I'll have to agree with that... most programming contests do not involve interactive interfaces. But I have seen a few examples. Things like "accept entry of a list of xxxx and produce xxxx. the following are legal inputs xx xx xx xx, all others should be rejected."
This is unfortunate however, as a serial interface is so much less desirable than an actual even-driven nonlinear one. Except in data-entry applications, for almost any other operation non-linearity is preferred. I personally can't stand using forced-linear applications where they're not necessary. Gives the contests and their students a poor idea of what to strive for in a user-friendly application.
However, if the instructor also intends to give these kids skill with something they could actually use later in life, VB seems a poor choice compared to almost all of the others
You would be amazed at how many big titles are written in VB (windows) and RB (macintosh). Heck, our store's POS system is written in RB. (though they don't advertise it as such!) It's out there, all over the place. It just has a bad rep on being a kiddy language and so the publishers don't tend to brag it up.
My hobbies tend to shift around, but a few yrs back I was writing commercial-grade apps in RB. I'm fluent with more programming languages than most devs can list off, (college focus was on programming languages in general, learn them all) and nothing beats RB/VB for rapid prototyping, which is basically what timed programming contests demand.
I read over quite a few already and find it funny people are saying things like python are the easiest of the bunch to learn. Command line easiest? really?
As much as I don't like MS, their VB is by far the easiest of the bunch to learn. And you won't have any speed issues at all to deal with, it executes extremely fast. It's an event-driven language also which makes it easier to compartmentalize things and avoid confusion for new users. Debugging in C can be a nightmare. VB does a great deal to force proper coding, it's hard to write something that compiles that doesn't run anything like it should, and with breakpoints and stepping, a higher level language like vb is very easy to debug. Strong typing is another plus.
Beware of people replying back with what's easiest for them. You're going to get a lot of that.
Yes all the ipods have really small screws. The screwdrivers that come with the kits work well but sometimes you have to get the glue out of the head first. (nano)
I actually have gotten used to digitizer screen replacements on the touches and iphones finally. The hardest part of the whole operation is getting the shattered bits of glass off the front frame's adhesive.
Putty knife with the mac mini anyone?
That's a modified putty knife of course! I remember opening the first one of those, the customer I just knew was going to expect there to not be a mark on it, and getting that case open without at least a little dent in the white plastic there is really tricky.
To be fair my hatred of apples methods of keeping people out probably stems from the sheer amount of ipod classics and touches I have to fix compared to other apple hardware, fact is those are their most popular products though.
Mostly macbooks and macbook pros around here. Some techs seem to be afraid to work on laptops, I speculate they're more comfortable working with tower PCs with tons of room in them and not much in the way of precision fits. But now there's just the one service cert instead of two (desktop and laptop). I know we got a lot of business in the past from places that fixed desktops onsite but mailed in 100% of the laptops. We only mail in for something that's going to require a ton of parts or labor since apple penalizes us for using lots of parts and pays labor per-job not per-difficulty.
newer apple products come out they continue to progress towards 'no user servicable parts' with more and more annoying ways to keep people out of them (1mm phillips screws etc etc)
You must be new to apple service. I've been at it for going on 10 years. I'll take a new mac to work on any day over an old one. 40+ screws of 15 different sizes in random places to replace the logic board in a clamshell ibook from '98 is a great example. Maybe you have something there with "no user serviceable parts", but certainly not "no serviceable parts". Very few laptops have many "user-serviceable" parts in them anyway. As an example, GSX lists 140 available parts for the late 2009 macbook, and over 200 for the latest 27" imac.
As for "1mm screws", that's almost funny to read. The newest macbook can be torn completely apart with a #0 philips and a T6. There are a few "triwing" security screws to keep people from trying to swap out batteries all the time and wear out the internal connector on those models with built-in batteries but that's about it for challenging fasteners. Quit trying to use butter knives and tackhammers to work on computers, get yourself a good set of Wiha or something and quit rounding the screws, I'm tired of having to get out the screw extractor from when the last clown to try to work on the computer stripped the heads off.
Where are you pulling your arseformation out of anyway? The pc tech on the other side of the room is constantly cussing about bad design making his service life a PITA. I'll work on a mac any day thankyouverymuch. The only tough Apple products to work on nowadays are some of the ipods. (the "ipod classic" comes immediately to mind)
I still have my copy of "Beneath Apple DOS" in my library.
that went out with the lot about 5 yrs ago when I realized it was time to leave that era behind. Very few books, but I think I was up to close to 300 floppies. Had the entire Beagle Bros collection, that was an excellent outfit. I Hear Alan Bird is working for Apple now. Kinda wish I'd have kept those manuals, they were gems.
Today I do warranty repair work for Apple at an AASP. Our shop is small, but I have the satisfaction in knowing we're good and well-respected. From time to time the local (50 miles away!) apple store actually sends customers here because they can't cut it.:)
Hence the wish that I could have anywhere near the mastery level on the mac as I did on the II. But for now I solve problems, I fix things, and I help people. That sums up what I enjoy doing, and usually involves technology. Any technology really, I'm not picky. ("jack of all trades" type)
well I was just thinking about applesoft... it occupied $B600-FFFF iiirc, about 18k. DOS for the floppy took just above the card rom all the way up to that, which was what, $D000-$B5FF, about another 12k.
I had a sourced copy of both somewhere around here. Was fun to be able to recompile your BASIC or DOS. (ty BB) People today with their kernel recompiles have no idea they're not the only ones doing that sort of thing.
for certain the drivers/os back then were less buggy - they were smaller and so much less complex. It was a fairly simple matter for someone to have full understanding of the entire OS and sum it up in under 50k. (and I mean BYTES, not LoC)
Though my experience was on the Apple II not the Commodore. Little things like writing your own device drivers, drawing graphics via direct access to interlaces vram, (oh the maths!) direct read latch access to the floppy drives, writing hybrid assembly/BASIC apps. It was grand.
It's downright depressing to compare my present-day knowledge of computers, classify myself as somewhere in the upper 2%, and still wish I knew a quarter as much (percentage-wise) about my current computer as I did about my//c.
they're also isolated from a great many other things that commonfolk are exposed to daily. If you create 100,000 changes and then see an effect, you can't point to any one of those changes and call it the cause of the effect.
If the government is going to force people to get vaccinated (and they do; you can't go to school without it),
I thought the government required you to send your kids to school? So if you don't want to send your kids to school you just need to skip the vaccinations?
That's what makes "spear-phishing" so ridiculously dangerous - if the attacker is spending his entire day on you specifically, you're going to need a little more than an off-the-shelf unmonitored solution. And if you're a "high visibility target" then you are going to need even more, defense in depth and a dedicated team for your security. It's not reasonable to expect "but I installed Norton!" to come from a CEO of a big company for example. Bigger assets require better, customized defenses.
Bigger targets attract more than script kiddies and people that are buying hacking kits. They attract entire groups and organizations of highly skilled and specialized hackers that know how to analyze your defenses, have experience getting around all but the industrial grade security tools, and can customize their work and cover their tracks.
It's no different than complaining that neighborhood security is a mess because your padlock didn't keep your bike from getting stolen. If you have a really nice bike, and a smart thief really wants it, you'd better have something better than a crappy $7 masterlock on it. You can't blame the lock if the bike gets stolen. You were using the wrong tool for the job and the outcome should come as no surprise. You were expecting way too much (security) from way too little.
Does make one wonder if the PHB that decided to give notice to a disgruntled employee with sensitive access will be held accountable for his stupidity? Oh wait, what am I thinking?
Someone needs to give his ex-manager an education by example of how to can someone safely.
In any case, I thought MP3 songs were the new benchmark for capacity.
Naw, that was sooo 2000. And by 2004 we'd already abandoned that and gone to DVD rips. We're currently at bluray 720p rips, with 1020p knocking loudly.
what this suggests then, is that the obvious avenue for attack is a way to trigger cell death whenever the aids virus is present in the cell, wonder if theres some way to give the cell sensitivity in this respect with minimal side effects. isnt this similar to some cancer treatment?
Apoptosis is the mechanism by which a cell destroys itself. (its "self destruct" mechanism) All larger lifeform cells have it. It's got two basic triggers: (1) when the cell has served its function and needs to go away, such as the webbing between your fingers while in the womb. (2) when the cell is damaged and needs to be destroyed, to recycle the resources and protect the organism.
(2) applies to general cell damage as well as virus infection and unchecked replication. (cancer) There are dozens of things that can trigger apoptosis, and a major design feature of almost all viruses is they disable many of the apoptosis triggers and mechanisms. That way when the cell figures out it's infected and tries to trip the self-destruct before it can replicate the virus, it fails or is delayed.
This is also why a lot of cancer research focuses on viruses. Since viruses cause damage internally and disable apoptosis, a lot of scientists believe that virus infection is the most common trigger to cancer... shut off apoptosis, unintentionally damage the switch for cell reproduction, and fail to start up the bug factory, and you have a cancerous cell.
Not that there even is an aids virus. I thought it was HIV
AIDS was originally the description of the condition/symptoms of the disease that was later identified as HIV. The terms are now used somewhat interchangeably. (tho admittedly, this is probably poor usage, but at some point you just have to accept it)
Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome. Basically, something you caught from someone else crippled your immune system. Took them awhile to figure out what it was and actually isolate and classify it. That something was HIV.
The term "AIDS" got its foothold during the time period between when we recognized the disease and figured out what was causing it. You still call a cold a "cold", even though we now know that being exposed to cold damp weather for extended periods isn't actually what is the root cause of your getting sick.
almost any virus can be considered a rootkit. They hijack cells and get them to infect others, just like an internet worm. Their level of sophistication varies though, which determines the level of danger they represent. The big problem is that evolution occurs at a staggering speed when such short "life cycles" combine with such a high reproduction grade. (one viron infecting one cell can release tens of thousands of virons when the cell finally bursts) Nothing can beat virii for adaptation speed because of this short of bacteria, which are only as effective because they take optimal reproduction and combine it with efficient use of resources and non reliance on hosts.
The only thing we have going for us against viruses is they can't be too successful or they kill the host before having time to effectively distribute themselves. I'd call that one of AIDS' best weapons - it takes so long to kill you that you can be an effective communicator for an incredibly long time, comparatively speaking. No one has ever died of AIDS actually... they die from stupid simple infections that are unchecked due to AIDS' destruction of the immune system. So in that respect, AIDS is completely harmless, directly-speaking. Indirectly however, it's easily lethal.
I think it's interesting that the cells themselves can hide in the progenitor cell
We're discussing the aids virus, not a cell infected with it. virus != cell.
The issue here is that some (all?) bone marrow stem cells don't progress with the reproduction of the virus while it's a stem cell. Once the stem cell is infected, the virus sits there, dormant, because the cell is not hospitable for it to reproduce in. Then when the stem cell differentiates into a red blood cell, the virus is able to resume its mission, and kicks out a few thousand new virons which re-initiate infection. This someone that was thought to be "cured" becomes reinfected.
Nerve cells have also been known to serve as time capsules for a variety of viruses, though I don't believe they've figured out what triggers reactivation in those cases. These sleepers are really challenging for the immune system to deal with, because from the outside of the cell where the white blood cells etc are milling around, the infected cell looks and behaves normally. It's only detected as a problem after it's fired up the bug factory inside, and by that time it may be too late. Unless the cell behaves abnormally, there's just no way for the immune system to identify the cell as needing to be destroyed. And from there the only thing that can kill it is itself. But again the apoptosis process is usually triggered by abnormalities within the cell - if the virus is dormant there's nothing to trigger that either. The cell doesn't know it's a carrier, nor does the immune system.
lesser of the two evils maybe? MS has many enemies in the marketplace. Maybe they decided the PS3 was the greater threat, or maybe they were hoping to push a piece off the board that was more vulnerable atm?
that's just completely hilarious. I posted in the recent thread on this saying the pirates were the ones that were going to ultimately get the better product, and looks like I was right. I want my cookie now.
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I'll have to agree with that... most programming contests do not involve interactive interfaces. But I have seen a few examples. Things like "accept entry of a list of xxxx and produce xxxx. the following are legal inputs xx xx xx xx, all others should be rejected."
This is unfortunate however, as a serial interface is so much less desirable than an actual even-driven nonlinear one. Except in data-entry applications, for almost any other operation non-linearity is preferred. I personally can't stand using forced-linear applications where they're not necessary. Gives the contests and their students a poor idea of what to strive for in a user-friendly application.
However, if the instructor also intends to give these kids skill with something they could actually use later in life, VB seems a poor choice compared to almost all of the others
You would be amazed at how many big titles are written in VB (windows) and RB (macintosh). Heck, our store's POS system is written in RB. (though they don't advertise it as such!) It's out there, all over the place. It just has a bad rep on being a kiddy language and so the publishers don't tend to brag it up.
My hobbies tend to shift around, but a few yrs back I was writing commercial-grade apps in RB. I'm fluent with more programming languages than most devs can list off, (college focus was on programming languages in general, learn them all) and nothing beats RB/VB for rapid prototyping, which is basically what timed programming contests demand.
I read over quite a few already and find it funny people are saying things like python are the easiest of the bunch to learn. Command line easiest? really?
As much as I don't like MS, their VB is by far the easiest of the bunch to learn. And you won't have any speed issues at all to deal with, it executes extremely fast. It's an event-driven language also which makes it easier to compartmentalize things and avoid confusion for new users. Debugging in C can be a nightmare. VB does a great deal to force proper coding, it's hard to write something that compiles that doesn't run anything like it should, and with breakpoints and stepping, a higher level language like vb is very easy to debug. Strong typing is another plus.
Beware of people replying back with what's easiest for them. You're going to get a lot of that.
See ipod touch for that one
Yes all the ipods have really small screws. The screwdrivers that come with the kits work well but sometimes you have to get the glue out of the head first. (nano)
I actually have gotten used to digitizer screen replacements on the touches and iphones finally. The hardest part of the whole operation is getting the shattered bits of glass off the front frame's adhesive.
Putty knife with the mac mini anyone?
That's a modified putty knife of course! I remember opening the first one of those, the customer I just knew was going to expect there to not be a mark on it, and getting that case open without at least a little dent in the white plastic there is really tricky.
To be fair my hatred of apples methods of keeping people out probably stems from the sheer amount of ipod classics and touches I have to fix compared to other apple hardware, fact is those are their most popular products though.
Mostly macbooks and macbook pros around here. Some techs seem to be afraid to work on laptops, I speculate they're more comfortable working with tower PCs with tons of room in them and not much in the way of precision fits. But now there's just the one service cert instead of two (desktop and laptop). I know we got a lot of business in the past from places that fixed desktops onsite but mailed in 100% of the laptops. We only mail in for something that's going to require a ton of parts or labor since apple penalizes us for using lots of parts and pays labor per-job not per-difficulty.
Hundreds of iPhones walking around = hundreds of remotely activated microphone and camera at the R&D facility!
oh, because Apple has so much to learn from Microsoft. They'll just be all over that I'm sure. MS is so known for innovation, whereas Apple...
newer apple products come out they continue to progress towards 'no user servicable parts' with more and more annoying ways to keep people out of them (1mm phillips screws etc etc)
You must be new to apple service. I've been at it for going on 10 years. I'll take a new mac to work on any day over an old one. 40+ screws of 15 different sizes in random places to replace the logic board in a clamshell ibook from '98 is a great example. Maybe you have something there with "no user serviceable parts", but certainly not "no serviceable parts". Very few laptops have many "user-serviceable" parts in them anyway. As an example, GSX lists 140 available parts for the late 2009 macbook, and over 200 for the latest 27" imac.
As for "1mm screws", that's almost funny to read. The newest macbook can be torn completely apart with a #0 philips and a T6. There are a few "triwing" security screws to keep people from trying to swap out batteries all the time and wear out the internal connector on those models with built-in batteries but that's about it for challenging fasteners. Quit trying to use butter knives and tackhammers to work on computers, get yourself a good set of Wiha or something and quit rounding the screws, I'm tired of having to get out the screw extractor from when the last clown to try to work on the computer stripped the heads off.
Where are you pulling your arseformation out of anyway? The pc tech on the other side of the room is constantly cussing about bad design making his service life a PITA. I'll work on a mac any day thankyouverymuch. The only tough Apple products to work on nowadays are some of the ipods. (the "ipod classic" comes immediately to mind)
We're using "yesterday's terminology" here. For the purposes of computer app size, LoC is Lines of Code, not Libraries of Congress.
I still have my copy of "Beneath Apple DOS" in my library.
that went out with the lot about 5 yrs ago when I realized it was time to leave that era behind. Very few books, but I think I was up to close to 300 floppies. Had the entire Beagle Bros collection, that was an excellent outfit. I Hear Alan Bird is working for Apple now. Kinda wish I'd have kept those manuals, they were gems.
So, top 2%, what are you doing now?
Today I do warranty repair work for Apple at an AASP. Our shop is small, but I have the satisfaction in knowing we're good and well-respected. From time to time the local (50 miles away!) apple store actually sends customers here because they can't cut it. :)
Hence the wish that I could have anywhere near the mastery level on the mac as I did on the II. But for now I solve problems, I fix things, and I help people. That sums up what I enjoy doing, and usually involves technology. Any technology really, I'm not picky. ("jack of all trades" type)
well I was just thinking about applesoft... it occupied $B600-FFFF iiirc, about 18k. DOS for the floppy took just above the card rom all the way up to that, which was what, $D000-$B5FF, about another 12k.
I had a sourced copy of both somewhere around here. Was fun to be able to recompile your BASIC or DOS. (ty BB) People today with their kernel recompiles have no idea they're not the only ones doing that sort of thing.
for certain the drivers/os back then were less buggy - they were smaller and so much less complex. It was a fairly simple matter for someone to have full understanding of the entire OS and sum it up in under 50k. (and I mean BYTES, not LoC)
Though my experience was on the Apple II not the Commodore. Little things like writing your own device drivers, drawing graphics via direct access to interlaces vram, (oh the maths!) direct read latch access to the floppy drives, writing hybrid assembly/BASIC apps. It was grand.
It's downright depressing to compare my present-day knowledge of computers, classify myself as somewhere in the upper 2%, and still wish I knew a quarter as much (percentage-wise) about my current computer as I did about my //c.
*sigh*
they're also isolated from a great many other things that commonfolk are exposed to daily. If you create 100,000 changes and then see an effect, you can't point to any one of those changes and call it the cause of the effect.
If the government is going to force people to get vaccinated (and they do; you can't go to school without it),
I thought the government required you to send your kids to school? So if you don't want to send your kids to school you just need to skip the vaccinations?
t to mention AV programs simply scan for yesterday's threats.
lets just sum that up. Zero-Day
That's what makes "spear-phishing" so ridiculously dangerous - if the attacker is spending his entire day on you specifically, you're going to need a little more than an off-the-shelf unmonitored solution. And if you're a "high visibility target" then you are going to need even more, defense in depth and a dedicated team for your security. It's not reasonable to expect "but I installed Norton!" to come from a CEO of a big company for example. Bigger assets require better, customized defenses.
Bigger targets attract more than script kiddies and people that are buying hacking kits. They attract entire groups and organizations of highly skilled and specialized hackers that know how to analyze your defenses, have experience getting around all but the industrial grade security tools, and can customize their work and cover their tracks.
It's no different than complaining that neighborhood security is a mess because your padlock didn't keep your bike from getting stolen. If you have a really nice bike, and a smart thief really wants it, you'd better have something better than a crappy $7 masterlock on it. You can't blame the lock if the bike gets stolen. You were using the wrong tool for the job and the outcome should come as no surprise. You were expecting way too much (security) from way too little.
I would expect two
Does make one wonder if the PHB that decided to give notice to a disgruntled employee with sensitive access will be held accountable for his stupidity? Oh wait, what am I thinking?
Someone needs to give his ex-manager an education by example of how to can someone safely.
In any case, I thought MP3 songs were the new benchmark for capacity.
Naw, that was sooo 2000. And by 2004 we'd already abandoned that and gone to DVD rips. We're currently at bluray 720p rips, with 1020p knocking loudly.
what this suggests then, is that the obvious avenue for attack is a way to trigger cell death whenever the aids virus is present in the cell, wonder if theres some way to give the cell sensitivity in this respect with minimal side effects. isnt this similar to some cancer treatment?
Apoptosis is the mechanism by which a cell destroys itself. (its "self destruct" mechanism) All larger lifeform cells have it. It's got two basic triggers: (1) when the cell has served its function and needs to go away, such as the webbing between your fingers while in the womb. (2) when the cell is damaged and needs to be destroyed, to recycle the resources and protect the organism.
(2) applies to general cell damage as well as virus infection and unchecked replication. (cancer) There are dozens of things that can trigger apoptosis, and a major design feature of almost all viruses is they disable many of the apoptosis triggers and mechanisms. That way when the cell figures out it's infected and tries to trip the self-destruct before it can replicate the virus, it fails or is delayed.
This is also why a lot of cancer research focuses on viruses. Since viruses cause damage internally and disable apoptosis, a lot of scientists believe that virus infection is the most common trigger to cancer... shut off apoptosis, unintentionally damage the switch for cell reproduction, and fail to start up the bug factory, and you have a cancerous cell.
Not that there even is an aids virus. I thought it was HIV
AIDS was originally the description of the condition/symptoms of the disease that was later identified as HIV. The terms are now used somewhat interchangeably. (tho admittedly, this is probably poor usage, but at some point you just have to accept it)
Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome. Basically, something you caught from someone else crippled your immune system. Took them awhile to figure out what it was and actually isolate and classify it. That something was HIV.
The term "AIDS" got its foothold during the time period between when we recognized the disease and figured out what was causing it. You still call a cold a "cold", even though we now know that being exposed to cold damp weather for extended periods isn't actually what is the root cause of your getting sick.
almost any virus can be considered a rootkit. They hijack cells and get them to infect others, just like an internet worm. Their level of sophistication varies though, which determines the level of danger they represent. The big problem is that evolution occurs at a staggering speed when such short "life cycles" combine with such a high reproduction grade. (one viron infecting one cell can release tens of thousands of virons when the cell finally bursts) Nothing can beat virii for adaptation speed because of this short of bacteria, which are only as effective because they take optimal reproduction and combine it with efficient use of resources and non reliance on hosts.
The only thing we have going for us against viruses is they can't be too successful or they kill the host before having time to effectively distribute themselves. I'd call that one of AIDS' best weapons - it takes so long to kill you that you can be an effective communicator for an incredibly long time, comparatively speaking. No one has ever died of AIDS actually... they die from stupid simple infections that are unchecked due to AIDS' destruction of the immune system. So in that respect, AIDS is completely harmless, directly-speaking. Indirectly however, it's easily lethal.
I think it's interesting that the cells themselves can hide in the progenitor cell
We're discussing the aids virus, not a cell infected with it. virus != cell.
The issue here is that some (all?) bone marrow stem cells don't progress with the reproduction of the virus while it's a stem cell. Once the stem cell is infected, the virus sits there, dormant, because the cell is not hospitable for it to reproduce in. Then when the stem cell differentiates into a red blood cell, the virus is able to resume its mission, and kicks out a few thousand new virons which re-initiate infection. This someone that was thought to be "cured" becomes reinfected.
Nerve cells have also been known to serve as time capsules for a variety of viruses, though I don't believe they've figured out what triggers reactivation in those cases. These sleepers are really challenging for the immune system to deal with, because from the outside of the cell where the white blood cells etc are milling around, the infected cell looks and behaves normally. It's only detected as a problem after it's fired up the bug factory inside, and by that time it may be too late. Unless the cell behaves abnormally, there's just no way for the immune system to identify the cell as needing to be destroyed. And from there the only thing that can kill it is itself. But again the apoptosis process is usually triggered by abnormalities within the cell - if the virus is dormant there's nothing to trigger that either. The cell doesn't know it's a carrier, nor does the immune system.
lesser of the two evils maybe? MS has many enemies in the marketplace. Maybe they decided the PS3 was the greater threat, or maybe they were hoping to push a piece off the board that was more vulnerable atm?
right now... are the pirates?
that's just completely hilarious. I posted in the recent thread on this saying the pirates were the ones that were going to ultimately get the better product, and looks like I was right. I want my cookie now.