers will diminish. (I've experimented with inducing it-- when one previous job changed buildings, I purchased the Medium-Sized Treasure Box, the Bag of Mystery, and a gallon of Tiny Treasures from Archie McPhee, spread them all out on a spare desk, and said "It's free!" Unbeknownst to me, a friend in QA spread a lie that I'd be terribly hurt if people didn't take at least one. Weird goodies spread over the entire company, and some people started bringing in some of their own.) As long as we can keep the correlation of quirkiness and competence high, though, we should be able to keep software engineering safe for weirdness for a good while yet.
Once you know C and have learned what it can do, C++ should be taught before Java. It gives you a lot of useful tools while keeping a fairly strict environment. In particular, it helps you think about memory management as you work with constructors and destructors.
Java insulates you from memory management, and pointer arithmetic, and the way it does so requires that you deal with its object-oriented libraries. As a language for teaching OO techniques, it could be effective once the student has learned the disciplines of C and C++.
(As an aside, the discipline taught by C and C++ is important when moving to more flexible C-based languages like JavaScript and Perl. Some people regard Perl as an abomination because it is extremely easy to write thoroughly obfuscated code in the language. I recommend that people writing Perl stick to C/C++ like syntax as much as is practical as a way of avoiding obfuscation. Once you take steps to avoid obfuscation-- which requires some discipline-- Perl is a very effective scripting tool.)
Does that mean they can cure the common cold? Not that I've seen. It's best to get a recommendation for a competent one from someone who's actually benefited from their attentions. You may also want to look for an osteopath, rather than a chiropractor, if you want someone with greater training in other aspects of medicine.
(On a related note, I was able to get done with a really nasty flu faster than expected with the aid of a combination of acupuncture, massage, and herbs from the acupuncturist my family sees-- Dr. Xiao Ping Wang of Cupertino. He only does business through recommendations, and was able to clear up my mother's carpal tunnel syndrome in about 6 sessions. He uses a combination of massage, acupuncture, herbal packs, and herbal medicines, so the acupuncture might be nothing more than a placebo effect on top of other things, but we have gotten good results from "alternative medicine". Again, good recommendations are important.)
For that matter, you could have entirely imaginary landscapes and targets when you're playing paintball. Add subtle bone-conduction headphones and you can walk around talking with an imaginary friend that you can see and hear and, with some body position sensors, get in fistfights with. If you thought Tamagotchi was distracting, just wait for these apps!