For my money, it's more about teaching them languages that are as different as practically possible. Assembler, C, Fortran, a functional language (Haskell, F#, etc...), a scripting/control language, and maybe something more modern with OO and garbage collection (Java, C#, etc..).
After 25 years of programming, I can honestly say that after a while it's all the same. I think the only surprise I've seen is the functional languages.
"Hey, I know this!"* Awk is just a free-form RPG, Python is Perl is Ruby is Javascript is every other C-derived scripting language, 68000 assembler is 6502 is really RISC, and Basic is BASIC. It's all about recognizing the forms and patterns of the language and system. After that, it's just syntax.
So how does Fortran fit into all of this? Its anachronisms are useful. Code doesn't have to *look* like code all free-flowy and outline-like. Sometimes columns are important (not just whitespace, Python). It has a crufty I/O system -- but damned useful. Implicit typing can be fun.
I suppose if you didn't want to teach Fortran, another language of the same generation would be okay... perhaps RPG (a personal favorite) or Pascal. The lesson being that legacy code exists, and that good designs of the past have some lessons to teach.
That's one advantage of this guy's product -- you buy one codec pack, install it, and never look back. Now any video player you use will just work.
I've heard this promise many times before, and each time it's turned into "of course you need to get the *latest* codec pack, which requires a new player, and new libraries, and since we only write the codecs and not the encoder or decoder itself you'll have to get product X too, and....
In 25 years of IT I have used some truly awful systems of legend, but only video always manages to make me angry and sad. Every company and developer that's ever touched video in some way needs to add their own flavor and now it's all turned to shit. As a consumer I really couldn't give a flying fuck about how it works as long as it does. This is why things like Flash video make me happy.
Relative position of the Sun to the center of the Galaxy and 14 pulsars
The radial pattern on the left of the plaque shows 15 lines emanating from the same origin. Fourteen of the lines have corresponding long binary numbers, which stand for the periods of pulsars, using the hydrogen spin-flip transition frequency as the unit. Since these periods will change over time, the epoch of the launch can be calculated from these values.
The lengths of the lines show the relative distances of the pulsars to the Sun. A tick mark at the end of each line gives the Z coordinate perpendicular to the galactic plane.
If the plaque is found, only some of the pulsars may be visible from the location of its discovery. Showing the location with as many as 14 pulsars provides redundancy so that the location of the origin can be triangulated even if only some of the pulsars are recognized.
The data for one of the pulsars is misleading. When the plaque was designed, the frequency of pulsar "1240" (now known as J1243-6423) was known to only three significant decimal digits: 0.388 seconds. The map lists the period of this pulsar in binary to much greater precision: 100000110110010110001001111000. Rounding this off at about 10 significant bits (100000110100000000000000000000) would have provided a hint of this uncertainty. This pulsar is represented by the long line pointing down and to the right.
The fifteenth line on the plaque extends to the far right, behind the human figures. This line indicates the sun's relative distance to the center of the galaxy.
So I picked up that much. What I'm unclear on is shouldn't the distortions (from Earth's perspective anyway) be moving? As we observe a point outside our solar system through the year, we'd be looking through a slightly different part of the heliopause "lens". So the distortions should move as Earth does (or whatever our observation platform is).
If the "ripples" are fast (relative to a solar year) we should see them, and be able to correct them over a short period of time. If they're slow, then a longer period.
That would only mean that a simple snapshot wouldn't suffice and that we'd have to take multiple images of the CBR and correct them accordingly.
"It's not their fault, it's the fault of the people setting the idiotic policies."
Their complicity and enthusiasm for enforcing those policies is their fault. "This is idiotic and degrading, and I feel that I'm intruding on the rights of other Americans. I quit" is a fair response.
To beat an analogy to death: it doesn't matter which is faster, it's whichever gets it done right.
Learn how to lay tile (books, internets, television, YMMV). Practice and test in a location no-one will notice (learn to cut tile for under the appliances *first*) -- get your mistakes out of the way and correct them. Then put in the tile as quickly as you can do it correctly and no quicker.
My introduction to "multithreaded" code was on the Atari 6502 platform. I know it wasn't threads, but 25 years later it still feels like them.
The vertical blank interrupt (as the television monitor scanning beam moved back into position) happened 60 times per second. In that brief amount of time, the 6502's normal instruction flow was interrupted and you could execute just a few instructions.
This is where you read the joystick, played music, and did housekeeping. Of course, you didn't have time to do all of these in a single VBI so you'd develop a chain or round-robin of routines to run in the VBI.
Lots of registers were off-limits in the VBI, taking too long could cause all kinds of weird effects, many memory addresses were overwritten without warning, side effects everywhere, and if you failed to return properly the game was over -- time to reset.
The cost of connecting a regional urban center group shouldn't be levied on the entire nation. Spending tens of billions of dollars to connect Dallas/Houston/Austin doesn't interest me. That's a heavy burden to bear for someone that doesn't live anywhere near a "corridor" and nowhere near Texas.
Is there some reason this couldn't be done regionally instead? Groups of states (or a single large state like California) could pool their resources to connect urban centers. This keeps the greedy hand of the Federal Government out of the pockets of disinterested parties, and the direct beneficiaries of the service pay for it.
Power can be maintained locally instead of giving sovereignty over to the US. Levy taxes on those whom it benefits -- possibly in exchange for additional privileges. Negotiate the contracts to build this monstrosity within the region so the everyone benefits both ways. The offset from the direct taxes would be made up from employment and business opportunities.
The push-back from the outlying areas that won't be covered by the rail but taxed anyway (like say, Amarillo) would be small potatoes compared to taxing Iowa to pay for Olympia/Eugene/Vancouver's rail line.
I'm reminded of the dumbasses that lobbied to get the shuttle prototype named "Enterprise". Due to design changes, it never went into space. Nice tribute.
Less like the Ayatollah and more like Jesse Jackson. Jackson is not "the Emperor of Black People", but every time the man chimes in about race-related issues the media is sure to stick a microphone in front of him.*
The problem is that once someone gets tagged as "representing" a class of people, they're awfully hard to get rid of. The media (Slashdot) falls over themselves when an edict is issued. This keeps them around long after they're usefulness is past.
Amen, brother. Preach on. This is enabling at its finest.
To the detractors: putting up with people you don't like is one thing. The lady that burns popcorn in the microwave every week, the guy selling Amway that insists on "networking" with you, and the fellow in the next cube who regularly yells at his kids on his cell phone. Dealing with these things are just good manners and social grace.
Social misfits can be harmless or harmful. In the workplace wearing mismatched socks or begging off lunch invitations out of shyness is harmless. Insulting co-workers, failing to bathe, growing fruit-flies in a dung-heap of a desk, and refusing to help those beneath you is harmful. These people need to be fired.
Putting up with an asshole who's endangering your livelihood and your sanity are quite another. Code can *always* be rebuilt in exchange for time and money, but a working, productive development team is damned-near priceless.
During a total solar eclipse (from the Earth's perspective), the ring of light around the moon is from the sun's photosphere showing around the edges of the moon.
The ring around the earth in the solar eclipse (from the Moon's perspective) is from the light refracting from the atmosphere. I'd think the Earth's relative size would be far too large for an effect like Baily's Beads to be seen from the moon.
The problem with wikipedia is that John Doe can publish a page anywhere on the internet interviewing himself. Cite that as a reference, and ta-da! The [citation needed] notations go away and there's now an authoritative reference on the topic.
Sounds silly, but it is done in practice.
[Citation? Nope. I'm not going to rat people out that have done exactly this...]
Agreed. Until then, it's worse money (arms, food, medical supplies) after bad -- it all winds up in the dictator's hands anyway.
And they shouldn't get help casting off those chains either. When a population gets too much outside help to get rid of this kind of oppression, it simply collapses again or becomes dependent on that outside help to sustain it.
Boycotts and embargoes are one thing, but any active help should be avoided.
I've written (and edited) tech books for major publishers (SAMS, Addison/Wesley, Pearson). I have to agree with the parent: it's not your call.
While you can write your book in anything you want be prepared to use THEIR tools for going back-and-forth with their copy editors, tech editors, and typesetters.
If you're comfortable in vi and using markup, that's great. However, don't be surprised when a publisher insists you use a Microsoft Word template and turn on document revision control for your chapter submissions. You may wind up taking your beautiful markup and mashing it into Word before sending it. Your proofs may come back as really awful Adobe Acrobat PDF files that make Foxit crash. Tough. Suck it up.
Producing ideas and words is your problem. Figuring out how to pass them between multiple people/departments/companies to get a book printed is theirs.
Same here. Bumper crop of both acorns and squirrels in the Metro Detroit area.
I mean, if the Washington Post can publish the speculations of a botanist based on local anecdotal evidence and internet discussion groups, then we can use the same method to refute it, right?
Gee, it's too bad an entire field of science just doesn't get "sun cycles and sun weather"! Good thing you showed up to tell them!
Because the motives of researchers are pure and faultless, and their predictive abilities on climate change have been accurate so far, we should trust them blindly?
Nope. Sorry. Scientists want funding, influence, and respect as much as every other human being. It's a lot sexier (and more profitable) to claim the world is going to end than it is to say that every thing is okay, really.
I'm a member of the generation that was sold "Global Cooling" by the same scientists in the 1970's. I remember the papers, the articles, and the dire warnings about impending glacial advance. The calls for research grants and a government agency were incessant.
Let's apply Sagan's Skeptic's Toolkit to anthropogenic global warming in 2008, shall we?
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the "facts." The "facts" are sparse, and still coming in. We are applying precise measurements to modern conditions, and using indirect observation to extrapolate (what we hope) are just as precise measurements from centuries ago. Smells a little of baloney, but plausible.
Arguments from authority carry little weight. But "an entire field of science" says so, smells of this.
Prepare more than one hypothesis. Global warming can only be anthropogenic. And if it's only partly mankind's fault, it's impossible to quantify. FAIL. This is 100% laced-with fillers and hog knuckles baloney.
Apply Occam's Razor where two arguments explain the data equally well.Fails here too. Solar activity has been a bit odd lately, and the sun sure in the hell has a lot more control over the climate than mankind ever will. Baloney.
Always ask if the hypothesis is falsifiable, at least in principle.This isn't the first time this kind of climate change has happened, but the first time we can blame SUV's. More baloney.
Skepticism and political inertia need to always serve as flywheels to science going off and doing something half-cocked.
The layout wastes space and is only marginally usable when doctored to death with greasemonkey.
gmail is broken: instead of launching the gmail application, it now launches a mini app that's crippled: no save capability, no autosave, etc..
An otherwise productive Monday will now be spent trying to find a substitute home page. And frack, my RSS newsreader is Google Reader, so I guess that's gone too.
Slashdot Mirror
For my money, it's more about teaching them languages that are as different as practically possible. Assembler, C, Fortran, a functional language (Haskell, F#, etc...), a scripting/control language, and maybe something more modern with OO and garbage collection (Java, C#, etc..).
After 25 years of programming, I can honestly say that after a while it's all the same. I think the only surprise I've seen is the functional languages.
"Hey, I know this!"* Awk is just a free-form RPG, Python is Perl is Ruby is Javascript is every other C-derived scripting language, 68000 assembler is 6502 is really RISC, and Basic is BASIC. It's all about recognizing the forms and patterns of the language and system. After that, it's just syntax.
So how does Fortran fit into all of this? Its anachronisms are useful. Code doesn't have to *look* like code all free-flowy and outline-like. Sometimes columns are important (not just whitespace, Python). It has a crufty I/O system -- but damned useful. Implicit typing can be fun.
I suppose if you didn't want to teach Fortran, another language of the same generation would be okay... perhaps RPG (a personal favorite) or Pascal. The lesson being that legacy code exists, and that good designs of the past have some lessons to teach.
* Pardon the movie reference.
Robot Chicken: All the fun of the Family Guy cut-aways without having to endure the awful episodes they're embedded in.
That's one advantage of this guy's product -- you buy one codec pack, install it, and never look back. Now any video player you use will just work.
I've heard this promise many times before, and each time it's turned into "of course you need to get the *latest* codec pack, which requires a new player, and new libraries, and since we only write the codecs and not the encoder or decoder itself you'll have to get product X too, and....
In 25 years of IT I have used some truly awful systems of legend, but only video always manages to make me angry and sad. Every company and developer that's ever touched video in some way needs to add their own flavor and now it's all turned to shit. As a consumer I really couldn't give a flying fuck about how it works as long as it does. This is why things like Flash video make me happy.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
Relative position of the Sun to the center of the Galaxy and 14 pulsars
The radial pattern on the left of the plaque shows 15 lines emanating from the same origin. Fourteen of the lines have corresponding long binary numbers, which stand for the periods of pulsars, using the hydrogen spin-flip transition frequency as the unit. Since these periods will change over time, the epoch of the launch can be calculated from these values.
The lengths of the lines show the relative distances of the pulsars to the Sun. A tick mark at the end of each line gives the Z coordinate perpendicular to the galactic plane.
If the plaque is found, only some of the pulsars may be visible from the location of its discovery. Showing the location with as many as 14 pulsars provides redundancy so that the location of the origin can be triangulated even if only some of the pulsars are recognized.
The data for one of the pulsars is misleading. When the plaque was designed, the frequency of pulsar "1240" (now known as J1243-6423) was known to only three significant decimal digits: 0.388 seconds. The map lists the period of this pulsar in binary to much greater precision: 100000110110010110001001111000. Rounding this off at about 10 significant bits (100000110100000000000000000000) would have provided a hint of this uncertainty. This pulsar is represented by the long line pointing down and to the right.
The fifteenth line on the plaque extends to the far right, behind the human figures. This line indicates the sun's relative distance to the center of the galaxy.
Ahhh, forget the casino!
So as I count them...
The Romanov Dynasty: 15 Czars (Peter I - Nicholas II)
The Obama Administration: 15 Czars (Border Czar, Climate Czar, Cyberspace Czar, Copyright Czar, Climate Czar, Car Czar, Drug Czar, Energy Czar, Education Czar, Economic Czar, Health Care Czar, Housing Czar, Mortgage Czar, Technology Czar, WMD Czar)
I may have missed some in either category, but I'm still betting Obama will wind up with more.
Come on, this is NASA we're talking about. There is no way they ever would have gone with a Blu-Ray format.
They would have gone with HD-DVD.
Whoa, whoa there buddy. That's a bit modern for NASA. They'd have opted for laserdisc or betamax.
The best technology that 1978 has to offer.
So I picked up that much. What I'm unclear on is shouldn't the distortions (from Earth's perspective anyway) be moving? As we observe a point outside our solar system through the year, we'd be looking through a slightly different part of the heliopause "lens". So the distortions should move as Earth does (or whatever our observation platform is).
If the "ripples" are fast (relative to a solar year) we should see them, and be able to correct them over a short period of time. If they're slow, then a longer period.
That would only mean that a simple snapshot wouldn't suffice and that we'd have to take multiple images of the CBR and correct them accordingly.
"It's not their fault, it's the fault of the people setting the idiotic policies."
Their complicity and enthusiasm for enforcing those policies is their fault. "This is idiotic and degrading, and I feel that I'm intruding on the rights of other Americans. I quit" is a fair response.
To beat an analogy to death: it doesn't matter which is faster, it's whichever gets it done right.
Learn how to lay tile (books, internets, television, YMMV). Practice and test in a location no-one will notice (learn to cut tile for under the appliances *first*) -- get your mistakes out of the way and correct them. Then put in the tile as quickly as you can do it correctly and no quicker.
The goats don't live at the Google site, they're brought there when the fields need trimming. I've gotta assume that they're not herded there.
What's the fuel consumption of a large truck full of goats versus conventional lawn mowing?
My introduction to "multithreaded" code was on the Atari 6502 platform. I know it wasn't threads, but 25 years later it still feels like them.
The vertical blank interrupt (as the television monitor scanning beam moved back into position) happened 60 times per second. In that brief amount of time, the 6502's normal instruction flow was interrupted and you could execute just a few instructions.
This is where you read the joystick, played music, and did housekeeping. Of course, you didn't have time to do all of these in a single VBI so you'd develop a chain or round-robin of routines to run in the VBI.
Lots of registers were off-limits in the VBI, taking too long could cause all kinds of weird effects, many memory addresses were overwritten without warning, side effects everywhere, and if you failed to return properly the game was over -- time to reset.
Simpler times...
The cost of connecting a regional urban center group shouldn't be levied on the entire nation. Spending tens of billions of dollars to connect Dallas/Houston/Austin doesn't interest me. That's a heavy burden to bear for someone that doesn't live anywhere near a "corridor" and nowhere near Texas.
Is there some reason this couldn't be done regionally instead? Groups of states (or a single large state like California) could pool their resources to connect urban centers. This keeps the greedy hand of the Federal Government out of the pockets of disinterested parties, and the direct beneficiaries of the service pay for it.
Power can be maintained locally instead of giving sovereignty over to the US. Levy taxes on those whom it benefits -- possibly in exchange for additional privileges. Negotiate the contracts to build this monstrosity within the region so the everyone benefits both ways. The offset from the direct taxes would be made up from employment and business opportunities.
The push-back from the outlying areas that won't be covered by the rail but taxed anyway (like say, Amarillo) would be small potatoes compared to taxing Iowa to pay for Olympia/Eugene/Vancouver's rail line.
I'm reminded of the dumbasses that lobbied to get the shuttle prototype named "Enterprise". Due to design changes, it never went into space. Nice tribute.
On the plus side, it didn't blow up either.
Less like the Ayatollah and more like Jesse Jackson. Jackson is not "the Emperor of Black People", but every time the man chimes in about race-related issues the media is sure to stick a microphone in front of him.*
The problem is that once someone gets tagged as "representing" a class of people, they're awfully hard to get rid of. The media (Slashdot) falls over themselves when an edict is issued. This keeps them around long after they're usefulness is past.
Ignore Stallman and he'll go away.
* Feel free to substitute Kissinger/Foreign Policy, Nader/Product Safety, Hoffa/Labor Relations, etc..
Amen, brother. Preach on. This is enabling at its finest.
To the detractors: putting up with people you don't like is one thing. The lady that burns popcorn in the microwave every week, the guy selling Amway that insists on "networking" with you, and the fellow in the next cube who regularly yells at his kids on his cell phone. Dealing with these things are just good manners and social grace.
Social misfits can be harmless or harmful. In the workplace wearing mismatched socks or begging off lunch invitations out of shyness is harmless. Insulting co-workers, failing to bathe, growing fruit-flies in a dung-heap of a desk, and refusing to help those beneath you is harmful. These people need to be fired.
Putting up with an asshole who's endangering your livelihood and your sanity are quite another. Code can *always* be rebuilt in exchange for time and money, but a working, productive development team is damned-near priceless.
During a total solar eclipse (from the Earth's perspective), the ring of light around the moon is from the sun's photosphere showing around the edges of the moon.
The ring around the earth in the solar eclipse (from the Moon's perspective) is from the light refracting from the atmosphere. I'd think the Earth's relative size would be far too large for an effect like Baily's Beads to be seen from the moon.
Or am I missing something?
The problem with wikipedia is that John Doe can publish a page anywhere on the internet interviewing himself. Cite that as a reference, and ta-da! The [citation needed] notations go away and there's now an authoritative reference on the topic.
Sounds silly, but it is done in practice.
[Citation? Nope. I'm not going to rat people out that have done exactly this...]
Agreed. Until then, it's worse money (arms, food, medical supplies) after bad -- it all winds up in the dictator's hands anyway.
And they shouldn't get help casting off those chains either. When a population gets too much outside help to get rid of this kind of oppression, it simply collapses again or becomes dependent on that outside help to sustain it.
Boycotts and embargoes are one thing, but any active help should be avoided.
When dealing with insects, most humans prefer to use chemical warfare as well. (DDT, Diazinon, DEET, etc...) Why not other mammals?
I've written (and edited) tech books for major publishers (SAMS, Addison/Wesley, Pearson). I have to agree with the parent: it's not your call.
While you can write your book in anything you want be prepared to use THEIR tools for going back-and-forth with their copy editors, tech editors, and typesetters.
If you're comfortable in vi and using markup, that's great. However, don't be surprised when a publisher insists you use a Microsoft Word template and turn on document revision control for your chapter submissions. You may wind up taking your beautiful markup and mashing it into Word before sending it. Your proofs may come back as really awful Adobe Acrobat PDF files that make Foxit crash. Tough. Suck it up.
Producing ideas and words is your problem. Figuring out how to pass them between multiple people/departments/companies to get a book printed is theirs.
Read TFA. No, you didn't miss any of them. Thanks for the summary.
While I'm generally a fan of Microsoft products (yes, boo hiss) these are all pretty lame. Four of them are touchscreens or variants thereof.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Same here. Bumper crop of both acorns and squirrels in the Metro Detroit area.
I mean, if the Washington Post can publish the speculations of a botanist based on local anecdotal evidence and internet discussion groups, then we can use the same method to refute it, right?
Because the motives of researchers are pure and faultless, and their predictive abilities on climate change have been accurate so far, we should trust them blindly?
Nope. Sorry. Scientists want funding, influence, and respect as much as every other human being. It's a lot sexier (and more profitable) to claim the world is going to end than it is to say that every thing is okay, really.
I'm a member of the generation that was sold "Global Cooling" by the same scientists in the 1970's. I remember the papers, the articles, and the dire warnings about impending glacial advance. The calls for research grants and a government agency were incessant.
Let's apply Sagan's Skeptic's Toolkit to anthropogenic global warming in 2008, shall we?
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the "facts." The "facts" are sparse, and still coming in. We are applying precise measurements to modern conditions, and using indirect observation to extrapolate (what we hope) are just as precise measurements from centuries ago. Smells a little of baloney, but plausible.
Arguments from authority carry little weight. But "an entire field of science" says so, smells of this.
Prepare more than one hypothesis. Global warming can only be anthropogenic. And if it's only partly mankind's fault, it's impossible to quantify. FAIL. This is 100% laced-with fillers and hog knuckles baloney.
Apply Occam's Razor where two arguments explain the data equally well.Fails here too. Solar activity has been a bit odd lately, and the sun sure in the hell has a lot more control over the climate than mankind ever will. Baloney.
Always ask if the hypothesis is falsifiable, at least in principle.This isn't the first time this kind of climate change has happened, but the first time we can blame SUV's. More baloney.
Skepticism and political inertia need to always serve as flywheels to science going off and doing something half-cocked.
The layout wastes space and is only marginally usable when doctored to death with greasemonkey.
gmail is broken: instead of launching the gmail application, it now launches a mini app that's crippled: no save capability, no autosave, etc..
An otherwise productive Monday will now be spent trying to find a substitute home page. And frack, my RSS newsreader is Google Reader, so I guess that's gone too.