MIT's 2.70 (Now called 2.007) is much older than any of the television shows or competitions. It is a contest held by the Mechanical Engineering department.
I'm sure I'll sound like a zealot, but it is hard to beat Open Source projects for accessible development experience. He'll get to see good code and bad and get experience solving real problems. Maybe he can make a name for himself doing something and get a job that way. (Sure, its unlikely, but it could happen!)
And what's more: Nobody will ever have to know that he's an older guy. Everyone is faceless and ageless if they want to be.
We are definitely in agreement about XML-RPC. I am a firm believer in choosing the technology to fit the requirements and not the other way around. I have found SOAP useful for some situations, but treating it like a panacea and trying to apply it to everything is foolhardy at best. Technological religious wars are just plain dumb.:)
If it is reasonable/cheap/easy to integrate PS1 consoles into mainstream DVD players, then will we be seeing PS1 consoles integrated into our DVD-ROMs? I'm not sure what the implications would be or whether it would be reasonable to do, but being able to use your PC to also natively play console games is sort of an interesting idea.
Gran Turismo anyone?
Mmmm.... High Resolution Monitor... (Insert Homer Simpson drooling sound)
The fact that IBM and Apache's initial implementations of SOAP were buggy doesn't seem to have a lot of bearing on whether or not SOAP as a standard is a good idea. There's lots of buggy code out there, but that doesn't mean that its goal was flawed. Linux has bugs, does that make it a bad idea?
Furthermore, the very fact that you use IBM and Apache as your examples contradicts your point that SOAP was developed in the context of.NET. What interest does the Apache Group or IBM have in pushing a Microsoft-only technology? It is clear from having worked with several of the toolkits that Microsoft's implementation is the least useful one of all (At this point, anyway.).
Sure, for distributed computing that has the goal of increased performance, SOAP is not ideal due to the XML-parsing overhead, but to think that performance is the only reason to make a system distributed is shortsighted. The key in modern computing is authoritative information and SOAP can make it a great deal easier to create interfaces to it.
Remember, SOAP is not a distributed object implementation, it is merely a wire protocol. Even more importantly, you should make the distinction (When comparing it to XML-RPC) that it is not a raw RPC protocol. There are really three aspects of SOAP:
Messaging - defines an XML-based way to send messages, without specifying a transport protocol necessarily.
Encoding - defines an XML-Schema-based way to serialize data to be transferred in the aforementioned messages
RPC - defines a way to use both the messaging and the encoding aspects to encapsulate distributed, language-independent method calls
The SOAP specification allows you to use just the messaging aspect, the messaging and encoding, or all three, depending on what your needs are. For example, the project I am currently working on makes use of the full RPC SOAP specification using SOAP::Lite for Perl and Apache SOAP for Java (Over HTTP or HTTPS). But in a different aspect of the same project, we have our own encoding schema and so only use the unidirectional messaging aspects. (Over HTTP or SMTP).
Seems like nobody made any money and the people that did actually have valuable domains just got sued into the ground. (I am not making any value statement as to whether or not this is right or wrong...)
The rest of us just got annoying spam.
Maybe I'm wrong, though... Does anybody have any stories they can share of people who actually made real money doing this? I mean other than Network Solutions.;)
"And, of course, we spared no expense with our software, either: We installed the latest versions of IIS, Windows XP and Outlook on every machine in the datacenter to make absolutely sure that no one can get unauthorized access to anything on our servers! Everybody knows that software you pay a lot for is more secure than that free stuff. Microsoft says so!"
Wait, wait... What about responding to a post that is responding to a post that is commenting about a Slashdot story that is talking about about talking about gaming on television?
Ok, I think that's enough now. Besides, this is making me dizzy.
You make a good point, but it's worth noting that I didn't spend all night writing my Slashdot comment, like I did the other night playing Quake3.
You could have "Behind The Game" with interviews with characters like Ranger and Bitterman from Quake3, talking about their problems with depression over the years and their difficult addictions to pain pills. They could vent about all the different problems they had with the other bots. How he dealt with his failed relationship with Lara Croft, etc...
It seems like gaming companies have their hands full just trying to compete for market share of people actually playing games. Is it at all possible to make money talking about playing games?
I know I may be in the minority here, but I feel pretty lame when I blow a whole night actually gaming. I can't imagine how lame it would be to blow a whole night just watching someone talk about gaming...
As another poster pointed out by saying "Richard Feynman" I think the idea that "balanced people" are not intelligent is inaccurate.
As an undergraduate at MIT, there are many people who have no social skills, but there are also many who are very personable and very good at a large number of things: music, sports, theatre, etc.
As a successful engineer and MIT EE/CS student, I think it is not unreasonable for me to think that I am "intelligent," but as an All-American athlete and enthusiast in many other things than CS, I also like to think of myself as "balanced." I have a beautiful wife and I enjoy hanging out with my friends. "Balance" is what you make it.
However, I am having trouble finding Bioinformatics books that are geared toward my skills: most are written for Biologists who don't know Linux or PERL.
I pose the question: how well can you really know Perl if you call it PERL?
If you type perldoc perlfaq1, you'll see, among other things:
What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?
One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII?:-) Larry now uses "Perl" to signify the language proper and "perl" the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that "Nothing but perl can parse Perl." You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means "awk and perl" and "Python and Perl" look OK, while "awk and Perl" and "Python and perl" do not. But never write "PERL", because perl isn't really an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.
You're definitely right-on about learning to hack cars with a Civic. It's like buying an old 486 or something that you can afford to beat up and trash the hard-drive. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of the whole "rice boy" thing, but it's hard to go wrong with a 1991 Honda CRX that you can turbocharge and turn into a killer little race car. People tear up SCCA events in those things. You can do all the crazy technological stuff you want to it, with electronic boost controllers and everything else, and your total investment in the car is relatively low if you break it or blow the engine.
I've spent a great deal of time working in the automotive performance aftermarket industry and I can definitively say that car hacking is alive and well. We used to sell pretty darn technical stuff like hotcakes, particularly to the import performance crowd. If you want to get 300hp out of a 2.0L Honda or Audi, you have to pull some crazy technological shit. You can't just bore it out and dump more fuel in.
I have a late-model 300ZX Twin Turbo that is one of the most sophisticated cars on the road. Hell, it was designed on a Cray 2. (Back when they were the shit, in the late eighties) It is completely computer controlled, with distributorless, coil-on-plug ignition, rear-wheel steering, etc. I have remapped the air-fuel ratio in the computer and added controls for larger fuel injectors to compensate for the increased boost pressure that I run. I have tweaked out the ignition system and made various other modifications to the driveline. I've put in adjustable shocks and progressive-rate springs. I feel like it is very tweakable.
Granted, I have a level of comfort with working on cars that most people don't have (I've yanked the engine and transmission out of it myself - nobody works on it but me.), but it's not like I was born with it. A co-worker of mine compares my knowledge and interest in working on cars to his interest in computer hardware. Potentially intimidating at first, but rewarding when you figure out what's going on.
The point being that there are all kinds of tweaks you can pull. Geeks like us have even more opportunities with all of the computer-controlled stuff that comes stock on these things now. I like to race my car, for example, and I've been thinking very much about getting a TuxPhone and integrating it into my car, not as a phone, but as an embedded Linux system for controlling air-fuel mapping and boost levels on the fly, not to mention data collection.
The author needs to get her story straight here. She goes on and on about "stealing bandwidth" - but they don't charge for the bandwidth! If I sit there with UBH all day, pulling down binaries, they charge me the same amount as if I never used it. Why do they care if I let my buddy use it too? They're not charging per GB. There is an implicit agreement between me and the cable company that for my $39.95 a month, I get 1.5Mb down or whatever, for whatever I want to do with it.
Since they charge a flat fee, it seems pretty obvious that they price it based on their infrastructure costs - the price of maintaining the line to my house, the modem at their end, the gateways, DNS, etc. If they can't tell that I have other people connected, doesn't that imply that they cannot quantify how much more it is costing them? If I throw up an 802.11b network, then I'm footing the bill for all the infrastructure. From their perspective, their costs go up exactly zero, with a flat-rate pricing structure.
Normal sentators might worry about not seeing this mission through in their lifetime, but not Strom: he can vote against it, confident that he will still be around in another 200 years. (Unless everyone figures out that he's a robot first...)
Slashdot Mirror
Read my post again and tell me where I said that working on an open source project would provide anything other than experience.
MIT's 2.70 (Now called 2.007) is much older than any of the television shows or competitions. It is a contest held by the Mechanical Engineering department.
And what's more: Nobody will ever have to know that he's an older guy. Everyone is faceless and ageless if they want to be.
We are definitely in agreement about XML-RPC. I am a firm believer in choosing the technology to fit the requirements and not the other way around. I have found SOAP useful for some situations, but treating it like a panacea and trying to apply it to everything is foolhardy at best. Technological religious wars are just plain dumb. :)
Gran Turismo anyone?
Mmmm.... High Resolution Monitor... (Insert Homer Simpson drooling sound)
Furthermore, the very fact that you use IBM and Apache as your examples contradicts your point that SOAP was developed in the context of .NET. What interest does the Apache Group or IBM have in pushing a Microsoft-only technology? It is clear from having worked with several of the toolkits that Microsoft's implementation is the least useful one of all (At this point, anyway.).
Sure, for distributed computing that has the goal of increased performance, SOAP is not ideal due to the XML-parsing overhead, but to think that performance is the only reason to make a system distributed is shortsighted. The key in modern computing is authoritative information and SOAP can make it a great deal easier to create interfaces to it.
Remember, SOAP is not a distributed object implementation, it is merely a wire protocol. Even more importantly, you should make the distinction (When comparing it to XML-RPC) that it is not a raw RPC protocol. There are really three aspects of SOAP:
The SOAP specification allows you to use just the messaging aspect, the messaging and encoding, or all three, depending on what your needs are. For example, the project I am currently working on makes use of the full RPC SOAP specification using SOAP::Lite for Perl and Apache SOAP for Java (Over HTTP or HTTPS). But in a different aspect of the same project, we have our own encoding schema and so only use the unidirectional messaging aspects. (Over HTTP or SMTP).
Seems like nobody made any money and the people that did actually have valuable domains just got sued into the ground. (I am not making any value statement as to whether or not this is right or wrong...)
The rest of us just got annoying spam.
Maybe I'm wrong, though... Does anybody have any stories they can share of people who actually made real money doing this? I mean other than Network Solutions. ;)
"And, of course, we spared no expense with our software, either: We installed the latest versions of IIS, Windows XP and Outlook on every machine in the datacenter to make absolutely sure that no one can get unauthorized access to anything on our servers! Everybody knows that software you pay a lot for is more secure than that free stuff. Microsoft says so!"
Don't forget Damian Conway! It's another good opportunity to help Open Source (and Perl).
Ok, I think that's enough now. Besides, this is making me dizzy.
You make a good point, but it's worth noting that I didn't spend all night writing my Slashdot comment, like I did the other night playing Quake3.
You could have "Behind The Game" with interviews with characters like Ranger and Bitterman from Quake3, talking about their problems with depression over the years and their difficult addictions to pain pills. They could vent about all the different problems they had with the other bots. How he dealt with his failed relationship with Lara Croft, etc...
I know I may be in the minority here, but I feel pretty lame when I blow a whole night actually gaming. I can't imagine how lame it would be to blow a whole night just watching someone talk about gaming...
There isn't a building 15, is there?
As an undergraduate at MIT, there are many people who have no social skills, but there are also many who are very personable and very good at a large number of things: music, sports, theatre, etc.
As a successful engineer and MIT EE/CS student, I think it is not unreasonable for me to think that I am "intelligent," but as an All-American athlete and enthusiast in many other things than CS, I also like to think of myself as "balanced." I have a beautiful wife and I enjoy hanging out with my friends. "Balance" is what you make it.
Think:
I pose the question: how well can you really know Perl if you call it PERL?
If you type perldoc perlfaq1, you'll see, among other things:
What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"? :-) Larry now uses "Perl" to signify the language proper and "perl" the implementation of it, i.e. the current interpreter. Hence Tom's quip that "Nothing but perl can parse Perl." You may or may not choose to follow this usage. For example, parallelism means "awk and perl" and "Python and Perl" look OK, while "awk and Perl" and "Python and perl" do not. But never write "PERL", because perl isn't really an acronym, apocryphal folklore and post-facto expansions notwithstanding.
One bit. Oh, you weren't talking ASCII?
You're definitely right-on about learning to hack cars with a Civic. It's like buying an old 486 or something that you can afford to beat up and trash the hard-drive. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a big fan of the whole "rice boy" thing, but it's hard to go wrong with a 1991 Honda CRX that you can turbocharge and turn into a killer little race car. People tear up SCCA events in those things. You can do all the crazy technological stuff you want to it, with electronic boost controllers and everything else, and your total investment in the car is relatively low if you break it or blow the engine.
I have a late-model 300ZX Twin Turbo that is one of the most sophisticated cars on the road. Hell, it was designed on a Cray 2. (Back when they were the shit, in the late eighties) It is completely computer controlled, with distributorless, coil-on-plug ignition, rear-wheel steering, etc. I have remapped the air-fuel ratio in the computer and added controls for larger fuel injectors to compensate for the increased boost pressure that I run. I have tweaked out the ignition system and made various other modifications to the driveline. I've put in adjustable shocks and progressive-rate springs. I feel like it is very tweakable.
Granted, I have a level of comfort with working on cars that most people don't have (I've yanked the engine and transmission out of it myself - nobody works on it but me.), but it's not like I was born with it. A co-worker of mine compares my knowledge and interest in working on cars to his interest in computer hardware. Potentially intimidating at first, but rewarding when you figure out what's going on.
The point being that there are all kinds of tweaks you can pull. Geeks like us have even more opportunities with all of the computer-controlled stuff that comes stock on these things now. I like to race my car, for example, and I've been thinking very much about getting a TuxPhone and integrating it into my car, not as a phone, but as an embedded Linux system for controlling air-fuel mapping and boost levels on the fly, not to mention data collection.
Anybody have any idea where this puts the projected number of transistors per cm2?
I wonder how long it will take me and LWP to get a search for "slashdot" to point to http://goatse.cx?
Since they charge a flat fee, it seems pretty obvious that they price it based on their infrastructure costs - the price of maintaining the line to my house, the modem at their end, the gateways, DNS, etc. If they can't tell that I have other people connected, doesn't that imply that they cannot quantify how much more it is costing them? If I throw up an 802.11b network, then I'm footing the bill for all the infrastructure. From their perspective, their costs go up exactly zero, with a flat-rate pricing structure.
To me - this just sounds like one thing: GREED.
Normal sentators might worry about not seeing this mission through in their lifetime, but not Strom: he can vote against it, confident that he will still be around in another 200 years. (Unless everyone figures out that he's a robot first...)