Doh! Forgot about the Dream Park novels from Niven.
Does anyone remember if Niven used a space elevator in Rainbow Mars? I think he actually had an honest to goodness giant beanstalk, but I can't remember of it actually reached orbital space.
This disaster was used (although on Mars) in the plot of in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (or maybe Green Mars... can't remember). In that case, though, the "beanstalk" was sabotaged as a weapon during a revolution. It wiped out a slice of a city, puncturing the atmosphere of a bunch of buildings, but had no casualties outside the settled areas. Can't have a tsunami in that thin an atmosphere.
(Pardon the random nature of this free assosciation epic...)
I had a big advantage in that I originally trained as an electronics technician (with an A.S.) before going for my C.S. degree. The best thing you can do as an embedded guy is to know hands on hardware. I don't know how many C.S. grads I've interviewed who literally could not change a fuse, to say nothing of reading schematics.
When interviewing, I found many HR types separated the wheat from the chaff by seeing what test equipment you know. Here are some gizmos you should (eventually) be able to use:
An oscilliscope.
Logic analyzer.
Protocol analyzer.
In circuit emulator (even though other emulation technologies are squeezing them out).
Voltmeter.
If you take any hardware classes or do any hobbyist stuff, beg your instructor/mentor to teach you how to use these toys. Often, the type/model of tool is irrelevant if you know why it would be used and what its limitations are.
Even if you don't assemble or repair complex computer systems for a hobby, any sufficiently complex mechanical work can help show your ability to learn (knowing how to lift and strip a VW engine indicates you can take apart something complex, diagnose a problem, put it back together, and handle the myriad of unexpected problems that crop up in such an operation).
If you're looking into the hobbyist route, Windows CE (yes, the one from that company) is available for a free 60 day trial here. It would show a lot of initiative to grab the eval edition, play with it, and build and boot an old 486/Pentium CEPC (PC running windows CE). Don't start pitching yourself as a CE expert, but indicate you have "recreational experience" with it.
Finally, embedded development is (by definition) a multi-disciplinary exercise. Having some chemistry gives you a leg up in interviews at a company that makes blood analysis equipment, mechanical skills helps in printers, motion control and other stuff. And understanding how to work with marketing guys instead of against them lets you write requirements that mean something to a customer instead of just being an empty document.
Actually, you had to tell their manager something. Most managers got a little pissed when someone cheated and got kicked out of an onsite class the company was shelling out $4-8K for.
And, yes, I did have a few beg me not to tell their manager. Oddly, though, they didn't seem as sarcastic as you are.
I know you posted as AC (can't blame ya', really), but I was wondering if you (or anyone reading this post) might have suggestions on catching this kind of cheating. I'm thinking randomly doing the "explain your code to the class" thing might be enough to intimidate the more timid cheaters.
And, yes, I know it's against the interest of the AC that posted his account of pay-for-code to help me out here, but I thought I'd give it a shot.
When I took a lot of creative writting courses in college, the topic of plagurism often came up, often in the context of "stealing" a single phrase or idea. What I found was that people who were good writers were incapable of cutting and pasting someone else's prose. They'd wind up teaking, twisting, and "improving" it. By the time they read it aloud to the class, you couldn't recognize it at all.
Then, of course, they'd get all offended that you didn't realize that it was a Hemmingway reference or something. Human nature, I guess...
I've taught numerous courses and once figured it wouldn't be too tough to build a detector like this. Inevitably, someone who cheated would follow a very basic procedure:
Copy the original code.
Change every variable name (even if to a less sensible name - HalfCircleWidth instead of Radius).
Rephrase most comments, but in the most transparent manner (e.g. "incerment the counter": becomes "the counter is incremented").
Grab one or two lines of code near the top and rewrite them in the most awkward manner possible. Presumably, this is to prove to themselves that they're more clever than the teacher and that they could've actually done the assignment if they'd bothered.
Inevitably, it was the trivial stuff (indentation, comment structure) that set off my alarms. Then, I'd give them a moment of truth and sit them down to try to explain how "their" code works. If they didn't, I'd kick their tails out. If I was teaching a seminar at someone's workplace, I might or might not inform their management. Since all these penalties were spelled out in my syllabus, I never lost any sleep (in fact, putting them in my syllabus tends to ensure no one tries it).
As to the the differenece between "consulting" with another and "cheating", I've found that the "explain your own code" is a pretty good yardstick. If I spend 2-3 hours preparing to teach a lecture, I have no sympathy with someone who doesn't spend enough time to do the assigned work but instead cheats.
I hate plugging Microsoft, and I doubt this is the only tool of this ilk out there, but there's an unsupported tool they created called autoduck (page bottom) that we've used with some success. You put the documentation into your source code, marking them with tags. Autoduck pulls them out, then parses them into a help file or an RTF file for importing into Word or WP. Seems ideal for documenting APIs, but we've found other uses, too. I think it originally shipped with VB, but I'm not sure.
And, yes, I know that a flame could argue that many other commercially sold Microsoft products could be called "unsupported tools," so let's try to steer any jokes onto a different track...
Back when I noticed this slashdot story about SPAM levels skyrocketing, it got me wondering: could this be a sign of a shakeout in the SPAMmer community? With the bottom having fallen out of Internet advertising, I would bet that the clients of SPAMmers are well aware of how ineffective these tactics are (do you know anyone on the net longer than a week who's ever responded to a SPAM? If you do, how many do they throw out for each they respond to?). In response, the SPAMmers would have to drop their rates, which would cause an explosion in traffic, which would make it even more ineffective...
Maybe it's just a fantasy, but I'd like to think that eventually SPAM would just fall away as an advertising medium, not because of the ethical issues but because of its ineffectiveness.
"And for kids of all ages -- there's a fact action game of skill, served up the McDonald's way!" Was it a branded version of "Burger Time," and you got to put together orders on the cook line as customers screamed at you? ROTFLMAO!
Slander? Beat it with GPS based /. moderation
on
Mid-Air Messaging?
·
· Score: 2
food-lovers could post messages outside a restaurant door, giving subsequent visitors
an instant endorsement or a warning to take their custom elsewhere. (New Scientist)
How long would it be before some ticked off merchant sued to stop posting of messages in front of his property? If he could prove a competitor had flamed/slandered him (although that would take a Scientology style witchhunt to break through any anonymity setups), he'd have serious grounds.
As far as critiques of companies or services go, you'd really need some kind of moderation. Not only could they filter insightful comments from the flames, but they could also handle admin chores, such as moving a company's coordinates when it moves, killing old records when a place goes under and a new one moves in, or aliasing/hyperlinking coordinates when a place opens a second location.
Naturally, it would take a freaking mint of money to do if you had dedicated staff. But if you used, say, slashdot's or some other user driven moderation scheme, it just might be workable.
While the FBI requires a court order to install its technology, formerly called "Carnivore," some service providers reportedly comply voluntarily...
Yes, I know this part is old news. Still, it makes me cringe whenever I see it. I assume there have been discussions of lawsuits/injunctions against ISPs to keep them from divulging this kind of stuff without a customer's consent. Could anyone post links to resources out there on these efforts for me? Thanks in advance.
I'm dubious about fuel cells for the same reason electrics haven't caught on - the infastructure to refuel at a public "gas station" isn't there (as many/.ers have pointed out). My wife and I have been looking at an alternative: A hybrid car.
We were leaning towards Toyota's Prius, although Honda makes one too (the Insight, I believe). Can't speak for Honda, but Toyota is very serious about this, selling them cheap at about $25K (and you get to deduct $2000 on your Federal income taxes. Some states give you incentives, too). Obviously, they're hoping to make it up on market share (not like the dot-coms, I hope!) and maintenance. We test drove one and it was nice, with the pickup of a small V6, but it was uncanilly quiet -- your brain thinks you're coasting even when you're cruising or accelerating slightly. AT 50+ MPG and the tax deductions, we were hoping to come out ahead instead of maintaining our '94 Corolla.
...until our company laid my wife off. Damn recession. Still, the Prius is a pretty cool car.;)
Those images confirmed the presence of huge, smooth, cut granite-like blocks in perpendicular and circular formations, some in pyramid shapes...
Well, it's only a matter of time before they do a detailed analysis, so I might as well come clean before this gets any more out of hand.
You see, it really wasn't intentional. Some weekend back in the Summer of '98, me and a bunch of buddies were kicking back at my place, just wasting time. Jimmy was channel surfing on my beat up Sony when he caught a story about all those crop circles in the UK and how a couple of middle aged farmers confessed to making several of 'em with measuring tapes and sheets of plywood. Phil had already been asking us what he should do about the old shrimp trawler he'd inherited from his aunt in the Florida keys, so when Eddie mentioned how he had a whole lot of granite tile left over from flooring his den... well, somehow between the first and second kegs the whole thing developed a life of its own. Next thing I know, we're dodging the Cuban coast guard under cover of night, drunk as skunks as we tossed those dang tiles out the back of the boat.
Honestly, I can't see how anyone fell for it, thinking it was laid out in an orderly pattern. I mean, Phil was awful drunk and there was no way he could've walked a straight line, to say nothing of steering the boat. As to the "circular formation," well, halfway through we had to turn back to Florida for more beer before dumping the last of the tiles.
Anyway, on behalf of the Florida Keys Bowling and Skeet Shooting league, I'd like to apologize for any confusion we might have caused to any archeologists or geologists out there. We've learned our lesson and will never do it again - especially not after getting caught by the Egyptian Police outside of Giza.
I am I the only one, but is anyone else worried that when they finally find the unified theory, "The Theory that Explains Everything," that it'll wind up being Murphy's Law?
I guess it could. From an engineering standpoint it would make more sense. The FBI need merely turn it on, not infect/install it themselves. If MS threw this bone to the DOJ, they might consider some quid pro quo on the antitrust front (not like they need to with the way things are going, though).
'Hadn't thought of that option before. Of course, I will now. Probably not get any sleep for a few days, too.
An interesting idea was brought up in a deeper thread: What if you reverse engineered Magic Lantern's mechanism for uploading keystroke logs and then built tools to hammer their servers?
The FBI could change their mechanism, but they'd be stuck doing remote upgrades of all the computers they'd already infected. If you had a sniffer watching for upgrade traffic and keylog traffic, you could detect an infection.
Actually, you could build a DOS attack on that basic principle (even if they log the strokes instead of sending out in real time, they gotta upload the logs at some point). Admitted, it'd be tough to get a copy (not in stores, not open source, definately not in a published RFC...) but if someone could reverse engineer the protocol (some encrypted FTP, I presume) you could build all kind of nasty utilities!
What to name it, though? "Magic Darkness" or maybe "Flashbang"?
I've never been on a project that was really suited to embedded LINUX before, but I can definaitely see applications for it (esp. net intensive stuff). Sad to see the Red Hat documentation was spotty, but that's (unfortunately) par for the course in the embedded world (at least in the commercial area).
Would've liked to see benchmarks and/or memory footprints on the stuff the reviewer built in the review, though...
So, now it's a three way race to see who's smarter: To see if the (1)virus writers are smart enough to make it look like their stuff is (2)FBI to (3)AV developers.
Eventually, I'm gonna need a scorecard to keep all this striaght.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone remember if Niven used a space elevator in Rainbow Mars? I think he actually had an honest to goodness giant beanstalk, but I can't remember of it actually reached orbital space.
This disaster was used (although on Mars) in the plot of in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (or maybe Green Mars... can't remember). In that case, though, the "beanstalk" was sabotaged as a weapon during a revolution. It wiped out a slice of a city, puncturing the atmosphere of a bunch of buildings, but had no casualties outside the settled areas. Can't have a tsunami in that thin an atmosphere.
Isn't that what a (non rechargable) battery does?
PS - Sorry if I botched 'c'. It's been a long day.
Drat! Some domain squatter already snapped up secondlawofthermodynamics.com!!
I had a big advantage in that I originally trained as an electronics technician (with an A.S.) before going for my C.S. degree. The best thing you can do as an embedded guy is to know hands on hardware. I don't know how many C.S. grads I've interviewed who literally could not change a fuse, to say nothing of reading schematics.
When interviewing, I found many HR types separated the wheat from the chaff by seeing what test equipment you know. Here are some gizmos you should (eventually) be able to use:
- An oscilliscope.
- Logic analyzer.
- Protocol analyzer.
- In circuit emulator (even though other emulation technologies are squeezing them out).
- Voltmeter.
If you take any hardware classes or do any hobbyist stuff, beg your instructor/mentor to teach you how to use these toys. Often, the type/model of tool is irrelevant if you know why it would be used and what its limitations are.Even if you don't assemble or repair complex computer systems for a hobby, any sufficiently complex mechanical work can help show your ability to learn (knowing how to lift and strip a VW engine indicates you can take apart something complex, diagnose a problem, put it back together, and handle the myriad of unexpected problems that crop up in such an operation).
If you're looking into the hobbyist route, Windows CE (yes, the one from that company) is available for a free 60 day trial here. It would show a lot of initiative to grab the eval edition, play with it, and build and boot an old 486/Pentium CEPC (PC running windows CE). Don't start pitching yourself as a CE expert, but indicate you have "recreational experience" with it.
Finally, embedded development is (by definition) a multi-disciplinary exercise. Having some chemistry gives you a leg up in interviews at a company that makes blood analysis equipment, mechanical skills helps in printers, motion control and other stuff. And understanding how to work with marketing guys instead of against them lets you write requirements that mean something to a customer instead of just being an empty document.
Actually, you had to tell their manager something. Most managers got a little pissed when someone cheated and got kicked out of an onsite class the company was shelling out $4-8K for.
And, yes, I did have a few beg me not to tell their manager. Oddly, though, they didn't seem as sarcastic as you are.
And, yes, I know it's against the interest of the AC that posted his account of pay-for-code to help me out here, but I thought I'd give it a shot.
When I took a lot of creative writting courses in college, the topic of plagurism often came up, often in the context of "stealing" a single phrase or idea. What I found was that people who were good writers were incapable of cutting and pasting someone else's prose. They'd wind up teaking, twisting, and "improving" it. By the time they read it aloud to the class, you couldn't recognize it at all.
Then, of course, they'd get all offended that you didn't realize that it was a Hemmingway reference or something. Human nature, I guess...
- Copy the original code.
- Change every variable name (even if to a less sensible name - HalfCircleWidth instead of Radius).
- Rephrase most comments, but in the most transparent manner (e.g. "incerment the counter": becomes "the counter is incremented").
- Grab one or two lines of code near the top and rewrite them in the most awkward manner possible. Presumably, this is to prove to themselves that they're more clever than the teacher and that they could've actually done the assignment if they'd bothered.
Inevitably, it was the trivial stuff (indentation, comment structure) that set off my alarms. Then, I'd give them a moment of truth and sit them down to try to explain how "their" code works. If they didn't, I'd kick their tails out. If I was teaching a seminar at someone's workplace, I might or might not inform their management. Since all these penalties were spelled out in my syllabus, I never lost any sleep (in fact, putting them in my syllabus tends to ensure no one tries it).As to the the differenece between "consulting" with another and "cheating", I've found that the "explain your own code" is a pretty good yardstick. If I spend 2-3 hours preparing to teach a lecture, I have no sympathy with someone who doesn't spend enough time to do the assigned work but instead cheats.
Check out this piece from the Onion poking some fun at the new iMac. I especially like "special drool tray catches saliva of enthralled technogeeks."
(Sorry. Couldn't resist).
And, yes, I know that a flame could argue that many other commercially sold Microsoft products could be called "unsupported tools," so let's try to steer any jokes onto a different track...
Maybe it's just a fantasy, but I'd like to think that eventually SPAM would just fall away as an advertising medium, not because of the ethical issues but because of its ineffectiveness.
"And for kids of all ages -- there's a fact action game of skill, served up the McDonald's way!" Was it a branded version of "Burger Time," and you got to put together orders on the cook line as customers screamed at you? ROTFLMAO!
How long would it be before some ticked off merchant sued to stop posting of messages in front of his property? If he could prove a competitor had flamed/slandered him (although that would take a Scientology style witchhunt to break through any anonymity setups), he'd have serious grounds.
As far as critiques of companies or services go, you'd really need some kind of moderation. Not only could they filter insightful comments from the flames, but they could also handle admin chores, such as moving a company's coordinates when it moves, killing old records when a place goes under and a new one moves in, or aliasing/hyperlinking coordinates when a place opens a second location.
Naturally, it would take a freaking mint of money to do if you had dedicated staff. But if you used, say, slashdot's or some other user driven moderation scheme, it just might be workable.
Yes, I know this part is old news. Still, it makes me cringe whenever I see it. I assume there have been discussions of lawsuits/injunctions against ISPs to keep them from divulging this kind of stuff without a customer's consent. Could anyone post links to resources out there on these efforts for me? Thanks in advance.
We were leaning towards Toyota's Prius, although Honda makes one too (the Insight, I believe). Can't speak for Honda, but Toyota is very serious about this, selling them cheap at about $25K (and you get to deduct $2000 on your Federal income taxes. Some states give you incentives, too). Obviously, they're hoping to make it up on market share (not like the dot-coms, I hope!) and maintenance. We test drove one and it was nice, with the pickup of a small V6, but it was uncanilly quiet -- your brain thinks you're coasting even when you're cruising or accelerating slightly. AT 50+ MPG and the tax deductions, we were hoping to come out ahead instead of maintaining our '94 Corolla.
...until our company laid my wife off. Damn recession. Still, the Prius is a pretty cool car. ;)
Well, it's only a matter of time before they do a detailed analysis, so I might as well come clean before this gets any more out of hand.
You see, it really wasn't intentional. Some weekend back in the Summer of '98, me and a bunch of buddies were kicking back at my place, just wasting time. Jimmy was channel surfing on my beat up Sony when he caught a story about all those crop circles in the UK and how a couple of middle aged farmers confessed to making several of 'em with measuring tapes and sheets of plywood. Phil had already been asking us what he should do about the old shrimp trawler he'd inherited from his aunt in the Florida keys, so when Eddie mentioned how he had a whole lot of granite tile left over from flooring his den... well, somehow between the first and second kegs the whole thing developed a life of its own. Next thing I know, we're dodging the Cuban coast guard under cover of night, drunk as skunks as we tossed those dang tiles out the back of the boat.
Honestly, I can't see how anyone fell for it, thinking it was laid out in an orderly pattern. I mean, Phil was awful drunk and there was no way he could've walked a straight line, to say nothing of steering the boat. As to the "circular formation," well, halfway through we had to turn back to Florida for more beer before dumping the last of the tiles.
Anyway, on behalf of the Florida Keys Bowling and Skeet Shooting league, I'd like to apologize for any confusion we might have caused to any archeologists or geologists out there. We've learned our lesson and will never do it again - especially not after getting caught by the Egyptian Police outside of Giza.
I am I the only one, but is anyone else worried that when they finally find the unified theory, "The Theory that Explains Everything," that it'll wind up being Murphy's Law?
'Hadn't thought of that option before. Of course, I will now. Probably not get any sleep for a few days, too.
The FBI could change their mechanism, but they'd be stuck doing remote upgrades of all the computers they'd already infected. If you had a sniffer watching for upgrade traffic and keylog traffic, you could detect an infection.
Actually, you could build a DOS attack on that basic principle (even if they log the strokes instead of sending out in real time, they gotta upload the logs at some point). Admitted, it'd be tough to get a copy (not in stores, not open source, definately not in a published RFC...) but if someone could reverse engineer the protocol (some encrypted FTP, I presume) you could build all kind of nasty utilities!
What to name it, though? "Magic Darkness" or maybe "Flashbang"?
Would've liked to see benchmarks and/or memory footprints on the stuff the reviewer built in the review, though...
Eventually, I'm gonna need a scorecard to keep all this striaght.