Does that mean I can be a 'Code Artist'?
on
Is Programming Art?
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· Score: 1
Seriously though, as a programmer I certainly would like to believe that programming is an art. As an art, there are many different levels of art. I would say that most commercial software is the same grade of art you get at walmart or the like -- mass produced, cookie cutter, rarely signed, etc. That kind of art is useful for adding some color to a room cheaply (as that kind of software is good for making a computer useful...) but as art, it's value is debatable.
That being said, there is many programmers out there whose vision, creativity, and inspiration make them the masters of art of programming. Most of the rest of us (including myself) are just producing boring walmart prints or perhaps hallmark greeting cards of programming art.
My company gave it a shot, and in two months switched back to traditional telephone lines. The problem we faced is that the small provider we were working with could not provide the proverbial 5 9's of uptime -- that is to say that even once we picked up the phone and did not have a dial tone. Telephones truly are critical in this business world -- the our internet connection could go down for an afternoon and it's only an annoyance. When the phone goes down an afternoon, its thousands of dollars of business. I strongly believe VOIP providers need the same level of regulation and responsibility as traditional providers because telephone is usually the first and most important link to emergency services, business contacts, friends and family, etc.
The spec that describes floppies and how bios's read them to boot says that the bios will load the first sector (512 bytes, IIRC) into memory and execute it. A simple solution for those old machines that ran only on floppy disks. However, because of this, when you format a floppy, the format utility puts a minimal 'boot' program in there that displays the message that you need to put a system disk in the drive and restart the computer. If they didn't do that, the bios would load whatever was in that sector and attempt to execute it.
For reference, a system disk has just enough room in that 512 bytes to get the system files loading into memory and executing.
Really though, it wouldn't be difficult to create a new standard whereby that minimal boot loader can query the bios to see if it is smart enough to continue the boot process, and if so go back to that. Older bioses would not respond correctly, and the default message could be displayed.
This is something that may infact be legal (despite the fact it seems to spit in the eye of the spirit or intention of the amendment), but this is something that the city should not do. Even though they have proven they have the power to do so, that does not mean that it should be done. These expropriations are morally repugnant. I hope the politicians involved burn in the purgatory of not being re-elected!
I ended up writing an essay of sorts to respond to this item. It's long -- I decided not to waste the time of anyone not interested in what I had to say, so I am not posting it here.
The short-short version is that:
This is a good thing
it is an emergent property of email technology and the role of email in everyday life
it happens because email forms a chain of events related to your life that maintains temporal and spatial relations of information
this is good for finding things you might want again
I think services like GMail need to expand on this idea and continue to add features that make email a better personal database -- searchable on more axies, and good at filtering out the noise
Although it is possible where you live there are different laws, most places make it so that you can't even contract out of a 2 or 3 week notice period -- otherwise it becomes too easy to create nearly indentured slavery type positions. Basically the only thing you risk is as you said: burning bridges.
If you don't need his reference, and the new position you wish to take it is that much better , I suggest you give your notice and go...
I usually at least do my best to spend those last few weeks documenting everything of importance, writing down or resetting passwords, and preparing lists of all the various tasks you do. This will answer most of the questions that a replacement might have (assuming they are worth their salt.)
Sounds like a fun little project and I wish you the best of luck, but someone should point out that what you are doing may be considered as some form of interferance with the law, and at the very least you will be making some detectives at the PD very unhappy. I think I would wash my hands of it and return it to the friend... stay out of it. Or if you have good reason to get involved in it, you should probably consult a lawyer before you go any farther.
Perhaps I should start a pool as to when/. posts the article about a person who was arrested for interfering in an investigation and tampering with police property?
I would find it a hard choice to make myself -- just on the coolness factor, but use some common sense before you find yourself in hot water!
I am seeing alot of people saying that nothing exists and why don't you use browser/tool/etc X, instead of offering useful advice.
No, this tool would not be too hard to write. I have written a protocol handler for windows (years ago). All it takes is a registry entry to point windows to the program, and a program that processes it's command line arguments through a list of greps with actions (hard coded or stored in a config file if you like). The only difficult part is that once in the browser, you can't easily intercept the selected links and check every one.
I think a rudimentry attempt at such a program could be done in 30-40 lines of C code, or with a perl script closer to 10 lines or less. All you have to do is find out what the registry entry for the protocol handler is, and change it. I found it by digging through the registry with regedit, but I suspect that the MSDN knowlege base probably has an article on it.
There is no need to browbeat someone over such a request because it doesn't make sense to us. The true measure of a utility such as that is that someone wants to use it, and someone (probably the same person) is willing to write it -- if it doesn't already exist.
is to ask who isn't doing this. Is there anyone reading this that works for a company that doesn't use this kind of practise and instead relies on the quality of the product to stand on it's own?
Thats what I thought. If there was, that company can't expect to last long in competition. This world is plainly insane, but so are all of us willing to buy into it, so I suppose it doesn't matter.
I suspect that they use it to identify when multiple counterfeits from disparate sources came from the same forger, and when they can track them by following the money trail, owning the printer in question would be an awefully nice bit of hard evidence. Not damning necessarily, but it would help the prosecution.
Re:Disconnect and motivation
on
The Music Man
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· Score: 1
Just a rehash of the infinite monkeys/typewriters problem. Might be an interesting distributed.net project to try something like that -- mind you, that is not signifigantly different than the kind of key generation/factoring work already being done.
I seem to recall a rather humourous mp3 about what can be accomplished with a large but finite number of monkeys... Steaming Pile Of Skit(album) by Three Dead Trolls In A baggy See song #12 and stream. Careful at work with the headphones on though -- their stuff is known to make a person break out in meniacal laughter on occasion, and your co-workers might think something was wrong with you.
Gee, not being evil made number six. I would like to see a huge multinational corporation put that at #1. That being said, #'s 1-5 of google's ten things (as linked above) are awefully nice things for the users. In general it sets out a pretty good plan for making people happy with their service.
Really though, if we could only teach the average joe (read as prolitariate) to ignore that kind of microspeak, then software can truly progress.
On the surface, the press release looks pretty good to me -- the fact of the matter is that only a very small amount of the population has the disicpline, self awareness, and controll to intentionally not get caught lieing on such a test. With access to a machine and a skilled operator and many hours/days/months, etc of practice most people could learn through biofeedback techniques how to do it.
The real problem (and the reason why it is generally inadmissible in court) is that the polygraph measures physiological responses to stress... It has been shown in the past that it is easy to manipulate the results through the questions (which, of course, a skilled operator would never allow/do;) and that it is more likely to generate a false negative than a false positive... I.e. It can call people liers who are telling the truth. Furthermore, a pyschopath (in the psychology sense) with no sense of morals or empathy will generally show a very flat response -- they simply don't feel like lieing is some incorrect and their CNS does not respond accordingly. Additionally, some people always look like they are lieing even on the most banal questions like asking a blue eyed person if they have blue eyes, just because you are asking at all. Simply put, if you are ever asked to take one to prove you are innocent, Don't! It's not worth it.
Once again, a self serving piece of propaganda by an operator who wishes to protect their revenue stream by making their work seem valid. This is one of those articles that is basically correct scientifically, but is intended to be misread in a misleading fashion -- just because it is difficult to intentionally beat a lie-detector test, does not mean that the test is meaningful, valid, or reliable.
Egad! Can you belive this tripe? I feel dirty for even having felt the need to respond at all. That being said, here is some prior art... This is by no means an exhaustive list -- just an example of what good record keepers we the community can be:
I have to wonder what the RIAA/Artist cut of that $0.99 is, because I am suprised that they aren't making at least some profit off of the music sales. I gather that the users seem to like the interface, so I suppose when they say no profit, they really mean that it will be a long time before the capital costs that went into building iTunes pays off. As you pointed out, however, Apple is a patient company, and recognises that style and function have to work together to make good products.
I think the best feature yet of DAoC is the fact that mythic released it when it was working! Since it's release in october, I have downloaded very few patches, and for the most part, I have never seen a bug in the game. There have been glitches that are reported in the release notes, but most of the minor. Since the story for these comments was about how bad EQ went about their release, Kudo's to Mythic for top notch software quality!
I'm on Rogers@home (here in Canada).
Over the last week we have had to change email settings with the warning that as of friday they can no longer guarentee email forwarding. Otherwise our service here is unaffected. Go Rogers!
The thing that always gets me is how $400 and $600 consoles from Sony, MS, etc. always seem to be sold at a loss, yet somehow Nintendo manages to sell their next-gen box for $199 and not take a loss -- in the past, their consoles are usually less costly than the competitors, yet if my fellow posters are right in saying that they haven't taken a loss yet on the hardware....
I suppose that means that nintendo is more concerned with... a good business plan! And even then, their hardware is usually better than the competitors.
In Canada, where the DMCA does not exist, and laws are generally more relaxed and reasonable, I would like to note that one of my favorite radio stations streams Mix 99.9, and It seems that streaming has had some impact on their listener base. During request shows, frequently they annouce requests from listeners around the world that are streaming the station and emailing their requests. Whether or not this maps to meaning it has been successful for that station, I don't know. However at least they arn't running from the internet in fear of poorly designed and dismally executed laws.
Pardon me, but, Patents exist to ensure companies can make money off something -- without them, many products would never come to market.
AC3 is some pretty sweet technology and I know my home theater experience is better for having it. Why shouldn't Dolby be allowed to protect their investment?
Sure, I like being able to watch dvd's with full on 5.1 digital sound under my various free-software OS's, but this isn't even a DMCA issue. AC3 is not encrypted, and I have not yet heard of copyright protection issues with it.
Dolby Labs exists almost exclusivley on licensing kick-ass sound storage and reproduction standards. They took the hiss out of tapes and blasted our brains out in the theators. If you like that kind of thing, rethink whether patents are really bad... How many of those technologies would be in existence without patent law?
Don't like capitalism? then leave the country or try and change it... If you are trying to change it, I respect you, but please respect the laws untill they are changed. Otherwise, you clearly have no respect for the country and it's history.
Compared to tomb raider, it had a story (which imho wasn't too bad), it managed to be orriginal as opposed to cliche, and the animation was best in class.
I am sorry that you want to tear it appart on technicallitys because I think it does what a movie should do: It told a story.
Sometimes, a movie is just a movie. Enjoy it for what it is, not what you thought it should be.
I don't remember for sure, but I think the license expressly forbade reviews? Actually, come to think of it AO4 beta was looser. I think they wanted to create some noise...
Even so, for all we know, their buisness model was to dup people into breaking their licenses and then sue them for "losses"...
My own take? Neat game, but I stopped playing after a few days. To buggy for my limited gaming hours.
Slashdot Mirror
That being said, there is many programmers out there whose vision, creativity, and inspiration make them the masters of art of programming. Most of the rest of us (including myself) are just producing boring walmart prints or perhaps hallmark greeting cards of programming art.
That's my take, anyhow.
My company gave it a shot, and in two months switched back to traditional telephone lines. The problem we faced is that the small provider we were working with could not provide the proverbial 5 9's of uptime -- that is to say that even once we picked up the phone and did not have a dial tone. Telephones truly are critical in this business world -- the our internet connection could go down for an afternoon and it's only an annoyance. When the phone goes down an afternoon, its thousands of dollars of business. I strongly believe VOIP providers need the same level of regulation and responsibility as traditional providers because telephone is usually the first and most important link to emergency services, business contacts, friends and family, etc.
The spec that describes floppies and how bios's read them to boot says that the bios will load the first sector (512 bytes, IIRC) into memory and execute it. A simple solution for those old machines that ran only on floppy disks. However, because of this, when you format a floppy, the format utility puts a minimal 'boot' program in there that displays the message that you need to put a system disk in the drive and restart the computer. If they didn't do that, the bios would load whatever was in that sector and attempt to execute it.
For reference, a system disk has just enough room in that 512 bytes to get the system files loading into memory and executing.
Really though, it wouldn't be difficult to create a new standard whereby that minimal boot loader can query the bios to see if it is smart enough to continue the boot process, and if so go back to that. Older bioses would not respond correctly, and the default message could be displayed.
This is something that may infact be legal (despite the fact it seems to spit in the eye of the spirit or intention of the amendment), but this is something that the city should not do. Even though they have proven they have the power to do so, that does not mean that it should be done. These expropriations are morally repugnant. I hope the politicians involved burn in the purgatory of not being re-elected!
- This is a good thing
- it is an emergent property of email technology and the role of email in everyday life
- it happens because email forms a chain of events related to your life that maintains temporal and spatial relations of information
- this is good for finding things you might want again
- I think services like GMail need to expand on this idea and continue to add features that make email a better personal database -- searchable on more axies, and good at filtering out the noise
If you are interested, read my http://www3.telus.net/cgapeart/2005/04/email-as-pAlthough it is possible where you live there are different laws, most places make it so that you can't even contract out of a 2 or 3 week notice period -- otherwise it becomes too easy to create nearly indentured slavery type positions. Basically the only thing you risk is as you said: burning bridges.
If you don't need his reference, and the new position you wish to take it is that much better , I suggest you give your notice and go...
I usually at least do my best to spend those last few weeks documenting everything of importance, writing down or resetting passwords, and preparing lists of all the various tasks you do. This will answer most of the questions that a replacement might have (assuming they are worth their salt.)
Sounds like a fun little project and I wish you the best of luck, but someone should point out that what you are doing may be considered as some form of interferance with the law, and at the very least you will be making some detectives at the PD very unhappy. I think I would wash my hands of it and return it to the friend... stay out of it. Or if you have good reason to get involved in it, you should probably consult a lawyer before you go any farther.
/. posts the article about a person who was arrested for interfering in an investigation and tampering with police property?
Perhaps I should start a pool as to when
I would find it a hard choice to make myself -- just on the coolness factor, but use some common sense before you find yourself in hot water!
I am seeing alot of people saying that nothing exists and why don't you use browser/tool/etc X, instead of offering useful advice.
No, this tool would not be too hard to write. I have written a protocol handler for windows (years ago). All it takes is a registry entry to point windows to the program, and a program that processes it's command line arguments through a list of greps with actions (hard coded or stored in a config file if you like). The only difficult part is that once in the browser, you can't easily intercept the selected links and check every one.
I think a rudimentry attempt at such a program could be done in 30-40 lines of C code, or with a perl script closer to 10 lines or less. All you have to do is find out what the registry entry for the protocol handler is, and change it. I found it by digging through the registry with regedit, but I suspect that the MSDN knowlege base probably has an article on it.
There is no need to browbeat someone over such a request because it doesn't make sense to us. The true measure of a utility such as that is that someone wants to use it, and someone (probably the same person) is willing to write it -- if it doesn't already exist.
This is what we call the pragmatic approach, eh?
is to ask who isn't doing this. Is there anyone reading this that works for a company that doesn't use this kind of practise and instead relies on the quality of the product to stand on it's own?
Thats what I thought. If there was, that company can't expect to last long in competition. This world is plainly insane, but so are all of us willing to buy into it, so I suppose it doesn't matter.
also known as antifreeze! Could this also be the cure for brain freeze from sucking down a slurpee too fast?
I suspect that they use it to identify when multiple counterfeits from disparate sources came from the same forger, and when they can track them by following the money trail, owning the printer in question would be an awefully nice bit of hard evidence. Not damning necessarily, but it would help the prosecution.
Just a rehash of the infinite monkeys/typewriters problem. Might be an interesting distributed.net project to try something like that -- mind you, that is not signifigantly different than the kind of key generation/factoring work already being done.
I seem to recall a rather humourous mp3 about what can be accomplished with a large but finite number of monkeys... Steaming Pile Of Skit(album) by Three Dead Trolls In A baggy See song #12 and stream. Careful at work with the headphones on though -- their stuff is known to make a person break out in meniacal laughter on occasion, and your co-workers might think something was wrong with you.
Gee, not being evil made number six. I would like to see a huge multinational corporation put that at #1. That being said, #'s 1-5 of google's ten things (as linked above) are awefully nice things for the users. In general it sets out a pretty good plan for making people happy with their service. Really though, if we could only teach the average joe (read as prolitariate) to ignore that kind of microspeak, then software can truly progress.
On the surface, the press release looks pretty good to me -- the fact of the matter is that only a very small amount of the population has the disicpline, self awareness, and controll to intentionally not get caught lieing on such a test. With access to a machine and a skilled operator and many hours/days/months, etc of practice most people could learn through biofeedback techniques how to do it.
;) and that it is more likely to generate a false negative than a false positive... I.e. It can call people liers who are telling the truth. Furthermore, a pyschopath (in the psychology sense) with no sense of morals or empathy will generally show a very flat response -- they simply don't feel like lieing is some incorrect and their CNS does not respond accordingly. Additionally, some people always look like they are lieing even on the most banal questions like asking a blue eyed person if they have blue eyes, just because you are asking at all. Simply put, if you are ever asked to take one to prove you are innocent, Don't! It's not worth it.
The real problem (and the reason why it is generally inadmissible in court) is that the polygraph measures physiological responses to stress... It has been shown in the past that it is easy to manipulate the results through the questions (which, of course, a skilled operator would never allow/do
Once again, a self serving piece of propaganda by an operator who wishes to protect their revenue stream by making their work seem valid. This is one of those articles that is basically correct scientifically, but is intended to be misread in a misleading fashion -- just because it is difficult to intentionally beat a lie-detector test, does not mean that the test is meaningful, valid, or reliable.
Egad! Can you belive this tripe? I feel dirty for even having felt the need to respond at all. That being said, here is some prior art... This is by no means an exhaustive list -- just an example of what good record keepers we the community can be:
RFC#2396: Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax, August 1998
RFC# 1738: Uniform Resource Locators (URL), December 1994
RFC# 1034: Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities, November 1987
Take that!
Good point.
I have to wonder what the RIAA/Artist cut of that $0.99 is, because I am suprised that they aren't making at least some profit off of the music sales. I gather that the users seem to like the interface, so I suppose when they say no profit, they really mean that it will be a long time before the capital costs that went into building iTunes pays off. As you pointed out, however, Apple is a patient company, and recognises that style and function have to work together to make good products.
It strikes me that this is a rare version of the hardware/software business model.
Normally, companies will take a loss on the hardware (i.e. x-box, nintendo, etc) and make up the loss on software..
Oh well, whatever works for them.
I think the best feature yet of DAoC is the fact that mythic released it when it was working! Since it's release in october, I have downloaded very few patches, and for the most part, I have never seen a bug in the game. There have been glitches that are reported in the release notes, but most of the minor. Since the story for these comments was about how bad EQ went about their release, Kudo's to Mythic for top notch software quality!
I'm on Rogers@home (here in Canada).
Over the last week we have had to change email settings with the warning that as of friday they can no longer guarentee email forwarding. Otherwise our service here is unaffected. Go Rogers!
The thing that always gets me is how $400 and $600 consoles from Sony, MS, etc. always seem to be sold at a loss, yet somehow Nintendo manages to sell their next-gen box for $199 and not take a loss -- in the past, their consoles are usually less costly than the competitors, yet if my fellow posters are right in saying that they haven't taken a loss yet on the hardware....
I suppose that means that nintendo is more concerned with... a good business plan! And even then, their hardware is usually better than the competitors.
Keep up the good work.
In Canada, where the DMCA does not exist, and laws are generally more relaxed and reasonable, I would like to note that one of my favorite radio stations streams Mix 99.9, and It seems that streaming has had some impact on their listener base. During request shows, frequently they annouce requests from listeners around the world that are streaming the station and emailing their requests. Whether or not this maps to meaning it has been successful for that station, I don't know. However at least they arn't running from the internet in fear of poorly designed and dismally executed laws.
Just be happy they haven't started stacking workers vertically, with ladders to get up to their cubes.
Pardon me, but, Patents exist to ensure companies can make money off something -- without them, many products would never come to market.
AC3 is some pretty sweet technology and I know my home theater experience is better for having it. Why shouldn't Dolby be allowed to protect their investment?
Sure, I like being able to watch dvd's with full on 5.1 digital sound under my various free-software OS's, but this isn't even a DMCA issue. AC3 is not encrypted, and I have not yet heard of copyright protection issues with it.
Dolby Labs exists almost exclusivley on licensing kick-ass sound storage and reproduction standards. They took the hiss out of tapes and blasted our brains out in the theators. If you like that kind of thing, rethink whether patents are really bad... How many of those technologies would be in existence without patent law?
Don't like capitalism? then leave the country or try and change it... If you are trying to change it, I respect you, but please respect the laws untill they are changed. Otherwise, you clearly have no respect for the country and it's history.
--Just a silly canadian.
Compared to tomb raider, it had a story (which imho wasn't too bad), it managed to be orriginal as opposed to cliche, and the animation was best in class.
I am sorry that you want to tear it appart on technicallitys because I think it does what a movie should do: It told a story.
Sometimes, a movie is just a movie. Enjoy it for what it is, not what you thought it should be.
I don't remember for sure, but I think the license expressly forbade reviews? Actually, come to think of it AO4 beta was looser. I think they wanted to create some noise...
Even so, for all we know, their buisness model was to dup people into breaking their licenses and then sue them for "losses"...
My own take? Neat game, but I stopped playing after a few days. To buggy for my limited gaming hours.