As the headline points out, this was demoed at SIGGRAPH 1999. Umm, maybe someone could tell me why Slashdot is featuring news from 7 years ago on the front page. Igarashi's work was novel at the time (in fact, he won the Significant New Researcher Award at this year's SIGGRAPH partly because of it), but let's remember that it's 2006 and a lot has been done in the world of sketch based interfaces. SmoothSketch3D is just one example from this year alone.
A common theme among all of the replies is that "Experience is more important than the name of your university". This is definitely true. If your goal is to get a good job, then yes, employers do care more for what work you've done, not on the school you attended. Granted, "better" CS programs generally give more opportunities for cool projects to work on. For example, I'm in my last year of CS at UW and I've developed a compiler, a ray tracer and a toy operating system. Add the experience that the co-op program has given me, and there's a lot there for employers to drool over.
This isn't a "Look-at-me" or "UW-is-great" rant (in fact, there are a few things that I do not like about my program). The point is that I am kind of alarmed that everybody seems to think that if you have a CS degree, you are slated to become a code monkey. If you wanted to be a programmer (ahem, sorry, software developer) then you should go to a college (FYI, most Americans call any post-secondary institution "college"... Canadians maintain a distinction between college and university, with the former being more skills based while the latter is academically based).
The choice of school for your undergraduate should not be based on whether or not you will get a job as a programmer after you graduate. If that's all you wanted, you could have saved many thousands of dollars by not attending university at all and just hacked on some project for fun building while acquiring experience. Your decision on whether or not to transfer should be based on the quality of the education you're receiving and the quality that you expect to receive. If you are content with the curriculum in your school as compared to other schools, then there is really no reason to transfer.
Twylite (234238) wrote: The idea that deadlines lead to bad code is a fallacy, and a self fulfilling prophecy. Code that is written well the first time has less bugs, which are more easily tracked down, and is easier to integrate with. Unfortunately those that cling to this mantra tend to believe that the only way to meet a tight deadline is a hack job.
The problem isn't so much deadlines as it is unexpected additions to a project without a corresponding change in deadline. You're saying that it's not true that the only way to meet a tight deadline is a hack job. Indeed, you're right if you live in the ideal world where you know that the following are set in stone:
what features need to be completed
the project's exact due date
Unfortunately, most of the time both of the above points are moving targets. There are many times when a customer (you know, those annoying people who pay the salary:-) will request a full implementation of something that's only so far in experimental stages. Did I mention that they also wanted it by yesterday? Other times, a due date will be pushed forward in order to meet some other milestone (for example, releasing something in December instead of January so that it's in Q4). At these times, a hack job is done with the good intention of "I'll fix it later". Of course, later may never actually come since another deadline will be pushed forward or another feature will be added last minute, causing yet even more hacks to be implemented.
Deadlines do cause hack jobs, well, moving deadlines do anyways. Unfortunately, these are a common occurence.
"The wonderful side of this dream [fuel cells powering laptops] is that some engineers expect it to be reality by the end of 2001."
So we're a bit behind.:-)
Unfortunately, I feel that due to varying lobby groups, the usage of fuel cells as an energy source will always be confined to the lab. The gasoline industry has heavily lobbied governments to prevent research into alternative fuel technologies (e.g., fuel cells) for the last few decades. Battery manufacturer's have also done the same (and they just keep going and going:-).
Until there is major R&D funding available to try to lower the production costs of fuel cells, their true potential will never be realized (no pun intended:-).
"Half-Life II" stars Gordon Freeman, a scientist battling aliens from the planet Xen in a mysterious European locale known only as City 17.
Surely this isn't the same Xen that gave us multiple virtual machines running on a single x86 chip? Would be quite funny if it was though. Imagine a first person shooter in which you kill multiple Linux distributions from all running at the same time on a single chip. Wonder if Billy Boy would be the first buyer?
The actual complaint in the class action law suit has very serious confusion involving the technical issues surrounding the SiteFinder.
In the introduction, they discuss that the SiteFinder replaces what was previously done with 404 errors. However, as has been previously discussed many times here on SlashDot, 404 errors occur when the domain exists, but the requested document does not exist on the webserver hosting that domain (it is the webserver than returns the 404 HTTP error code). In actually, when a domain didn't exist, you would get an error stating "Could not find domain". The complaint even describes how, in the past, incorrectly typing a URL would give a 404 error (they use the typo "ssyncalot.com" as a typo of "syncalot.com"). This behaviour never occured.
Although I feel that legal action against Verisign is a good idea, the plaintiffs should perhaps organize their technical facts before appearing in court.
Yes it is. In fact, X is liked by so many because of its network transparency.
However, the amount of data that a typical "rich" X client sends (e.g., mozilla) is huge. Many X clients are not optimized in terms of the amount of display information they output (that is, they output a lot of stuff that could probably be optimized away). For many developers, this is within reason since they figure that most of the time the xserver and xclient will be on the same machine (e.g., running mozilla on my box to display on my monitor).
This handy piece of proxy software put out by NX claims to be able to cache a lot of the data that X clients send, thereby reducing the amount of data actually transmitted. This will allow "rich" applications which send a lot of data to be run over slower connections with an apparenet reduce in lag time.
That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible.
Is is safe to assume that MS will be implementing symbolic links on files in NTFS (real symlinks, not "shortcuts":-)? Or is this statement just referring to how MS plans to be able to update files without having to reboot the system?
Interestingly enough, NTFS5 (on Win2K and above) already has support for a structure called Junctions. Essentially, these behave like symbolic links do in Unix, except that they can only point to directories (not to files). You can either use linkd.exe (provided in the Win2K Resource Kit) or visit Sysinterals, where they have a tool that will also create junctions. It's interesting that when MS deployed this feature, they didn't add support for symlinking to files also (granted, I don't know how NTFS works, so maybe it's not so trivial to link to files).
Although this comment is kind of fundamentalist (essentially, Ogg or Bust), it does raise an interesting question: How will EMI distribute the music online? The article doesn't get into this at all. There's been talk about lossless vs. lossy compression so far in here, but even amongst these there are choices. If EMI chooses lossless, will they go for WAV, FLAC or some other encoding. For lossy compression, there's a plethora of options: Ogg, MP3, Real Player, Windows Media, etc.
Although I am a fan of Ogg as a media format, I think it's safe to say that it will not be the number one choice of EMI. What's more, I feel that there is a narrow chance that even MP3 will be offered as one of the d/l options. Although MP3 has near ubiquitous compatibility with audio players and consumer hardware, it does not provide a key feature that companies like EMI do crave: Digital Rights Management. I predict that the only d/l options available to users will be Real Player and/or Windows Media.
EMI, if they have not done so already, will make "distribution deals" with both Microsoft and Real so that these two formats are the only ones used for downloading. In return, software like "Windows XP Media Edition" (or whatever that new thing is called:-) could push the user to acquire Music from EMI (MS did a similar thing with respect to Internet access and AOL... I'm certain many of us remember installing Windows at some point and seeing that the Desktop had, by default, a few icons for various large commercial ISPs).
As a final note, I don't feel that my claims that Windows Media and Real will be the only formats available is unsound./. readers are, typically, a bunch of nerds (self-proclaimed:-). While it is easy to give arguments like "But MP3 is better" or "Ogg roxors cause it's patent-free", these do not hold much water from a business perspective (which is where EMI is coming from). Other major sites already use Windows Media and Real as their only distribution format (e.g., amazon.com, when previewing tracks from CDs).
Maybe it's just me, but does anybody else see a problem with Slashdot using stories as an advertising mechanism? Thinkgeek does offer some very cool merchandise. I'll even admit that this item is rather leet (the iMac green and USB features are cool). But I really do not believe that Thinkgeek having this item for sale qualifies as "stuff that matters". Slashdot already runs banner ads for Thinkgeek... I don't think we need to have advertising appearing in "stories" also.
"We strongly recommend using a Windows2000/XP machine since the NTFS file system has no such file size limitation."
In fact, NTFS does have an upper bound on how large a single file can be. In theory, NTFS can have a file that is 16 exabytes minus 1 KB (2^64 bytes minus 1 KB). However, from an implementation standpoint, NTFS can only have a file as large as 16 terabytes minus 64 KB (2^44 bytes minus 64 KB) (yeah, way to go MS...). Not that anyone will be making video files that are 16 TB large, but the limit does exist.
There is a command line utility available at http://www.fourmilab.ch/md5/. They provide a zip file that contains a windows executable and source code (source is in the public domain). Place the executable someplace in your %PATH% (the Windows directory is a good place) and you're ready to rock.
With respect to Maple, the "built-in" capabilites that you describe generally add bloat to a math package's kernel. To circumvent this, Maple has placed much of its functionality in packages:
It is nice to see that Monico is donating the majority of the prize money to the FSF.
Garbage collection
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As others have pointed out, Perl's garbage collector does lend itself to the circle of garbage problem because it uses reference counting. Could you comment on the tradeoffs weighed when designing the garbage collector? e.g., Efficiency, time to implement, etc. If you could, would you reimplement it so that it used techniques like the Train Algorithm instead?
At the end of the article, right above where it says "Mark Jenkins reviews music and film for...", there is an advertisement for a wireless device (in fact, it even says Advertisement). The ad is randomized so that a new device is featured with each page reload. When I was reading the article, I saw:
Jornada 568 Personal Digital Ass
You may have to hit reload a few times before it comes up (it took me about 10 tries before I got it to come up again). Count on Microsoft (MSN) to have a truncation error.
Slashdot Mirror
As the headline points out, this was demoed at SIGGRAPH 1999. Umm, maybe someone could tell me why Slashdot is featuring news from 7 years ago on the front page. Igarashi's work was novel at the time (in fact, he won the Significant New Researcher Award at this year's SIGGRAPH partly because of it), but let's remember that it's 2006 and a lot has been done in the world of sketch based interfaces. SmoothSketch3D is just one example from this year alone.
Seems the author did some other research involving moving things around before this publication:
http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~anand/581site/ass1/ watch.html
A common theme among all of the replies is that "Experience is more important than the name of your university". This is definitely true. If your goal is to get a good job, then yes, employers do care more for what work you've done, not on the school you attended. Granted, "better" CS programs generally give more opportunities for cool projects to work on. For example, I'm in my last year of CS at UW and I've developed a compiler, a ray tracer and a toy operating system. Add the experience that the co-op program has given me, and there's a lot there for employers to drool over.
This isn't a "Look-at-me" or "UW-is-great" rant (in fact, there are a few things that I do not like about my program). The point is that I am kind of alarmed that everybody seems to think that if you have a CS degree, you are slated to become a code monkey. If you wanted to be a programmer (ahem, sorry, software developer) then you should go to a college (FYI, most Americans call any post-secondary institution "college"... Canadians maintain a distinction between college and university, with the former being more skills based while the latter is academically based).
The choice of school for your undergraduate should not be based on whether or not you will get a job as a programmer after you graduate. If that's all you wanted, you could have saved many thousands of dollars by not attending university at all and just hacked on some project for fun building while acquiring experience. Your decision on whether or not to transfer should be based on the quality of the education you're receiving and the quality that you expect to receive. If you are content with the curriculum in your school as compared to other schools, then there is really no reason to transfer.
"CA settled it's case with the DOJ."
It should be its, not it's.
Since we had a recent article from the CGL at the Univeristy of Waterloo, here's the explanation from one of the faculty there.
Yes, I'm pedantic.
Twylite (234238) wrote: The idea that deadlines lead to bad code is a fallacy, and a self fulfilling prophecy. Code that is written well the first time has less bugs, which are more easily tracked down, and is easier to integrate with. Unfortunately those that cling to this mantra tend to believe that the only way to meet a tight deadline is a hack job.
The problem isn't so much deadlines as it is unexpected additions to a project without a corresponding change in deadline. You're saying that it's not true that the only way to meet a tight deadline is a hack job. Indeed, you're right if you live in the ideal world where you know that the following are set in stone:
Unfortunately, most of the time both of the above points are moving targets. There are many times when a customer (you know, those annoying people who pay the salary :-) will request a full implementation of something that's only so far in experimental stages. Did I mention that they also wanted it by yesterday? Other times, a due date will be pushed forward in order to meet some other milestone (for example, releasing something in December instead of January so that it's in Q4). At these times, a hack job is done with the good intention of "I'll fix it later". Of course, later may never actually come since another deadline will be pushed forward or another feature will be added last minute, causing yet even more hacks to be implemented.
Deadlines do cause hack jobs, well, moving deadlines do anyways. Unfortunately, these are a common occurence.
Totally off topic, but....
upon first reading the subject, I thought to myself "They make buildings out of XML now? But why do those buildings get lower electricity bills?!"
Oh, the loveliness that is ambiguity
Even so, Visual C++ is the best compiler we have on PCs--with no competitive alternatives--so we're just sort of along for the ride.
Did I miss something, or did Borland, Intel and RMS all just stop making compilers? These are all competitive alternatives if I'm not mistaken.
"The wonderful side of this dream [fuel cells powering laptops] is that some engineers expect it to be reality by the end of 2001."
So we're a bit behind. :-)
Unfortunately, I feel that due to varying lobby groups, the usage of fuel cells as an energy source will always be confined to the lab. The gasoline industry has heavily lobbied governments to prevent research into alternative fuel technologies (e.g., fuel cells) for the last few decades. Battery manufacturer's have also done the same (and they just keep going and going :-).
Until there is major R&D funding available to try to lower the production costs of fuel cells, their true potential will never be realized (no pun intended :-).
From the article:
"Half-Life II" stars Gordon Freeman, a scientist battling aliens from the planet Xen in a mysterious European locale known only as City 17.
Surely this isn't the same Xen that gave us multiple virtual machines running on a single x86 chip? Would be quite funny if it was though. Imagine a first person shooter in which you kill multiple Linux distributions from all running at the same time on a single chip. Wonder if Billy Boy would be the first buyer?
The actual complaint in the class action law suit has very serious confusion involving the technical issues surrounding the SiteFinder.
In the introduction, they discuss that the SiteFinder replaces what was previously done with 404 errors. However, as has been previously discussed many times here on SlashDot, 404 errors occur when the domain exists, but the requested document does not exist on the webserver hosting that domain (it is the webserver than returns the 404 HTTP error code). In actually, when a domain didn't exist, you would get an error stating "Could not find domain". The complaint even describes how, in the past, incorrectly typing a URL would give a 404 error (they use the typo "ssyncalot.com" as a typo of "syncalot.com"). This behaviour never occured.
Although I feel that legal action against Verisign is a good idea, the plaintiffs should perhaps organize their technical facts before appearing in court.
Yes it is. In fact, X is liked by so many because of its network transparency.
However, the amount of data that a typical "rich" X client sends (e.g., mozilla) is huge. Many X clients are not optimized in terms of the amount of display information they output (that is, they output a lot of stuff that could probably be optimized away). For many developers, this is within reason since they figure that most of the time the xserver and xclient will be on the same machine (e.g., running mozilla on my box to display on my monitor).
This handy piece of proxy software put out by NX claims to be able to cache a lot of the data that X clients send, thereby reducing the amount of data actually transmitted. This will allow "rich" applications which send a lot of data to be run over slower connections with an apparenet reduce in lag time.
That's an area where the Unix guys are ahead of us, because of the way they do redirection -- they can patch a file and then change the symbolic link. That's an area where we've got a problem, and we'll fix it in the near future when possible.
Is is safe to assume that MS will be implementing symbolic links on files in NTFS (real symlinks, not "shortcuts" :-)? Or is this statement just referring to how MS plans to be able to update files without having to reboot the system?
Interestingly enough, NTFS5 (on Win2K and above) already has support for a structure called Junctions. Essentially, these behave like symbolic links do in Unix, except that they can only point to directories (not to files). You can either use linkd.exe (provided in the Win2K Resource Kit) or visit Sysinterals, where they have a tool that will also create junctions. It's interesting that when MS deployed this feature, they didn't add support for symlinking to files also (granted, I don't know how NTFS works, so maybe it's not so trivial to link to files).
Although this comment is kind of fundamentalist (essentially, Ogg or Bust), it does raise an interesting question: How will EMI distribute the music online? The article doesn't get into this at all. There's been talk about lossless vs. lossy compression so far in here, but even amongst these there are choices. If EMI chooses lossless, will they go for WAV, FLAC or some other encoding. For lossy compression, there's a plethora of options: Ogg, MP3, Real Player, Windows Media, etc.
Although I am a fan of Ogg as a media format, I think it's safe to say that it will not be the number one choice of EMI. What's more, I feel that there is a narrow chance that even MP3 will be offered as one of the d/l options. Although MP3 has near ubiquitous compatibility with audio players and consumer hardware, it does not provide a key feature that companies like EMI do crave: Digital Rights Management. I predict that the only d/l options available to users will be Real Player and/or Windows Media.
EMI, if they have not done so already, will make "distribution deals" with both Microsoft and Real so that these two formats are the only ones used for downloading. In return, software like "Windows XP Media Edition" (or whatever that new thing is called :-) could push the user to acquire Music from EMI (MS did a similar thing with respect to Internet access and AOL... I'm certain many of us remember installing Windows at some point and seeing that the Desktop had, by default, a few icons for various large commercial ISPs).
As a final note, I don't feel that my claims that Windows Media and Real will be the only formats available is unsound. /. readers are, typically, a bunch of nerds (self-proclaimed :-). While it is easy to give arguments like "But MP3 is better" or "Ogg roxors cause it's patent-free", these do not hold much water from a business perspective (which is where EMI is coming from). Other major sites already use Windows Media and Real as their only distribution format (e.g., amazon.com, when previewing tracks from CDs).
Maybe it's just me, but does anybody else see a problem with Slashdot using stories as an advertising mechanism? Thinkgeek does offer some very cool merchandise. I'll even admit that this item is rather leet (the iMac green and USB features are cool). But I really do not believe that Thinkgeek having this item for sale qualifies as "stuff that matters". Slashdot already runs banner ads for Thinkgeek... I don't think we need to have advertising appearing in "stories" also.
From the article:
"We strongly recommend using a Windows2000/XP machine since the NTFS file system has no such file size limitation."
In fact, NTFS does have an upper bound on how large a single file can be. In theory, NTFS can have a file that is 16 exabytes minus 1 KB (2^64 bytes minus 1 KB). However, from an implementation standpoint, NTFS can only have a file as large as 16 terabytes minus 64 KB (2^44 bytes minus 64 KB) (yeah, way to go MS...). Not that anyone will be making video files that are 16 TB large, but the limit does exist.
More info at MS Technet
Their server is totally slashdotted. I'm mirroring the article at my personal site.
There is a command line utility available at http://www.fourmilab.ch/md5/. They provide a zip file that contains a windows executable and source code (source is in the public domain). Place the executable someplace in your %PATH% (the Windows directory is a good place) and you're ready to rock.
Java is a dungeon.
With respect to Maple, the "built-in" capabilites that you describe generally add bloat to a math package's kernel. To circumvent this, Maple has placed much of its functionality in packages:
It is nice to see that Monico is donating the majority of the prize money to the FSF.
As others have pointed out, Perl's garbage collector does lend itself to the circle of garbage problem because it uses reference counting. Could you comment on the tradeoffs weighed when designing the garbage collector? e.g., Efficiency, time to implement, etc. If you could, would you reimplement it so that it used techniques like the Train Algorithm instead?
At the end of the article, right above where it says "Mark Jenkins reviews music and film for...", there is an advertisement for a wireless device (in fact, it even says Advertisement). The ad is randomized so that a new device is featured with each page reload. When I was reading the article, I saw:
Jornada 568 Personal Digital Ass
You may have to hit reload a few times before it comes up (it took me about 10 tries before I got it to come up again). Count on Microsoft (MSN) to have a truncation error.
Qualifications:
- Advanced knowledge of the C-c and C-v hotkeys in Windows
Work Experience