Indeed, check out Stephen Hawking's 'Law of Cosmic Censorship': The Universe does not allow "naked singularities"; they will always be clothed in a black hole.
I never even noticed that.(!) Maybe it's my background using so many different languages over the years (I started in the '70s) and I've used () for arrays so often it didn't strike me as confusing. Of couse, I never said Ada was perfect, just that I prefer it.
FWIW, I haven't worked with Ada for >2 years. My company landed a new contract, and I got moved to the new side, where I write Powerbuilder (Aauugghh!!!) PC programs for a customer who would rather do all his work on his Unix box!? (Note, the programs are legacy from the previous contractor. Part of our plan is to rewrite things to be platform independant -- probably in Java.)
I fell in love with Ada some years ago. Before that, I would have sworn you couldn't get better than C. Now, when my employer sends me to classes on C++/java/etc., my most frequent comment in class is "Oh, that's like (blank) in Ada," which usually gets me strange looks from my classmates (and instructors).
OT, but I think its unpoularity stems from the fact it was designed for DoD use, who then made it MANDATORY for all new projects. No programmer I've ever met likes to be told "you WILL use this language," and they will fight tooth and nail to use a language they are more comfortable with (usually C/C++). After all everybody knows that C is the only REAL language 8-) (Except for us geeks who have been programming down to the bare metal so long we think Assembler is a Higher Order Language).
FWIW, the REALLY sensitive stuff is only on internal nets, air-gapped from the internet. An outsider can't break in and look at your files if there is no connectivity.
That's why I always laugh whenever I read about some some 'l33t d00dz' hacking into military computers and compromising all our secrets. They may get some semi-sensitive, For-Official-Use-Only type crap, but they're not going to get the true classified stuff.
Someone below mentions the SIPRNET. Yes, it exists for lower-classified stuff, but it has very few connections to the general internet, and those that exist are VERY tightly controlled. If you try to slip in through one of them, you will have the OSI, CID, FBI, and a bunch of other letters knocking on your door. (Yes, the government does have a bunch of very intelligent, capable computer security guys. No, they don't noise it around - better to let the 'l33t d00dz' _think_ they are getting away with it.)
Re:This has been going on for 30 years
on
Morals and Layoffs
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· Score: 1
You seem to be implying that renting is more expensive than borrowing + real estate taxes + house insurance + maintainence, which is hard to believe.
FWIW, Where I live (Omaha, Nebraska) it seems to be cheaper to own than rent. I bought a house seven years ago because I couldn't afford to rent. My mortgage/taxes/insurance is $200+ less per month than rent on an identical house. My daughter and her husband (+ 3 kids) pay more to rent their little run-down place. (They can't buy because his credit is shot after being out of work for 12 of the last 24 months.)
Generally, I prefer cash. My problem is with the kiddies behind the register these days who can't figure out your change.
Yesterday I made a small purchase - $1.86. The sales clerk saw the two one dollar bills in my hand and punched that amount into the register. THEN she saw the penny sitting on the bills.
I could read her expression: "Oh, now what do I do?"
I had to explain to her that 1.86 from 2.01 was 0.15, and could I please have my change?
If I had just swiped my card, I would have been out of the store a good minute or two faster!
It is also my belief that the Hobbit literally started it all, that Tolkien started delving into Middle Earth, creating it, to entertain his children. I.e. he did not start off attempting to create a world, a history, and multiple languages, but instead that they are a by-product of the story he constructed to entertain his children.
Tolkien originally wrote pieces of what later became the Silmarillion as an exercise in philology, i.e., he invented a place where the people who spoke the languages he created would live. This was originally just a personal hobby type thing, although he did share with his family. (For instance, he is known to have referred to his wife as his 'Luthien Tinuviel' in private letters dating back to the 1920s.)
He later wrote The Hobbit as a children's tale for his own kids. He had no intention of linking it to his Silmarillion world, but he kept harking back to the grander themes therein, and they became entwined. After he successfully published The Hobbit, he tried to intrest his publishers in The Silmarillion, but they convinced him the public wouldn't accept a book like that.
"Give us more hobbits," they said, and so he tried, with LOTR. But this time he let the background history show through, and we learned about High Elves, and Valinor, and Morgoth, the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron was just a lieutenant. The earlier, unpublished (then) work he had done made LOTR just that much deeper and richer.
Correct about their ages. However, I don't know about equating with 18 or 21 in human years (emotionally speaking). I always figured they were pretty much like 'Big People' in that respect. Look at how many people in their twenties aren't _really_ responsible adults. (And that's how I felt when I first read these as a child some 40 yrs ago.)
Re:Here's a clue: They won't be using missles...
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 1
Sorry to hear you can't comprehend risk assessment. (And yes, I used the word almost, because none of this is absolute. I'm not that simplistic.)
You spend the money you have where it will do the most good! Wasting it on a system that has at best a 90% chance of foiling a rogue missile attack is senseless. It is simply a feel-good measure with no basis in real security.
I have been studying strategy and tactics since most slash-dotters were in diapers, and that includes keeping up to date on current threats in the world. While (some people claim) the probability of a missile attack is increasing, the probability is still so low that it shouldn't even register on our security radar. The attack that occurred on Tuesday was considered extremely likely within the next few years, yet no real steps were taken to prevent it. (I will admit, the magnitude was shockingly beyond what even the my most pessimistic colleagues expected.)
To get back to your response, I agree it's not all about terrorists. But a defense that might stop a missile that might be launched against us is not good enough. Try explaining to the public: 'well, we got four of the five missiles. Sorry about LA.' We still need to fund research and testing, but the system is nowhere close to being ready for deployment.
Re:Here's a clue: They won't be using missles...
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
To use your own analogy, since the front door is already wide open, why should we bother to lock the back door?
Nuclear missiles are an expensive, engineering-intense technology. Any organization capable enough to pull off this week's attack surely understands how much easier it would be to just smuggle a few punds of uranium into this country, and build a very simple but effective 'suitcase bomb'. I 'designed' one myself several years ago, that had no moving parts or any electronics at all. Sure, the terrorist has to be willing to die himself when setting it off, but that's obviously no barrier to the fanatic.
In any case, the key here is what is called risk assessment. Why spend billions to protect against something that will _almost_ certainly never happen, when _nothing_ is done to prevent the things that have a much higher probability?
I use CUPS at home. My HP Deskjet is hooked up to my parallel port. It was recognized on installation (OK I had to tell it the specific model), and has worked like a charm, since.
I run into the same problem. I'm running Mandrake 8.0. During installation, it detects the USB mouse, and I correct it to be a USB _wheel_ mouse. It says 'roll the mouse wheel to activate', and I do, and it's happy. I log in to KDE, use the scroll wheel, and everything's happy. I log in to Gnome, use the scroll wheel, and... nothing. Some programs WILL beep at me, like they're saying "I know you're doing something with the mouse, I just don't know what."
Unfortunately, you're all too right. Too often it's the manager (or the customer) who says "we need this yesterday." And the programmer who says it can't be done will soon find himself in the unemployment line.
I guess I'm fortunate to be working for a large corporation with an understanding client. Sometimes my customer says "I need this ASAP", and I can do the back-of-the-envelope calculation and say "You can have a rough system in 2 months", but I will also explain what he will give up, i.e., which updates/bug-fixes won't be delivered on time because I'm devoting time to this one. That puts the onus back on him. And fortunately, my manager backs me up.
You've hit the nail on the head! We need to hammer on these basics until ALL programmers understand them!
And, yeah, my throw-away-code line was kind of throw-away itself. You're right, all to often I've seen stuff that somebody built as a quick, one-time use utility end up as the anchor of a software project.
(And who would have believed that the stuff I wrote for a mainframe back in the eighties would still be around for Y2K?! (actually, it wasn't - thank God! I was stationed in Europe in the mid-ninties, and when I got back my first job was to rewrite the last remaining software system on that mainframe to run on a unix client-server network.))
Re:software is incredibly complex...
on
Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Beauty isn't really the issue here, it's maintainability. The current project I'm on, I 'inherited' someone elses butt-ugly code. It did the job fine, but I spent the first six months reading, re-reading, and testing, just so I could understand what the thing was doing. All told, I spent over a year just getting comfortable with the program. Meanwhile, I'm also supposed to be updating this thing for a new release every six months! Every chance I got I did 'code clean-up', fixing things that worked, but were difficult to understand the logic of, or just plain stupid (take a long, often-used routine, and make it in-line everywhere rather than use a function!?).
Finally, after two and a half years, I get the chance to re-write the whole thing into Java. (I know, it wouldn't be my first choice, but ANYTHING beats Powerbuilder!)
The point is, unless you are writing 'throw-away- code, your program may exist for many years, and have many people maintaining it. We need to do ourselves a favor and make sure that we can understand what we all write. Memory is cheap, so there is no good reason not to write good, clean, easy to follow code.
And don't give me the argument that "we're up against deadline". I've been playng this game for twenty years, and I know that every minute I spend in the design phase is like an hour saved in the coding phase. Design the thing first! Make sure you know how it is going to break down into the various modules you will use. If you design it right, the code will flow, and you will make your deadline easily.
I know, all you young hotshots out there won't listen to an old fart like me, but eventually you will either learn the hard way that I am right, or you will burn yourselves out and never want to code again. Meanwhile, _I_ get stuck trying to maintain the crap _you_ wrote!
No, us old farts know that Number One was Majel Barret (she never had a name - just Number One).
But then the suits at NBC decided that viewers wouldn't accept a female in a command position. And an unemotional one at that - an impossibility! So they took all her 'unlikable' qualitis (no emotion, high command, etc) and gave them to that alien guy, Spook, Spock, something like that.
Of course, Majel was a nice lady and a good actress, so they let her play Nurse Chapel....
Many of them closely parallel structure and syntax of North-Germanic languages (e.g. Norwegian, Danish, Old English). They parallel them enough that it isn't entirely inconceivable that the Common which is spoken in Middle Earth is in fact written as it sounds. It sounds just like English.
Actually, if you re-check the appendices, you will find that Tolkien 'translated' the Westron, or Common, speech into English, so he felt it was only appropriate to 'translate' other related languages. For example, the speech of the Rohirrim was similar to, but more archaic than, Westron. Therefor he rendered it as Old English.
(Yes, I am a big Tolkien fan. LOTR even induced me to take a post-grad linguistics course while I was in college.)
Working at WalMart does not give you any valuable experience at all, so why waste your time doing that?
Working at WalMart gives a person something you yourself say is very important: social skills! If a 16-year-old hasn't got the social skills to hack working there, he'll soon learn, or go down in flames.
IIRC, this product was being sold in the US (via the internet). However, as soon as Adobe complained to the company, they immediately stopped selling to US consumers. In other words, they obeyed the law (at least when their transgression was pointed out). So Sklyarov did nothing wrong!
Give this man a cigar! (or at least bump up his karma!)
Look at the US Constitution. Study the OTHER writings of those who wrote it. Thomas Jefferson considered intellectual property to be a non-sensical term. The _intent_ of copyright/patent law was to provide incentive for invention by securing rights for a limited time and then allowing (forcing!) the new thing into the public domain.
The idea expressed above is perfect. I invented it, you used it to make a profit, you pay me royalties. What could be simpler?
"What happens when you get a sample of some General's voice and then use a synthesiser to call up the poor kid on guard duty and get him to let a bunch of terrorists enter the base?"
Nothing. If that 'poor kid' has received ANY of the training our military police get, he will know better than to let anyone just call him up and tell him what to do. People can currently imitate someone else's voice, so there are already rules in place to avoid this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry. Anyone relying on Noam Chomsky for their arguments is neither intelligent nor thoughtful.
Indeed, check out Stephen Hawking's 'Law of Cosmic Censorship': The Universe does not allow "naked singularities"; they will always be clothed in a black hole.
I never even noticed that.(!) Maybe it's my background using so many different languages over the years (I started in the '70s) and I've used () for arrays so often it didn't strike me as confusing. Of couse, I never said Ada was perfect, just that I prefer it.
FWIW, I haven't worked with Ada for >2 years. My company landed a new contract, and I got moved to the new side, where I write Powerbuilder (Aauugghh!!!) PC programs for a customer who would rather do all his work on his Unix box!? (Note, the programs are legacy from the previous contractor. Part of our plan is to rewrite things to be platform independant -- probably in Java.)
Hear!Hear!
I fell in love with Ada some years ago. Before that, I would have sworn you couldn't get better than C. Now, when my employer sends me to classes on C++/java/etc., my most frequent comment in class is "Oh, that's like (blank) in Ada," which usually gets me strange looks from my classmates (and instructors).
OT, but I think its unpoularity stems from the fact it was designed for DoD use, who then made it MANDATORY for all new projects. No programmer I've ever met likes to be told "you WILL use this language," and they will fight tooth and nail to use a language they are more comfortable with (usually C/C++). After all everybody knows that C is the only REAL language 8-) (Except for us geeks who have been programming down to the bare metal so long we think Assembler is a Higher Order Language).
FWIW, the REALLY sensitive stuff is only on internal nets, air-gapped from the internet. An outsider can't break in and look at your files if there is no connectivity.
That's why I always laugh whenever I read about some some 'l33t d00dz' hacking into military computers and compromising all our secrets. They may get some semi-sensitive, For-Official-Use-Only type crap, but they're not going to get the true classified stuff.
Someone below mentions the SIPRNET. Yes, it exists for lower-classified stuff, but it has very few connections to the general internet, and those that exist are VERY tightly controlled. If you try to slip in through one of them, you will have the OSI, CID, FBI, and a bunch of other letters knocking on your door. (Yes, the government does have a bunch of very intelligent, capable computer security guys. No, they don't noise it around - better to let the 'l33t d00dz' _think_ they are getting away with it.)
You seem to be implying that renting is more expensive than borrowing + real estate taxes + house insurance + maintainence, which is hard to believe.
FWIW, Where I live (Omaha, Nebraska) it seems to be cheaper to own than rent. I bought a house seven years ago because I couldn't afford to rent. My mortgage/taxes/insurance is $200+ less per month than rent on an identical house. My daughter and her husband (+ 3 kids) pay more to rent their little run-down place. (They can't buy because his credit is shot after being out of work for 12 of the last 24 months.)
What you say is true, but....
IIRC, in Chapter two (The Shadow of the Past), As Gandalf explains about the Ring to Frodo, he says something to the effect of:
Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker! And therefore you were meant to have it also.
(That's the gist of it. I would quote it directly, but my books are at home by the bed.)
Generally, I prefer cash. My problem is with the kiddies behind the register these days who can't figure out your change.
Yesterday I made a small purchase - $1.86. The sales clerk saw the two one dollar bills in my hand and punched that amount into the register. THEN she saw the penny sitting on the bills.
I could read her expression: "Oh, now what do I do?"
I had to explain to her that 1.86 from 2.01 was 0.15, and could I please have my change?
If I had just swiped my card, I would have been out of the store a good minute or two faster!
It is also my belief that the Hobbit literally started it all, that Tolkien started delving into Middle Earth, creating it, to entertain his children. I.e. he did not start off attempting to create a world, a history, and multiple languages, but instead that they are a by-product of the story he constructed to entertain his children.
Tolkien originally wrote pieces of what later became the Silmarillion as an exercise in philology, i.e., he invented a place where the people who spoke the languages he created would live. This was originally just a personal hobby type thing, although he did share with his family. (For instance, he is known to have referred to his wife as his 'Luthien Tinuviel' in private letters dating back to the 1920s.)
He later wrote The Hobbit as a children's tale for his own kids. He had no intention of linking it to his Silmarillion world, but he kept harking back to the grander themes therein, and they became entwined. After he successfully published The Hobbit, he tried to intrest his publishers in The Silmarillion, but they convinced him the public wouldn't accept a book like that.
"Give us more hobbits," they said, and so he tried, with LOTR. But this time he let the background history show through, and we learned about High Elves, and Valinor, and Morgoth, the Great Enemy, of whom Sauron was just a lieutenant. The earlier, unpublished (then) work he had done made LOTR just that much deeper and richer.
Correct about their ages. However, I don't know about equating with 18 or 21 in human years (emotionally speaking). I always figured they were pretty much like 'Big People' in that respect. Look at how many people in their twenties aren't _really_ responsible adults. (And that's how I felt when I first read these as a child some 40 yrs ago.)
Sorry to hear you can't comprehend risk assessment. (And yes, I used the word almost, because none of this is absolute. I'm not that simplistic.)
You spend the money you have where it will do the most good! Wasting it on a system that has at best a 90% chance of foiling a rogue missile attack is senseless. It is simply a feel-good measure with no basis in real security.
I have been studying strategy and tactics since most slash-dotters were in diapers, and that includes keeping up to date on current threats in the world. While (some people claim) the probability of a missile attack is increasing, the probability is still so low that it shouldn't even register on our security radar. The attack that occurred on Tuesday was considered extremely likely within the next few years, yet no real steps were taken to prevent it. (I will admit, the magnitude was shockingly beyond what even the my most pessimistic colleagues expected.)
To get back to your response, I agree it's not all about terrorists. But a defense that might stop a missile that might be launched against us is not good enough. Try explaining to the public: 'well, we got four of the five missiles. Sorry about LA.' We still need to fund research and testing, but the system is nowhere close to being ready for deployment.
To use your own analogy, since the front door is already wide open, why should we bother to lock the back door?
Nuclear missiles are an expensive, engineering-intense technology. Any organization capable enough to pull off this week's attack surely understands how much easier it would be to just smuggle a few punds of uranium into this country, and build a very simple but effective 'suitcase bomb'. I 'designed' one myself several years ago, that had no moving parts or any electronics at all. Sure, the terrorist has to be willing to die himself when setting it off, but that's obviously no barrier to the fanatic.
In any case, the key here is what is called risk assessment. Why spend billions to protect against something that will _almost_ certainly never happen, when _nothing_ is done to prevent the things that have a much higher probability?
I use CUPS at home. My HP Deskjet is hooked up to my parallel port. It was recognized on installation (OK I had to tell it the specific model), and has worked like a charm, since.
I run into the same problem. I'm running Mandrake 8.0. During installation, it detects the USB mouse, and I correct it to be a USB _wheel_ mouse. It says 'roll the mouse wheel to activate', and I do, and it's happy. I log in to KDE, use the scroll wheel, and everything's happy. I log in to Gnome, use the scroll wheel, and... nothing. Some programs WILL beep at me, like they're saying "I know you're doing something with the mouse, I just don't know what."
Just one more reason I use KDE....
Unfortunately, you're all too right. Too often it's the manager (or the customer) who says "we need this yesterday." And the programmer who says it can't be done will soon find himself in the unemployment line.
I guess I'm fortunate to be working for a large corporation with an understanding client. Sometimes my customer says "I need this ASAP", and I can do the back-of-the-envelope calculation and say "You can have a rough system in 2 months", but I will also explain what he will give up, i.e., which updates/bug-fixes won't be delivered on time because I'm devoting time to this one. That puts the onus back on him. And fortunately, my manager backs me up.
BRAVO!
You've hit the nail on the head! We need to hammer on these basics until ALL programmers understand them!
And, yeah, my throw-away-code line was kind of throw-away itself. You're right, all to often I've seen stuff that somebody built as a quick, one-time use utility end up as the anchor of a software project.
(And who would have believed that the stuff I wrote for a mainframe back in the eighties would still be around for Y2K?! (actually, it wasn't - thank God! I was stationed in Europe in the mid-ninties, and when I got back my first job was to rewrite the last remaining software system on that mainframe to run on a unix client-server network.))
Beauty isn't really the issue here, it's maintainability. The current project I'm on, I 'inherited' someone elses butt-ugly code. It did the job fine, but I spent the first six months reading, re-reading, and testing, just so I could understand what the thing was doing. All told, I spent over a year just getting comfortable with the program. Meanwhile, I'm also supposed to be updating this thing for a new release every six months! Every chance I got I did 'code clean-up', fixing things that worked, but were difficult to understand the logic of, or just plain stupid (take a long, often-used routine, and make it in-line everywhere rather than use a function!?).
Finally, after two and a half years, I get the chance to re-write the whole thing into Java. (I know, it wouldn't be my first choice, but ANYTHING beats Powerbuilder!)
The point is, unless you are writing 'throw-away- code, your program may exist for many years, and have many people maintaining it. We need to do ourselves a favor and make sure that we can understand what we all write. Memory is cheap, so there is no good reason not to write good, clean, easy to follow code.
And don't give me the argument that "we're up against deadline". I've been playng this game for twenty years, and I know that every minute I spend in the design phase is like an hour saved in the coding phase. Design the thing first! Make sure you know how it is going to break down into the various modules you will use. If you design it right, the code will flow, and you will make your deadline easily.
I know, all you young hotshots out there won't listen to an old fart like me, but eventually you will either learn the hard way that I am right, or you will burn yourselves out and never want to code again. Meanwhile, _I_ get stuck trying to maintain the crap _you_ wrote!
No, us old farts know that Number One was Majel Barret (she never had a name - just Number One).
But then the suits at NBC decided that viewers wouldn't accept a female in a command position. And an unemotional one at that - an impossibility! So they took all her 'unlikable' qualitis (no emotion, high command, etc) and gave them to that alien guy, Spook, Spock, something like that.
Of course, Majel was a nice lady and a good actress, so they let her play Nurse Chapel....
Many of them closely parallel structure and syntax of North-Germanic languages (e.g. Norwegian, Danish, Old English). They parallel them enough that it isn't entirely inconceivable that the Common which is spoken in Middle Earth is in fact written as it sounds. It sounds just like English.
Actually, if you re-check the appendices, you will find that Tolkien 'translated' the Westron, or Common, speech into English, so he felt it was only appropriate to 'translate' other related languages. For example, the speech of the Rohirrim was similar to, but more archaic than, Westron. Therefor he rendered it as Old English.
(Yes, I am a big Tolkien fan. LOTR even induced me to take a post-grad linguistics course while I was in college.)
... government software? I'm sure some of it must be almost laughably bad.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Working at WalMart does not give you any valuable experience at all, so why waste your time doing that?
Working at WalMart gives a person something you yourself say is very important: social skills! If a 16-year-old hasn't got the social skills to hack working there, he'll soon learn, or go down in flames.
IIRC, this product was being sold in the US (via the internet). However, as soon as Adobe complained to the company, they immediately stopped selling to US consumers. In other words, they obeyed the law (at least when their transgression was pointed out). So Sklyarov did nothing wrong!
Give this man a cigar! (or at least bump up his karma!)
Look at the US Constitution. Study the OTHER writings of those who wrote it. Thomas Jefferson considered intellectual property to be a non-sensical term. The _intent_ of copyright/patent law was to provide incentive for invention by securing rights for a limited time and then allowing (forcing!) the new thing into the public domain.
The idea expressed above is perfect. I invented it, you used it to make a profit, you pay me royalties. What could be simpler?
"I do mind the enormous amount of crap Fantasy that is being published tday."
Just a reminder of Sturgeon's law: 90% of EVERYTHING is crap!
"What happens when you get a sample of some General's voice and then use a synthesiser to call up the poor kid on guard duty and get him to let a bunch of terrorists enter the base?"
Nothing. If that 'poor kid' has received ANY of the training our military police get, he will know better than to let anyone just call him up and tell him what to do. People can currently imitate someone else's voice, so there are already rules in place to avoid this problem.