Remeber the first time you saw someone using a hands free set on the street? If your experience was anything like mine, you imediately drew the conclusion that this is a man with a few screws loose.
Now-a-days people are used to guys on the subway staring blankly into infinity while having conversations with people who aren't there.
This has lead to an interesting trend I have begun to notice recently:
Over the last few years there has been an alarming increase in people talking incoherently into the air, without actually using a phone. I spot one on the average every two weeks. I blame hands free for legitimizing it.
The proposed system would look like "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (the part about the "Leap of Faith"). To be truly convincing (Predator) you would have to record the angle of incoming photons, then reemit them in the appropriate place, at the appropriate angle.
Maybe it would be easier to just wear an immense cocoon of thin strands of fibre glass, arranged so that every strand starts and stop at 180 degree opposed to each other... Nah.
And, depth perception based upon focal distance could reveal a system such as this even when done perfectly. Only I don't believe that. Focal depth is the weakest of all depth cues. If you get the others (bifocal images, parallax) right noone will notice...
How about "Commando Libya" for the C=64, circa 1986? Endless human-wave attacks by libyans that you gun down from your machine gun emplacement.
Play well enough, and you'll get to insert your high score. A line of libyans before a gillioutine. First one kneels down, use joystick to put a letter on his head, press fire to chop it off.
IAAJP. I'm the lead programer of a medium-large sized database client used in trade unions in Sweden. I developed the program three years ago and have maintained/expanded it ever since. I take exception with your exceptions:-)
confusing procedures
For example?
The applet security model (breaking the box)? 4 different "standards" so far, all confusing and incompatible.
Netscape
IE
Java 1.2
Java 1.3
Java 1.2 was worst by far... Required the end user to run PolicyTool from a prompt and specify specific operations to be allowed on a per-program basis. In java-esque syntax, no less.
The pre 1.2 situation was also horrible. I managed to make a system in which the same code could be run, trusted, in both Netscape and IE, while also cacheing the jars locally. NEVER ask me to do something like that again! I lost half my hair.
The situation is pretty OK now, though.
poor performance
Have you used it recently?
Only every day, my son. On a very fast modern computer with Java 1.4 it now runs like a sloth in a snow storm, as opposed to a turtle on its back. At least the actual GUI is now barely usable, though startup time is still horrible.
repeated incompatible upgrades
Example? The only thing I can imagine you're referring to is the Swing classes that replace or enhance AWT. That was a welcome change by just about anyone's standards.
AWT to Swing, yes. Also the Swing move from com.sun to javax, the three different printing API's... Not to mention the fact that the original Swing was horribly broken in many ways (focus handling, tables), so that everyone had to make hacks and patches to make the damn stuff even work. Hacks and patches that will (did) break the program in later JDK's.
Even if your program is 100% kosher, there is a grave risk that it won't work as planned in any other Java version than it was built for. Which is why most Java apps ship with their own JRE.
costly support requirements
What are you talking about, this is pure FUD
I'm not sure what he's getting at, but having five sysadm guys running around for a week tweeking the individual clients to make the app run could cost a bit. Though you should be able to program around that.
and expensive development tools
They never billed me for emacs, I thought it was free?
Totally agree. The JDK is free. Emacs is free. Heck, NetBeans is free, and JBuilder is cheap.
Heh... My ADSL connection is a reliable 2.5Mbps, for about $35 a month (Sweden). Care to immigrate? OTOH, you might want to consider Japan instead. They've recently rolled out 14(!)Mbps ADSL for about $20(!) a month.
Better yet, let the dragon produce hydrogen instead of methane. The hydrogen is stored in large glands along the sides of the dragon, making it just a little heavier than air.
Totally off-topic explanation of what the name means:
The Sampo, from the ancient Finnish national epos Kalevala (look for "On the third night"...,) is a magical mill that when turned on produces from its three sides never-ending streams of
1) Flour
2) Salt
3) Gold
[MS response to Java3]
1) Stick with the old Java 2 VM for a really really really long time
Hello?? MS Java is 1.1 (and was removed entirely for XP?), and has been so for a really really really long time. Sun and IBM produce the only good Java 2 VM's for Windows.
>>It will never be as fast as c/c++. But thats life...
>Not true! [Study showing Java is faster than C++]
Great! Couple this with the various studies I've seen over the years that prove beyond doubt that
C++ matches the speed of pure C.
Modern C compilers trounce assembly.
and it's now obvious to anyone that Java beats hand optimized assembly code, in speed and memory foot print, perhaps by so much as (adding) 50%! I'm so glad!
Of course, this large Java application that I work in daily (and authored) takes 20 seconds to load, and about 4 seconds for a database query, whereas the pure C version it replaces takes.5 seconds to load and.1 seconds for a query. But I'm sure I (and all the users I have to eat humble pie in front of since I made the new app) are just hallucinating. Happy, happy, joy, joy!
Steal 'boxing' from C-flat. The idea is that whenever a primitive is used as an object, it will be converted to it's corresponding object wrapper. Whenever a wrapper is used as a primitive, it will be converted back.
In other words,
5.toString(); myList.add(3.14);
will work, and will really do something like
new Integer(5).toString() myList.add(new Float(3.14))
theList.getElement(7)+4711;
becomes
((Integer)theList.getElement(7)).intValue+4711;
(Assuming element 7 was an Integer).
In practice, there will probably not be any real wrapper classes. That will all be taken care of by hacks and patches in the VM, and the ints will always be 32 bits of pure integer goodness (in the interest of speed). The important thing is that the primitives will act like objects, where apropriate. This requires that the Integer etc. classes are final. OK by me. His idea that primitives should be replaced real, honest-to-god, subclassable, imutable objects almost made me lose my lunch. 7 years of hardware progress have made Java just barely useable for real applications, and he wants to throw it all away and put us in Smalltalk hell?
Eh... Left is by definition towards communism/socialism. I think you have a incorrect conditioning that tells you fascism is right oriented. Not so, consider communism, capitalism and fascims three independent colors: red, blue and the brown of festering feces.
Hitler was pinkish turd (a color word I just made up, signifying a deep, dark brownish color). Pinochet was cobalt brown (more capitalism than fascism). Castro is blood brown (more communism than fascism).
Noone I know would consider Hitler a conservative. They would peg him as a fascist with slight socialist leanings.
with all the shit industry's been known to pull, i wouldn't want engineered corn with a patent on it either.
A small experiment: stop eating for 30 days, then repeat the above statement with a straight face.
I hate copyrighted food as much as the next one, especially since open-source food is plentiful. However, starving a few weeks will drastically change your priorities. Unfortunately, it's Mugabe who is making this call (and he seemed rather well fed the last time I saw him), not the people.
Transistors only execute what they are told to in the form of machine code (that comes from assembly, that may may come from a higher level language... is you program in 1s and 0s, you're sick). Neurons have a built in mechanism of operation. They simply act. I think the real point is that neurons are a "higher level of hardware" than transitors.
Beep. Wrong. Transistors do not respond to a "program". They are many levels beneath that. (Digital) transistors respond to a high voltage on the source and gate by putting a high voltage on the drain. Nothing more.They simpy act...
And neurons have no lofty mysterious "mechanisms". They recieve a certain amount of input signals in a certain frame of time, and fire all their "output" dendrites.
The actions of a transitor and a neuron are in fact very similar and compareable.
Re: the rest of your post, there is one huge difference between brain and computer: The computer has a minimal Turing processor, reading programs from memory. The brain is just one huge, disorderly network intermingling processing, memory and program in a very disoriented, evolved fashion . It's all hardware.
Politicians, at least those in our society, never seem to give a straight answer to a question. If a journalist asks a specific question, the politician answers with a "sound bite" or short, memorized speech which is related to, but does not necessarily answer, the reporter's question.
Yes, I see what you mean. The whole interview read as if he had a corpus, say the last book/report he wrote and then fuzzily matched questions to book chapters and just quoted the lot. Not that the "replies" weren't interesting, they just had very little to do with the questions.
Also, I see evidence of multiple mental disorders in his ramblings. Self reported chronic depression, paranoia, megalomania... Maybe a wee bit to much LSD&Cannabis under the bridge.
Did anyone notice that the three audio ports can be remapped between input and output at the user's discretion?
Yes, I did. I also noted that this enabled them to drive 5.1 speaker systems. Could someone please explain to a confused Java programmer how you can feed 5/6 speakers with three analog signals?
BeOS: B (of course!) AmigaOS: A+ (shuts eyes, claps ears and screams "Yadda, yadda, yadda...")
Re:Spoiler: 100 prisoners and a light bulb
on
Tech-Interview Riddles
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Unfortunately, Numbers will only be able to increase his tally by one, each time he's picked (less actually, since after a while there will be a high probability that no 'untallied' prisoner has been in the room since he was last there).
If Numbers is called on the average every 100 days, and can increase the tally by one each time, the procedure will take a bit less than 30 years!
Not that my solution is much better:
The prisoners make up their own calendar, in which every month has 100 days. Each prisoner is also assigned a number (1-100).
Now, if a prisoner is called on day N of the 'month', turning the light on is a signal to next guy that he knows for sure that prisoner number N has been in the room. Turning the light off is a signal that he doesn't have a clue about prisoner N.
If a prisoner is called on day N and sees a light, he makes a note that guy number N-1 has been in the room. The first prisoner that has all 100 checked can get the lot sprung.
Initially, each prisoner can only be sure of himself, so things will not start moving until by chance a prisoner is called on his own day. This should happen several times during the first month though. Knowledge of who has been in the room will then slowly spread among the prisoners.
The process won't complete until (some time after) every prisoner has been called on his day at least once. I tried to calculate how long that would be but my math isn't up to it. Probably some decades:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe she was just insane?
Remeber the first time you saw someone using a hands free set on the street? If your experience was anything like mine, you imediately drew the conclusion that this is a man with a few screws loose.
Now-a-days people are used to guys on the subway staring blankly into infinity while having conversations with people who aren't there.
This has lead to an interesting trend I have begun to notice recently:
Over the last few years there has been an alarming increase in people talking incoherently into the air, without actually using a phone. I spot one on the average every two weeks. I blame hands free for legitimizing it.
Long confusing post. I guess the gist was:
The proposed system would look like "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (the part about the "Leap of Faith"). To be truly convincing (Predator) you would have to record the angle of incoming photons, then reemit them in the appropriate place, at the appropriate angle.
Maybe it would be easier to just wear an immense cocoon of thin strands of fibre glass, arranged so that every strand starts and stop at 180 degree opposed to each other... Nah.
And, depth perception based upon focal distance could reveal a system such as this even when done perfectly. Only I don't believe that. Focal depth is the weakest of all depth cues. If you get the others (bifocal images, parallax) right noone will notice...
[Image]. Looks a bit tattered though.
How about "Commando Libya" for the C=64, circa 1986? Endless human-wave attacks by libyans that you gun down from your machine gun emplacement.
Play well enough, and you'll get to insert your high score. A line of libyans before a gillioutine. First one kneels down, use joystick to put a letter on his head, press fire to chop it off.
Not very PC, but quite fun.
IAAJP. I'm the lead programer of a medium-large sized database client used in trade unions in Sweden. I developed the program three years ago and have maintained/expanded it ever since. I take exception with your exceptions :-)
The applet security model (breaking the box)? 4 different "standards" so far, all confusing and incompatible.
- Netscape
- IE
- Java 1.2
- Java 1.3
Java 1.2 was worst by far... Required the end user to run PolicyTool from a prompt and specify specific operations to be allowed on a per-program basis. In java-esque syntax, no less.The pre 1.2 situation was also horrible. I managed to make a system in which the same code could be run, trusted, in both Netscape and IE, while also cacheing the jars locally. NEVER ask me to do something like that again! I lost half my hair.
The situation is pretty OK now, though.
Only every day, my son. On a very fast modern computer with Java 1.4 it now runs like a sloth in a snow storm, as opposed to a turtle on its back. At least the actual GUI is now barely usable, though startup time is still horrible.
AWT to Swing, yes. Also the Swing move from com.sun to javax, the three different printing API's... Not to mention the fact that the original Swing was horribly broken in many ways (focus handling, tables), so that everyone had to make hacks and patches to make the damn stuff even work. Hacks and patches that will (did) break the program in later JDK's.
Even if your program is 100% kosher, there is a grave risk that it won't work as planned in any other Java version than it was built for. Which is why most Java apps ship with their own JRE.
I'm not sure what he's getting at, but having five sysadm guys running around for a week tweeking the individual clients to make the app run could cost a bit. Though you should be able to program around that.
Totally agree. The JDK is free. Emacs is free. Heck, NetBeans is free, and JBuilder is cheap.
I believe he was talking about business systems (database clients and like ilk). Java clients have been quite successful in that area, there are tons.
Even so, I'm going to give it a shot, just for fun.
Dammit, just five, and using developer tools was kind of cheating.
Of course they had! What are you implying, you hethen?! Shouted: Women! Bring the rocks!
Heh... My ADSL connection is a reliable 2.5Mbps, for about $35 a month (Sweden). Care to immigrate? OTOH, you might want to consider Japan instead. They've recently rolled out 14(!)Mbps ADSL for about $20(!) a month.
Mmmmm.... Bandwidth.... Drool...
Tada! Giant, flying, fire-breathing dragon.
Totally off-topic explanation of what the name means:
The Sampo, from the ancient Finnish national epos Kalevala (look for "On the third night"...,) is a magical mill that when turned on produces from its three sides never-ending streams of
1) Flour
2) Salt
3) Gold
One wonders why they chose that name...
314 km straight up, followed by a plunge straight into the ground?
I sure as hell hope it was unmanned!
Hello?? MS Java is 1.1 (and was removed entirely for XP?), and has been so for a really really really long time. Sun and IBM produce the only good Java 2 VM's for Windows.
Great! Couple this with the various studies I've seen over the years that prove beyond doubt that
- C++ matches the speed of pure C.
- Modern C compilers trounce assembly.
and it's now obvious to anyone that Java beats hand optimized assembly code, in speed and memory foot print, perhaps by so much as (adding) 50%! I'm so glad!Of course, this large Java application that I work in daily (and authored) takes 20 seconds to load, and about 4 seconds for a database query, whereas the pure C version it replaces takes .5 seconds to load and .1 seconds for a query. But I'm sure I (and all the users I have to eat humble pie in front of since I made the new app) are just hallucinating. Happy, happy, joy, joy!
Steal 'boxing' from C-flat. The idea is that whenever a primitive is used as an object, it will be converted to it's corresponding object wrapper. Whenever a wrapper is used as a primitive, it will be converted back.
In other words,
will work, and will really do something like becomes (Assuming element 7 was an Integer).In practice, there will probably not be any real wrapper classes. That will all be taken care of by hacks and patches in the VM, and the ints will always be 32 bits of pure integer goodness (in the interest of speed). The important thing is that the primitives will act like objects, where apropriate. This requires that the Integer etc. classes are final. OK by me. His idea that primitives should be replaced real, honest-to-god, subclassable, imutable objects almost made me lose my lunch. 7 years of hardware progress have made Java just barely useable for real applications, and he wants to throw it all away and put us in Smalltalk hell?
Eh... Left is by definition towards communism/socialism. I think you have a incorrect conditioning that tells you fascism is right oriented. Not so, consider communism, capitalism and fascims three independent colors: red, blue and the brown of festering feces.
Hitler was pinkish turd (a color word I just made up, signifying a deep, dark brownish color). Pinochet was cobalt brown (more capitalism than fascism). Castro is blood brown (more communism than fascism).
Noone I know would consider Hitler a conservative. They would peg him as a fascist with slight socialist leanings.
A small experiment: stop eating for 30 days, then repeat the above statement with a straight face.
I hate copyrighted food as much as the next one, especially since open-source food is plentiful. However, starving a few weeks will drastically change your priorities. Unfortunately, it's Mugabe who is making this call (and he seemed rather well fed the last time I saw him), not the people.
About .1 microseconds after hitting that send button I realised 300mm probably refered to a complete silicon wafer, with many chips on it. Doh!
I'm an idiot.
+4 Insightful
Hey, good idea for a new sig!
Excuse my stupidity but isn't one foot rather a large die size even for an Itanium? Perhaps that's supposed to be 300 mm^2? Which is rather petite.
</anal>
Beep. Wrong. Transistors do not respond to a "program". They are many levels beneath that. (Digital) transistors respond to a high voltage on the source and gate by putting a high voltage on the drain. Nothing more.They simpy act...
And neurons have no lofty mysterious "mechanisms". They recieve a certain amount of input signals in a certain frame of time, and fire all their "output" dendrites.
The actions of a transitor and a neuron are in fact very similar and compareable.
Re: the rest of your post, there is one huge difference between brain and computer: The computer has a minimal Turing processor, reading programs from memory. The brain is just one huge, disorderly network intermingling processing, memory and program in a very disoriented, evolved fashion . It's all hardware.
Yes, I see what you mean. The whole interview read as if he had a corpus, say the last book/report he wrote and then fuzzily matched questions to book chapters and just quoted the lot. Not that the "replies" weren't interesting, they just had very little to do with the questions.
Also, I see evidence of multiple mental disorders in his ramblings. Self reported chronic depression, paranoia, megalomania... Maybe a wee bit to much LSD&Cannabis under the bridge.
Doh. I'm an idiot. (+1 Insightful)
Yes, I did. I also noted that this enabled them to drive 5.1 speaker systems. Could someone please explain to a confused Java programmer how you can feed 5/6 speakers with three analog signals?
1U LCD? Kind of hard to run QuakeX on, innit? OTOH, the marketroids will like that since it's HYPER wide-screen.
BeOS: B (of course!)
AmigaOS: A+ (shuts eyes, claps ears and screams "Yadda, yadda, yadda...")
Unfortunately, Numbers will only be able to increase his tally by one, each time he's picked (less actually, since after a while there will be a high probability that no 'untallied' prisoner has been in the room since he was last there).
If Numbers is called on the average every 100 days, and can increase the tally by one each time, the procedure will take a bit less than 30 years!
Not that my solution is much better:
The prisoners make up their own calendar, in which every month has 100 days. Each prisoner is also assigned a number (1-100).
Now, if a prisoner is called on day N of the 'month', turning the light on is a signal to next guy that he knows for sure that prisoner number N has been in the room. Turning the light off is a signal that he doesn't have a clue about prisoner N.
If a prisoner is called on day N and sees a light, he makes a note that guy number N-1 has been in the room. The first prisoner that has all 100 checked can get the lot sprung.
Initially, each prisoner can only be sure of himself, so things will not start moving until by chance a prisoner is called on his own day. This should happen several times during the first month though. Knowledge of who has been in the room will then slowly spread among the prisoners.
The process won't complete until (some time after) every prisoner has been called on his day at least once. I tried to calculate how long that would be but my math isn't up to it. Probably some decades :-(