That's not lack of structure, its how text strings were handled before Fortran had character variables. In FORTRAN IV, characters get stuffed into real or integer variables and you have to play games with bit masks and such. The " prefix indicates an OCTAL literal.
To increase bandwidth, cable companies used to have dual channel setups over analog cable (before digital). They used to have 'A/B' switches on the boxes and you could access double the amount of channels.
When I lived in the Comcast service area, they actually had two coax wires entering the house. Without a cable box you would get one channel line up on A and a different line up on B. Both wires went into the cable box. The cable box assigned these signals to a different set of cable channels. IIRC I sometimes had to set a separate A/B switch on the cable box to select alternate channels from the cable line up as well. For example NASA was on one of the alternate channels.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/ The bill includes the cost savings by releasing 2400 prisoners. They will Not be given iPods. Instead, each will get a confiscated weapon if they promise to move to Ohio. Not yet made public is a clause that makes Detroit part of Canada. "We are hoping that the change does Detroit good, moving to a new place can have that effect, you know, and Canada is really very nice,really."
Or maybe we get Toledo, Canada gets Detroit, Wisconsin gets the U.P. and we fight the war of 1812 all over again?
Exactly why has this become our top priority. I've watched from forty miles away as they've closed down Detroit schools and shut that community out more than they already are. Places like Detroit and inner Flint are struggling to even fit the definition of a city in the first world, and now our economic priority is... digital audio players! Oh, yeah. Because we all know that they're going to go home and put on their device scientific podcasts and discussions debating the importance of the Han Dynasty in China. We all know how academically sound students are anyway. THIRTY EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS? We just had an election centered on our business tax and how we can appropriate funds once we remove it. WELL THERE YOU GO. Better yet, let's spend that 38 million reviving the education system to include some kind of motivation and benefit to graduate well. But now. Now teachers and future teachers, like me, will get to hear "Sorry Mrs. Teacher, I didn't do my homework podcast thing because I had to rip cd's onto the ipod." Great job on the priorities, little Jimmy. Your government hath done thineself proud.
I live about 30 minutes from Saginaw. What started in Detroit is now commonplace in Pontiac, Flint, Lansing and Saginaw. Crime is rampant. Drive by shootings and arson are commnplace in the large cities. The governor is trying to bail the state out of an enormous budget deficit. Part of her plan is to put at 2% tax on services (with some exceptions). This is supposed to replace the already onerous "Single Business Tax" which will not actually have expired when her new taxes come into force. In addition, lawmakers propose raising the cost of license plates by 50%. Not only are we being taxed to death, we are being "feed" to death as well.
The big 3 auto makers are in danger of bankruptcy. 50% of their workforce has been laid off. In addition parts suppliers are going under left and right. Michigan is an economic basket case and all our governor can do is raise taxes. Michigan is circling the bottom of the toilet - and the governor and the legislature just keep flushing.
This proposal is beyond idiotic. If things get worse here, I will do something no native Michigander ever wants to do - I'm moving to Ohio.
It does afford me the option of wondering "aloud" why Brin didn't just download, say, an Apple ][ or C64 emulator.
Even better, find an emulator that runs CP/M which also emulates various types of terminals. One fun thing about computers is making them do fun looking *stuff* like display hacks, moving the cursor, typing backwards, etc. Learn how to control the display by issuing character sequences. Find some books by David Ahl. CP/M had an incredibly rich set of simple tools. Part of the fun is that you have to do some actual building to make things work. Sample any number of the host of languages available under CP/M. Use a line editor. Print out program listings, etc.
Use the computer as a *tool* to learn something else - like math. Number fun - magic squares - rectangular, triangular, perfect numbers. Find prime numbers and pythagorean triplets, etc. Do number base conversions. Learn dimensional analysis and units, etc, etc, etc.
Let the child enjoy saying "Whoopie. I made this."
Maybe so. A better question might be - Why would you want to use code like this or similar code? On the 65xx, one way of passing arguments to a subroutine was having them embedded in the code stream. So the return address is a pointer to your arguments. You deal with them, then adjust the return address to skip the arguments, push it, then return. So do I get the job???
Exactly, but with out having the quadratic formula memorized, how are you going to test if they can derive it?
Deriving the formula is a genaralization of a process called "completing the square". This process can be used to solve particular quadratic equations. It is a consequence of (a+b)**2 being a**2 + 2*a*b + b**2. It's been 35+ years since I studied this in school but if someone said "completing the square" I probably would remember how to derive it. Just don't ask me *exactly* how to extract a square root with pencil and paper. I know the method exists, but don't remember the exact deatails.
It's utterly bizarre that we worry about a few grammes of lead in solder but drive around in cars containing huge lead filled batteries, all of which are of course disposed of responsibly, aren't they? We pay for expensive granite kitchen worktops that contain, among other things, uranium. We eat "low sodium" salt that contains radioactive potassium. Rather than banning everything in sight, perhaps we need to have a basic toxicology course in all art training of the "don't lick the paintbrush, idiots" variety.
Like radium salts on watch dials of yore?
[flame on]
Why can't people at least learn enough science to understand the saying "The dose makes the poison"?
True, but the military aspect played a huge part in the funding for the interstate highway system. The interstates provide a tried-and-true platform for moving tanks and other heavy war material a very long distance, with minimal fuel and minimum time.
One of the specs for the interstate highway system was that it had to be wide enough to handle tanks. This came in handy during the '67 Detroit riots.
Some of these firms should really start looking at warehouses in Detroit.
Do bullet proof vests come included?
There is actually something worse than the rampant crime, corruption, drugs, traffic and exorbitant parking in Detroit - having to pay city income tax.
If every change even a correction needs to be audited save-to-save of a file... The mountains of next-to-worthless data the piles of auto-saves would generate is mind boggling.
As a former resident of Wisconsin, cheese is big business. Huge, in fact. Government grants for cheese and other dairy research are nothing new to the University of Wisconsin. Sure, it might appear like a drain on money, but by doing the research in a public setting it benefits all dairy producers whereas private research only benefits the company or co-op sponsoring it. To justify it all you have to do is imagine the tax benefits of even a few percentage points of additional dairy production.
Besides, I back all agricultural research.....
Does any one remember toxic shock syndrome? Identification and characterization of the bacteria responsible for the disease was done in Wisconsin. Studies of the toxin involved were done by researchers in food science. Agricultural research clearly saved lives in this case. [Go Bucky!]
Now, instead of all the "Contents may be hot" labels, everyone's going to have to start putting "Warning! Contents may detonate" on their coffee cups to avoid lawsuits.
How long until the ambulance chasing lawyers on TV get hold of this one? "Have you been burned by an exploding coffee cup? Dial 1-800-..."
1. Attach DDR dance pad to computer. 2. Remap key codes for debugger commands "Step In", "Step Over", "Step Out." 3. Actually step through code...
This gives a new meaning to "stamping out the bugs".
Personally I would rather see something like a large Wacom tablet that would record movement and output dance notation (labanotation). This would actually be an AI application worth doing.
Most of the developers I work with in contracting positions know less than the average Joe, even an excel macro would be stretching their abilities. Yet they all have Senior Programmer II titles or some such thing.
It started with VB, and will continue...
What's wrong with VB or other high level languages? At one time assembly was the only way I could get programs to run at reasonable speed on limited hardware. But those days are long past. There is no reason not to be able to do "rapid application development". There is no reason that you have to program on "bare metal" to access the Windows GUI API. Abstracting a lot of that away can be a good thing. You still end up having to know some principles in the end.
... More and more of these non-programmers start thinking they are developers, and getting hired into positions they don't belong in.... and America's corporations are paying for it in cold hard cash and wasted time.
No the real program is with management that does not want to understand the technology or that makes deals with big name consulting firms. These hire fresh graduates, work them to death, bill up the wazoo and end up producing product that is behind schedule and over budget.
Hopefully there will be a new paradigm in developer evaluation sometime in the near future, so that there will be a clear metric to determine a persons ability, and thus hire-ability.
Thank you Dr. Buzzword for your insight. This will only happen when magement gets a clue or HR gets a clue. Meanwhile I'm chilling a pair of skiis for a slalom run through Hades.
This is a fantastic way to achieve negative productivity. I know, let's put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand IDEs - that ought to get us some code!
Where do you think Usenet postings come from?
Some of it is really good and the rest of it is what Spafford called "a herd of elephants with diarrhea".
it won't matter because there is no public outcry yet at this point
Maybe there will be. See the story on CNN about the botnet hacker who is accused of selling zombies infected with software from a 180Solutions subsidiary:
Time to update the ol' resume and make for the exits. There is no intelligent life there.
The OP needs to bail for mostly non-technical reasons. The scope of his authority does not cover his areas of responsibility. When you are doing a job like that, you are screwed.
Traditionally, the newspapers were there to deliver news.
In the small city where I live the newspaper still does this. The national stories are all from the wire services but nothing beats their coverage of local news.
I read the local paper to see 1) stories about people I know 2) high school sports 3) obituaries - which of our customers have died.
When they finally decide where to put the new county jail, maybe I will stop reading the paper.
This one is old school: we're dealing with pointers and very limited memory. Here's the set up:
You are given a pointer to the head of a linked list. Your job is to figure out if the linked list has a cycle (i.e. one of the nodes has a next pointer that points back to some earlier node in the list). The trick is that you only have enough memory on the stack for two node pointers. How do you do it?
I got asked this in a tech intterview as a "bonus question" and it drove me nuts for the better part of an hour. The answer is pretty simple but a little hard to see.
Yes. See Knuth, vol 2, section 3.1 exercise 6 plus answers. It's yet another bit of magic from Robert Floyd.
Find X(n) and X(2n) advancing the first pointer by 1 and the second pointer by 2 at each step until they match. It turns out that the difference (n) is a multiple of the period! It's some theorem in group theory....
I've used this technique (with minor additions as listed in the text) to determine the period and the length of the non-repeating lead in belonging to some very old intrinsic (pseudo) random number generators supplied with very old versions of BASIC. Instead of having two pointers, you must be able to save and restore *all* of the locations used for the routine's seed.
34 is the correct answer. It's not really a *math* problem, but a *trivia* question which in *panic inducing* interview style depends on a specific bit of obscure knowledge, often called a "rat fact".
If you live in a certain large city or have visited there frequently, eventually you will suddenly realize why 34 comes right after 42.
Slashdot Mirror
spaghetti GOTO maze which, although messy, was probably the only way to do things in FORTRAN at the time with no structuring capability.
A random example:
IF(K.NE.1) MASK1="177*M2(K)
IF(((A(J).XOR."201004020100).AND.MASK1).EQ.0)GOTO 3
IF(S.EQ.0) GOTO 2
That's not lack of structure, its how text strings were handled before Fortran had character variables. In FORTRAN IV, characters get stuffed into real or integer variables and you have to play games with bit masks and such. The " prefix indicates an OCTAL literal.
To increase bandwidth, cable companies used to have dual channel setups over analog cable (before digital). They used to have 'A/B' switches on the boxes and you could access double the amount of channels.
When I lived in the Comcast service area, they actually had two coax wires entering the house. Without a cable box you would get one channel line up on A and a different line up on B. Both wires went into the cable box. The cable box assigned these signals to a different set of cable channels. IIRC I sometimes had to set a separate A/B switch on the cable box to select alternate channels from the cable line up as well. For example NASA was on one of the alternate channels.
Exactly. Maybe my Spanish degree from Grand Valley will not only help me be a Spanish teacher, but may be a fallback for if I have to move to Mexico.
You could move to Saginaw instead, though you probably would hate being in the neighborhood of your rival SVSU.
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/
The bill includes the cost savings by releasing 2400 prisoners. They will Not be given iPods. Instead, each will get a confiscated weapon if they promise to move to Ohio.
Not yet made public is a clause that makes Detroit part of Canada. "We are hoping that the change does Detroit good, moving to a new place can have that effect, you know, and Canada is really very nice,really."
Or maybe we get Toledo, Canada gets Detroit, Wisconsin gets the U.P. and we fight the war of 1812 all over again?
Exactly why has this become our top priority. I've watched from forty miles away as they've closed down Detroit schools and shut that community out more than they already are. Places like Detroit and inner Flint are struggling to even fit the definition of a city in the first world, and now our economic priority is... digital audio players! Oh, yeah. Because we all know that they're going to go home and put on their device scientific podcasts and discussions debating the importance of the Han Dynasty in China. We all know how academically sound students are anyway. THIRTY EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS? We just had an election centered on our business tax and how we can appropriate funds once we remove it. WELL THERE YOU GO. Better yet, let's spend that 38 million reviving the education system to include some kind of motivation and benefit to graduate well. But now. Now teachers and future teachers, like me, will get to hear "Sorry Mrs. Teacher, I didn't do my homework podcast thing because I had to rip cd's onto the ipod." Great job on the priorities, little Jimmy. Your government hath done thineself proud.
I live about 30 minutes from Saginaw. What started in Detroit is now commonplace in Pontiac, Flint, Lansing and Saginaw. Crime is rampant. Drive by shootings and arson are commnplace in the large cities. The governor is trying to bail the state out of an enormous budget deficit. Part of her plan is to put at 2% tax on services (with some exceptions). This is supposed to replace the already onerous "Single Business Tax" which will not actually have expired when her new taxes come into force. In addition, lawmakers propose raising the cost of license plates by 50%. Not only are we being taxed to death, we are being "feed" to death as well.
The big 3 auto makers are in danger of bankruptcy. 50% of their workforce has been laid off. In addition parts suppliers are going under left and right. Michigan is an economic basket case and all our governor can do is raise taxes. Michigan is circling the bottom of the toilet - and the governor and the legislature just keep flushing.
This proposal is beyond idiotic. If things get worse here, I will do something no native Michigander ever wants to do - I'm moving to Ohio.
It does afford me the option of wondering "aloud" why Brin didn't just download, say, an Apple ][ or C64 emulator.
Even better, find an emulator that runs CP/M which also emulates various types of terminals. One fun thing about computers is making them do fun looking *stuff* like display hacks, moving the cursor, typing backwards, etc. Learn how to control the display by issuing character sequences. Find some books by David Ahl. CP/M had an incredibly rich set of simple tools. Part of the fun is that you have to do some actual building to make things work. Sample any number of the host of languages available under CP/M. Use a line editor. Print out program listings, etc.
Use the computer as a *tool* to learn something else - like math. Number fun - magic squares - rectangular, triangular, perfect numbers. Find prime numbers and pythagorean triplets, etc. Do number base conversions. Learn dimensional analysis and units, etc, etc, etc.
Let the child enjoy saying "Whoopie. I made this."
What does this do:
POP EBX
INC EBX
PUSH EBX
RET
More often than not, crashes the machine.
Maybe so. A better question might be - Why would you want to use code like this or similar code? On the 65xx, one way of passing arguments to a subroutine was having them embedded in the code stream. So the return address is a pointer to your arguments. You deal with them, then adjust the return address to skip the arguments, push it, then return. So do I get the job???
Exactly, but with out having the quadratic formula memorized, how are you going to test if they can derive it?
Deriving the formula is a genaralization of a process called "completing the square". This process can be used to solve particular quadratic equations. It is a consequence of (a+b)**2 being a**2 + 2*a*b + b**2. It's been 35+ years since I studied this in school but if someone said "completing the square" I probably would remember how to derive it. Just don't ask me *exactly* how to extract a square root with pencil and paper. I know the method exists, but don't remember the exact deatails.
It's utterly bizarre that we worry about a few grammes of lead in solder but drive around in cars containing huge lead filled batteries, all of which are of course disposed of responsibly, aren't they? We pay for expensive granite kitchen worktops that contain, among other things, uranium. We eat "low sodium" salt that contains radioactive potassium. Rather than banning everything in sight, perhaps we need to have a basic toxicology course in all art training of the "don't lick the paintbrush, idiots" variety.
Like radium salts on watch dials of yore?
[flame on]
Why can't people at least learn enough science to understand the saying "The dose makes the poison"?
[flame off]
True, but the military aspect played a huge part in the funding for the interstate highway system. The interstates provide a tried-and-true platform for moving tanks and other heavy war material a very long distance, with minimal fuel and minimum time.
One of the specs for the interstate highway system was that it had to be wide enough to handle tanks. This came in handy during the '67 Detroit riots.
If people from Troy, Oregon are called Trojans, how come people from Tampa, Florida aren't called Tampons?
Cue up Alan Sherman's "Melvin Rose of Texas".
Some of these firms should really start looking at warehouses in Detroit.
Do bullet proof vests come included?
There is actually something worse than the rampant crime, corruption, drugs, traffic and exorbitant parking in Detroit - having to pay city income tax.
If every change even a correction needs to be audited save-to-save of a file ... The mountains of next-to-worthless data the piles of auto-saves would generate is mind boggling.
Bring back VMS!
As a former resident of Wisconsin, cheese is big business. Huge, in fact. Government grants for cheese and other dairy research are nothing new to the University of Wisconsin. Sure, it might appear like a drain on money, but by doing the research in a public setting it benefits all dairy producers whereas private research only benefits the company or co-op sponsoring it. To justify it all you have to do is imagine the tax benefits of even a few percentage points of additional dairy production.
....
Besides, I back all agricultural research.
Does any one remember toxic shock syndrome? Identification and characterization of the bacteria responsible for the disease was done in Wisconsin. Studies of the toxin involved were done by researchers in food science. Agricultural research clearly saved lives in this case. [Go Bucky!]
Now, instead of all the "Contents may be hot" labels, everyone's going to have to start putting "Warning! Contents may detonate" on their coffee cups to avoid lawsuits.
How long until the ambulance chasing lawyers on TV get hold of this one? "Have you been burned by an exploding coffee cup? Dial 1-800-..."
1. Attach DDR dance pad to computer.
2. Remap key codes for debugger commands "Step In", "Step Over", "Step Out."
3. Actually step through code...
This gives a new meaning to "stamping out the bugs".
Personally I would rather see something like a large Wacom tablet that would record movement and output dance notation (labanotation). This would actually be an AI application worth doing.
Most of the developers I work with in contracting positions know less than the average Joe, even an excel macro would be stretching their abilities. Yet they all have Senior Programmer II titles or some such thing.
... More and more of these non-programmers start thinking they are developers, and getting hired into positions they don't belong in.... and America's corporations are paying for it in cold hard cash and wasted time.
It started with VB, and will continue...
What's wrong with VB or other high level languages? At one time assembly was the only way I could get programs to run at reasonable speed on limited hardware. But those days are long past. There is no reason not to be able to do "rapid application development". There is no reason that you have to program on "bare metal" to access the Windows GUI API. Abstracting a lot of that away can be a good thing. You still end up having to know some principles in the end.
No the real program is with management that does not want to understand the technology or that makes deals with big name consulting firms. These hire fresh graduates, work them to death, bill up the wazoo and end up producing product that is behind schedule and over budget.
Hopefully there will be a new paradigm in developer evaluation sometime in the near future, so that there will be a clear metric to determine a persons ability, and thus hire-ability.
Thank you Dr. Buzzword for your insight. This will only happen when magement gets a clue or HR gets a clue. Meanwhile I'm chilling a pair of skiis for a slalom run through Hades.
This is a fantastic way to achieve negative productivity. I know, let's put a thousand monkeys in a room with a thousand IDEs - that ought to get us some code!
Where do you think Usenet postings come from?
Some of it is really good and the rest of it is what Spafford called "a herd of elephants with diarrhea".
Prostitutes and religious zealots are both against the GTA series. What stange bedfellows...
But hardly new. Years ago the radical left and the far far right both fought pornography. Google up Women Against Pornography or Andrea Dworkin.
it won't matter because there is no public outcry yet at this point
r .ap/index.html
Maybe there will be. See the story on CNN about the botnet hacker who is accused of selling zombies infected with software from a 180Solutions subsidiary:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/01/23/hacke
Time to update the ol' resume and make for the exits.
There is no intelligent life there.
The OP needs to bail for mostly non-technical reasons. The scope of his authority does not cover his areas of responsibility. When you are doing a job like that, you are screwed.
Traditionally, the newspapers were there to deliver news.
In the small city where I live the newspaper still does this. The national stories are all from the wire services but nothing beats their coverage of local news.
I read the local paper to see 1) stories about people I know 2) high school sports 3) obituaries - which of our customers have died.
When they finally decide where to put the new county jail, maybe I will stop reading the paper.
This one is old school: we're dealing with pointers and very limited memory. Here's the set up:
You are given a pointer to the head of a linked list. Your job is to figure out if the linked list has a cycle (i.e. one of the nodes has a next pointer that points back to some earlier node in the list). The trick is that you only have enough memory on the stack for two node pointers. How do you do it?
I got asked this in a tech intterview as a "bonus question" and it drove me nuts for the better part of an hour. The answer is pretty simple but a little hard to see.
Yes. See Knuth, vol 2, section 3.1 exercise 6 plus answers.
It's yet another bit of magic from Robert Floyd.
Find X(n) and X(2n) advancing the first pointer by 1 and the second pointer by 2 at each step until they match. It turns out that the difference (n) is a multiple of the period! It's some theorem in group theory....
I've used this technique (with minor additions as listed in the text) to determine the period and the length of the non-repeating lead in belonging to some very old intrinsic (pseudo) random number generators supplied with very old versions of BASIC. Instead of having two pointers, you must be able to save and restore *all* of the locations used for the routine's seed.
34 is the correct answer. It's not really a *math* problem, but a *trivia* question which in *panic inducing* interview style depends on a specific bit of obscure knowledge, often called a "rat fact".
If you live in a certain large city or have visited there frequently, eventually you will suddenly realize why 34 comes right after 42.
Here's the final Jeopardy question in Rot-13:
Jung ner fgbcf ba gur N genva?
Is obviously 42 ...
So what comes after 42?
145
125
59
42
Scroll down for the answer.
34
OK, Why?
Hint: Supposedly this was used as an interview question by some famous medical school.