To watch the HTTP stream I wrote hacky little perl script HttpSniffer that is freely available on my web site - handy for when you haven't got the ability to capture all the raw TCP/IP (eg Win2K browser to Win2K server inside a corporate environment, or you have to debug interactions with a new web client on someone else's machine).
It's an HTTP tunnel (cf xmon for tracing X), but you can use it to watch headers, see authentication and other negotiations, and if you want it will produce timing info too.
but I find it difficult to actually apply the knowledge
It depends what you do. When I first started web scripting on a new platform (ASP) I had problems with cookies, trying to see why cookies were being sent sometimes and not others. Watching an HTTP stream makes it much easier to measure results properly, plus you can see things like chunk-encoding, which slows transfers over low-bandwidth lines, but increases responsiveness by sending results before the full results are generated (without dropping back to HTTP 1.0). With ASP and IIS you don't have direct control over when this happens, but after fiddling for a while you can see how to provoke it, and how to prevent it when required.
Nowadays you may not need to know this stuff, but when you do need it, you need to be able to see the subtleties of the stream (as you point out).
< shameless-plug >
To watch the HTTP stream I wrote hacky little perl script HttpSniffer that is available on my web site - handy for when you haven't got the ability to capture all the raw TCP/IP (eg Win2K to Win2K inside a corporate environment). It's really an HTTP tunnel, but you can use it to watch headers, negotiations, and will produce timing info too.
Doing this I also found a few spots where various web servers don't quite meet the specs (or the specs are sort of vague) so you have to guess precisely what's happening...
If you have any links regarding this, I would be most interested. That is one of the coolest stories I have ever heard.
Sorry, but it was an anecdote told to me back when I used to work in investigative analysis, fraud investigation and money laundering software - it was from one of the US customers who prefer not to be identified. You hear some great stories working in large scale fraud investigation, but most of them can't be attributed - sorry.
Some of the reporting on fraud and money laundering in general might include similar themes.
The US $ has been the worlds leading "hard currency" for quite some time. A large proportion of the issued paper is not in the USA, but is in use overseas. If they recall the older bills, you'll get hit by a huge flood of people desperate to change their notes from all sorts of back-waters (you'll get this anyway even without the recall, but not as much).
This flood of cash movement is a great chance for fraud, and it can cause currency problems as some people may decide to cash in old US to local currency instead, and that would cause all sorts of problems as large amounts of paper money wash back.
When the $100 bill was changed a few years back, it triggered quite a stampede in several countries, as rumours started that the old bills would not be valid.
Anyone doubting how much cash is held overseas - the Columbian drug barons have so much dirty money in US bills that they're unable to clean - in both senses - that they shrink wrap it, stack it in pallets, and are supposed to be holding warehouses full of $5 and $20 bills. One of them reputedly threatened the US that if they didn't call off harrassing him, he'd fly a few pallets over the poorest US ghettos and drop tens of millions of dollars from the air, which would trigger some very nasty riots and major local economic,civic and social problems.
So, in short, I'd suggest a major answer in that the US is being a responsible provider of hard currency by not recalling old notes.
IN the UK we are about to roll out a massive scheme whereby we don't use our signature to validate our bank card/credit card transactions, we use a PIN number instead.
In Australia they've been doing this for years - mind you they've also being running decent IT systems in the retail branches too for a long time to make it easier.. whereas the UK retail banking is only now starting to get away from the "all your details at your home branch" mentality.
Two friends here in the UK have Audi's with in-car nav systems like this that can also play TV and DVD's - the system turns off any ouput (except the nav system) when the car is moving at less than 2 mph.
This is factory fitted, so I dare say this is how it gets past the local laws about screens being visible.
Years ago Leyland made a design-concept truck that (amongsth other things) had cameras at the back so the driver could see behind him when reversing, but they pointed out then that this would be illegal the way the UK law stood at the time. I take it these laws have been revised or there is a new understanding of the issues.
The Highway Code as I understand it, by the way, is not actual law, but more a government condoned guide to preferred conduct.
If you're writing scripted pages using ASP (I use PerlScript under ASP) on IIS, and you turn on NTLM authentication only, then when your page executes it executes with the rights of the browsing user - you don't see this happen, it just occurs. The equivalent of an SU to the appropriate user (normally it executes under the identity of a system account).
This means that you can easily write web pages where you know the user is who they claim to be on an NT based system, and your web pages can do things like browse local files (ie on the server) and know that you won't be opening any security holes, as your webpage script will open be able to open a file/directory if that user has permission to see it.
I used this to make a web-based front end to a large file server that let people attach comments to files, personalise comments, search for files by comments etc. and I didn't have to worry about the admin of the permissions on the server as it all just worked. Makes it much easier to prove to IT Security that your web apps are not exposing files to inappropriate users (inside investment banks there are quite stringent requirements for showing chinese walls exist to prevent insider trading and similar).
re: 1) OK, so I call it Av-gas as a generic term for aviation fuel, and you know the proper name - I was just pointing out that I didn't think it was a good idea to use a flint lighter (hey, may not be real flint, but you know what I mean) when 30 feet from a tanker in nearly 40 degree heat where the fumes are making a heat-haze type shimmer.... and any idiot knows that a bucket of most petrol based fuels is much safer than the fumes. Empty tankers are more vulnerable to spark explosion than full ones.
re: 2) The fuelling area was a tanker with a bloke standing on the top 30 feet away (it was along queue, 200 people being searched to make sure they weren't carrying bombs, the irony somehow escaped Air Pakistan). The fumes were really strong, and I didn't think the guy holding the re-fuelling hose was paying much attention, so he might spill some fuel when he removes the hose - still fancy taking a chance with 4 germans with lighters and cigarette butts ?? Do you think the ban on smoking on the tarmac is just for fun ?
re: PS - maybe, but how about those pens that flash when your phone rings ? Do any of those make a spark ? Or static discharge ? Me, when I'm at a petrol station, I think the "turn off your phone signs" are reasonable... even if it's just there to stop you from being distracted and pumping fuel all over yourself...
Re:I guess I really should shut off my cell phone
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Cell Phones and Air Safety
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· Score: 4, Informative
because I think it's ridiculous that it could really be harmful. I guess I was wrong?
Do you leave it on in your pocket when you fill up with "gas" (petrol) too because it's ridiculous that a spark could cause an explosion of fumes ? Do you smoke while filling the car up too ?
Put your phone next to your car antenna and turn the radio on, and turn the phone on - hear that "dut-dut-der-dut-dut-der-dut" pulsing ?? Notice how you get the same effect when you drive to the airport (from their radar) ? Do you figure maybe a cell-phone that can't get a signal so has upped its power output to max to try and get one, about 20 feet away from the plane's antennas is going to providea stronger pulse than the radio signal being transmitted from 5 miles away ?
I was standing on the tarmac waiting to board a flight in Pakistan, next to a 747 that was being re-fuelled (which was freaking me out anyway - the av-gas fumes were really strong), and the people behind me decided this would be a good time to light up a cigarette... (they were german, said something about being ridiculous when I told them to put their lighters away and put their "f*ckin fags out").
I wonder if they'll have a flash animation of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" soon - it wasn't a bad book
Oh but pardon me it was a bad book... as a long time fan of HHGTTG (first read the books in the early-80's I think) I finally got round to reading Dirk Gently last year, and found it the most disappointing pile of steaming do-do since reading some of Heinlein's later (lazy) works.
My estimation of Douglas Adams is still suffering... and I'd already been let down gently by the stories of how arrogantly he behaved in the "new media" crowd...
Yeah, the BBC did experiment with encoding all their stuff with a free streaming bit too, but then didn't bother - dunno if it was support or bandwidth or what... I hate the Real players, but then I can just listen to Radio 4 as it is... sorry...
For all you not in the UK, there is a Radio 4 show of impression based comedy called Dead Ringers and while most of it is local UK oriented (except for the George Bush piss-takes), they also do a superb Tom Baker as Doctor Who calling vaious people on the phone. Some of the best bits (in Real Audio unfortunately) are here - Doctor Who calling the real Tom Baker, for example, was superb (Tom Baker reacts very well).
And for those who haven't seen it, Tom Baker's fiction The Boy Who Kicked Pigs is a very dark children's book, and well worth a read.
Explanation on compatibility (pit length)
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High Density CDs
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· Score: 3, Informative
This lifted from a post by "CD Freaks on 13 March 2003" on this page
HD-Burn will just *halve* the pit length on the CD, so double the data (and effectively half the error correction).
However, plextor will only reduce the pit length by 40%, and assuming the drive produces no jitter, then this means the resulting CD will still be readable by normal CD drives, as the red book standard allows for 40% jitter in either direction, so think of it as like Yamaha's Audio Master, but in reverse
If you cut words for a living, you want to start studying how language really works, and not pretend it's some pure logic system.
I am unique - there is no other person identical to me in the world. A man born with wings would also be unique - guess which one more deserves the title ?? Hence, I would argue, he would be "more unique".
If you insist on treating language as pure logic, remember that maths at certain points also does things like compare infinities, whereby some infinite values are taken to be larger than others, and dividing one infinity by another yields a useful value.
In the meantime, it's also worth noting that "double negatives" do not cancel each other out in human langaues, split infinitives are not a major sin, and that words evolve over time - this is a strength of English, not a weakness.
Have a go at sloppy writing, cliches, and spelling by all means, but don't turn language police on things that have worked well for hundreds of years before the Victorians got all uptight over them
It is, of course, Abbey Road not Abby Road and they are alive and well and still playing games with the famous photo (and have a webcam pointed at the zebra crossing so you too can see loads of tourists getting nearly run over while trying to re-create that photo). Plenty of geek technology there too, for anyone who's into serious playing around with analog and digital sound recording and manipulation.
Disclaimer: I do have links with people there, and yes it is a nice place to hang out (it's still the best place to record the soundtrack for big movies such as Star Wars, LoTR, etc).
.. because you end up hiring people who've heard the tricks, not smart people.
Me, I ask questions that lead to "discuss how this has affected your professional/personal life" type conversations.
My approach to Q's like "4 people crossing a bridge" is to give a silly answer "they all cross the bridge at once and find it is in fact strong enough to take the combined weight" and then accuse the questioner of being "overly constrained by the problem, whereas I'm thinking outside the box".
Disclaimer: I've walked out of interviews 'cos the interviewer was too dumb. I've also done enough to be able to afford to be this arrogant.
OK, but how about if it detects no jiggles for a while (ie you're not walking etc and generating energy for it that way) and it's running a bit low on juice, it vibrates briefly to tell you "hey, jump up and down or shake me a bit - I'm getting running down".
Not perpetual motion, but a way to tell you "if you're there, I'll be turning off pretty soon unless you do something". And before you say "That's dumb, to use up power when you're running low", all my phones beep to tell me they're running low in battery.
And I always remember the number of seconds in a year as PI * 10 ^ 7 - comes from someone's physics lecturer dropping it into an equation as an estimate that produced quite a pretty result at the end !
The Kx guys? Promoting OO++? I'd like to see where. The Kx guys are as anti-OO as any professional can be these days without risking being laughed at by the uninformed community (that thinks OO is a silver bullet).
This was back when Arthur was working at UBS in New York - maybe 6 or 7 years ago, and had a core K development team of a dozen or so. They were very anti-OO, but lost quite a lot of credibility through putting up straw man OO arguments and knocking them down - such as the example I gave above, and claiming these proved the "fundamental flaws of the OO approach". It was one of the core team who then showed another solution, and claimed this as his new technique to be called "OO++".
Don't get me wrong, I quite like some features of K, and I had quite a bit of respect for Arthur and some of the K internals... it was just some of the hype and deliberate obfuscation of arguments from the crowd that was sour.
Strong typing (compilation time type checking) exists in C/C++ Java,... but has nothing to do with OO as such. The first 'real' OO language (Smalltalk) has runtime type checking. No casting, no template/generics mechanisms necessary. Takes a lot of overhead out of programming... Not really new. Still, I agree with your conclusion about strong typing.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that dropping strong typing was new, or that it was fundamental to OO (more that it was taken as given in so many OO systems) - more that it was coming back into vogue.
I've argued for some time that of the oft-quoted 3 fundamentals of OO (polymorphism, encapsulation, and inheritance) then inheritance is often mis-understood (if not redundant) as a fundamental. "Inheritance" meaning the way that you can re-use functionality by "Coding by Differences" sure, whereas "Inheritance as the only way to do Polymorphism" isn't wrong, but it's a feature of some OO implementations - others (such as SmallTalk) can choose to polymorphism in other ways.
First: yeah, right because XP (et al) re-writes OO: pair programming, early delivery, RAD, iterative development etc are different ways of running a life cycle, not different ways of structuring your model of a domain.
Second: this reminds of when the K boys did a big rant about "I prove OO is flawed because if you have a class Person and derive from it Customer and Staff classes then you break stuff when a staff member quits his job and walks into the shop and buys stuff as you need to get the object to mutate classes". They claimed to instead invent "OO++" (they called it that). The correct OO answer is that you've got a poor design, you need to revisit it (and aspects or attributes or roles as concepts may help you think about this), but that doesn't break or replace OO (ie straw man argument).
Now meta-programming, such as the (now rather old but still a head-fuck for those who program in one language only) Meta Object Protocol is the direction that I see code structure moving: more Lisp-like structures and flexibility to change your object protocol on the fly, losing strong typing as a fundamental mechanism for OO, these are ways to let you manipulate the larger level structure of your code whilst keeping the lowest level of syntax constant . You let people write their OO code as they like, but as an over-coordinator you can suddenly change the way inheritance works, or the way method-dispatch works to get different effects. It's what I like about Perl (which is making me realise what all those Lisp hackers were raving about for so long, but I prefer the pragmatic approach of perl over the rather purist lisp).
-- T
Re:Increasing theoretical maximums
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Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
The theoretical maximum of USB 1.x has not increased; it remains at 12 Mbps. However, the theoretical maximum of USB LATEST has increased from 12 Mbps in USB 1.x to 480 Mbps in USB 2.0
I think you're agreeing with my pedantry... "theoretical max" of "a single design implementation" doesn't increase, but a significant change to the design, or a "new technology" may have a different theoretical max (eg theoretical max of an analog modem on a frequency capped line, theoretical max resolution of X-Ray lithography for circuit design, theoretical maximum speed of a body), or a change in technique may take "currently achievable/economic levels" closer to the theoretical max... it's his poor writing I'm having a go at, not the idea that performance is expected to improve over time.
Hey, my writing might be poor, but I'm not claiming to be worth being paid for this couple of paragraphs;^)
But that's only the beginning, because EFI is really a kind of blank slate that will allow a total rethinking of how computers start up. For example, a traditional BIOS is space-limited, so most are programmed in compact, low-level "machine language," which is notoriously difficult to do well--in fact, very few engineers are proficient in machine language. In contrast, EFI is written in C, the world's most popular high-end programming language, and EFI isn't space-constrained because its data resides in a special reserved area of the hard drive. This means that far more engineers will be able to do more creative things with PC hardware than is now possible.
Ooh yes, you have to write a BIOS in "machine language", but can use C for EFI - gee, imagine all the programs that you couldn't write in ASM (yeah, I know, he means because of storage and accessibility, but for a former editor of Byte it's a pretty dumb statement).
If you've ever opened up your PC, the overall layout will instantly seem familiar, and you'll recognize many of the components. Note the power supply in the rear right corner, the floppies in the open bays on the right, the hard drive in the closed bay near the center, the system switches and speaker, and the card slots to the left. Experienced eyes will even pick out the BIOS chip, the battery backup for the BIOS, the RAM banks, the familiar-looking cables and electrical connectors, and more.
Hey great, are we going to get rid of the legacy "power supply" ?? And "speakers". And a battery backed clock ? It's like pointing out that modern cars still have seats (like the "old" ones) and the ability to move...
And Serial ATA...
It's a spec that should initially deliver a theoretical maximum of around 150 Mbytes per second and ramp to 600 Mbytes per second in the next five years or so.
Again, you know what he's trying to say, but a "theoretical maximum" doesn't increase over time.
Oh well... that's what I.W. is good for I suppose, but I hope I don't get a printout of this dropped on my desk by my boss with a Post-It saying "Thought this very technical article has some important points that we should consider"...
Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?
At first yes, but with a few bugs which they promise to fix real quick (if you get the Service Pack hotfix to XP, which brings a few other nasties with it, Paladium, Media Player, etc)... but over a year of so they'll quietly drop what they call "support for legacy products" (ie anything not delivering a large profit margin to MS, Windows 95, OS/2 and any OS ending in the letters "ix")... anyone remember the nasty bits of code to deliberately break DR-DOS ??
Slashdot Mirror
< shameless-plug >
/shameless-plug >
To watch the HTTP stream I wrote hacky little perl script HttpSniffer that is freely available on my web site - handy for when you haven't got the ability to capture all the raw TCP/IP (eg Win2K browser to Win2K server inside a corporate environment, or you have to debug interactions with a new web client on someone else's machine).
It's an HTTP tunnel (cf xmon for tracing X), but you can use it to watch headers, see authentication and other negotiations, and if you want it will produce timing info too.
<
--
T
but I find it difficult to actually apply the knowledge
/shameless-plug >
It depends what you do. When I first started web scripting on a new platform (ASP) I had problems with cookies, trying to see why cookies were being sent sometimes and not others. Watching an HTTP stream makes it much easier to measure results properly, plus you can see things like chunk-encoding, which slows transfers over low-bandwidth lines, but increases responsiveness by sending results before the full results are generated (without dropping back to HTTP 1.0). With ASP and IIS you don't have direct control over when this happens, but after fiddling for a while you can see how to provoke it, and how to prevent it when required.
Nowadays you may not need to know this stuff, but when you do need it, you need to be able to see the subtleties of the stream (as you point out).
< shameless-plug >
To watch the HTTP stream I wrote hacky little perl script HttpSniffer that is available on my web site - handy for when you haven't got the ability to capture all the raw TCP/IP (eg Win2K to Win2K inside a corporate environment). It's really an HTTP tunnel, but you can use it to watch headers, negotiations, and will produce timing info too.
Doing this I also found a few spots where various web servers don't quite meet the specs (or the specs are sort of vague) so you have to guess precisely what's happening...
<
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T
If you have any links regarding this, I would be most interested. That is one of the coolest stories I have ever heard.
Sorry, but it was an anecdote told to me back when I used to work in investigative analysis, fraud investigation and money laundering software - it was from one of the US customers who prefer not to be identified. You hear some great stories working in large scale fraud investigation, but most of them can't be attributed - sorry.
Some of the reporting on fraud and money laundering in general might include similar themes.
is why there is no recall on older bills?
The US $ has been the worlds leading "hard currency" for quite some time. A large proportion of the issued paper is not in the USA, but is in use overseas. If they recall the older bills, you'll get hit by a huge flood of people desperate to change their notes from all sorts of back-waters (you'll get this anyway even without the recall, but not as much).
This flood of cash movement is a great chance for fraud, and it can cause currency problems as some people may decide to cash in old US to local currency instead, and that would cause all sorts of problems as large amounts of paper money wash back.
When the $100 bill was changed a few years back, it triggered quite a stampede in several countries, as rumours started that the old bills would not be valid.
Anyone doubting how much cash is held overseas - the Columbian drug barons have so much dirty money in US bills that they're unable to clean - in both senses - that they shrink wrap it, stack it in pallets, and are supposed to be holding warehouses full of $5 and $20 bills. One of them reputedly threatened the US that if they didn't call off harrassing him, he'd fly a few pallets over the poorest US ghettos and drop tens of millions of dollars from the air, which would trigger some very nasty riots and major local economic,civic and social problems.
So, in short, I'd suggest a major answer in that the US is being a responsible provider of hard currency by not recalling old notes.
IN the UK we are about to roll out a massive scheme whereby we don't use our signature to validate our bank card/credit card transactions, we use a PIN number instead.
In Australia they've been doing this for years - mind you they've also being running decent IT systems in the retail branches too for a long time to make it easier.. whereas the UK retail banking is only now starting to get away from the "all your details at your home branch" mentality.
less than / more than
Oops yes - sorry.
Highway Code
Yep, that sounds about right.. just pointing out that The Highway Code is not the be all and end all of road law in the UK.
BTW...
Good point, suppose we should wait to hear from someone involved in the vehicle approval procedure.
Cheers
Two friends here in the UK have Audi's with in-car nav systems like this that can also play TV and DVD's - the system turns off any ouput (except the nav system) when the car is moving at less than 2 mph.
This is factory fitted, so I dare say this is how it gets past the local laws about screens being visible.
Years ago Leyland made a design-concept truck that (amongsth other things) had cameras at the back so the driver could see behind him when reversing, but they pointed out then that this would be illegal the way the UK law stood at the time. I take it these laws have been revised or there is a new understanding of the issues.
The Highway Code as I understand it, by the way, is not actual law, but more a government condoned guide to preferred conduct.
It's mostly useful for large corporate intranets.
If you're writing scripted pages using ASP (I use PerlScript under ASP) on IIS, and you turn on NTLM authentication only, then when your page executes it executes with the rights of the browsing user - you don't see this happen, it just occurs. The equivalent of an SU to the appropriate user (normally it executes under the identity of a system account).
This means that you can easily write web pages where you know the user is who they claim to be on an NT based system, and your web pages can do things like browse local files (ie on the server) and know that you won't be opening any security holes, as your webpage script will open be able to open a file/directory if that user has permission to see it.
I used this to make a web-based front end to a large file server that let people attach comments to files, personalise comments, search for files by comments etc. and I didn't have to worry about the admin of the permissions on the server as it all just worked. Makes it much easier to prove to IT Security that your web apps are not exposing files to inappropriate users (inside investment banks there are quite stringent requirements for showing chinese walls exist to prevent insider trading and similar).
re: 1) OK, so I call it Av-gas as a generic term for aviation fuel, and you know the proper name - I was just pointing out that I didn't think it was a good idea to use a flint lighter (hey, may not be real flint, but you know what I mean) when 30 feet from a tanker in nearly 40 degree heat where the fumes are making a heat-haze type shimmer.... and any idiot knows that a bucket of most petrol based fuels is much safer than the fumes. Empty tankers are more vulnerable to spark explosion than full ones.
re: 2) The fuelling area was a tanker with a bloke standing on the top 30 feet away (it was along queue, 200 people being searched to make sure they weren't carrying bombs, the irony somehow escaped Air Pakistan). The fumes were really strong, and I didn't think the guy holding the re-fuelling hose was paying much attention, so he might spill some fuel when he removes the hose - still fancy taking a chance with 4 germans with lighters and cigarette butts ?? Do you think the ban on smoking on the tarmac is just for fun ?
re: PS - maybe, but how about those pens that flash when your phone rings ? Do any of those make a spark ? Or static discharge ? Me, when I'm at a petrol station, I think the "turn off your phone signs" are reasonable... even if it's just there to stop you from being distracted and pumping fuel all over yourself...
because I think it's ridiculous that it could really be harmful. I guess I was wrong?
Do you leave it on in your pocket when you fill up with "gas" (petrol) too because it's ridiculous that a spark could cause an explosion of fumes ? Do you smoke while filling the car up too ?
Put your phone next to your car antenna and turn the radio on, and turn the phone on - hear that "dut-dut-der-dut-dut-der-dut" pulsing ?? Notice how you get the same effect when you drive to the airport (from their radar) ? Do you figure maybe a cell-phone that can't get a signal so has upped its power output to max to try and get one, about 20 feet away from the plane's antennas is going to providea stronger pulse than the radio signal being transmitted from 5 miles away ?
I was standing on the tarmac waiting to board a flight in Pakistan, next to a 747 that was being re-fuelled (which was freaking me out anyway - the av-gas fumes were really strong), and the people behind me decided this would be a good time to light up a cigarette... (they were german, said something about being ridiculous when I told them to put their lighters away and put their "f*ckin fags out").
I wonder if they'll have a flash animation of "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" soon - it wasn't a bad book
Oh but pardon me it was a bad book... as a long time fan of HHGTTG (first read the books in the early-80's I think) I finally got round to reading Dirk Gently last year, and found it the most disappointing pile of steaming do-do since reading some of Heinlein's later (lazy) works.
My estimation of Douglas Adams is still suffering... and I'd already been let down gently by the stories of how arrogantly he behaved in the "new media" crowd...
Yeah, the BBC did experiment with encoding all their stuff with a free streaming bit too, but then didn't bother - dunno if it was support or bandwidth or what... I hate the Real players, but then I can just listen to Radio 4 as it is... sorry...
For all you not in the UK, there is a Radio 4 show of impression based comedy called Dead Ringers and while most of it is local UK oriented (except for the George Bush piss-takes), they also do a superb Tom Baker as Doctor Who calling vaious people on the phone. Some of the best bits (in Real Audio unfortunately) are here - Doctor Who calling the real Tom Baker, for example, was superb (Tom Baker reacts very well).
And for those who haven't seen it, Tom Baker's fiction The Boy Who Kicked Pigs is a very dark children's book, and well worth a read.
Sounds like it'll work, but make a more disk...
--
T
If you cut words for a living, you want to start studying how language really works, and not pretend it's some pure logic system.
I am unique - there is no other person identical to me in the world. A man born with wings would also be unique - guess which one more deserves the title ?? Hence, I would argue, he would be "more unique".
If you insist on treating language as pure logic, remember that maths at certain points also does things like compare infinities, whereby some infinite values are taken to be larger than others, and dividing one infinity by another yields a useful value.
In the meantime, it's also worth noting that "double negatives" do not cancel each other out in human langaues, split infinitives are not a major sin, and that words evolve over time - this is a strength of English, not a weakness.
Have a go at sloppy writing, cliches, and spelling by all means, but don't turn language police on things that have worked well for hundreds of years before the Victorians got all uptight over them
--
T
It is, of course, Abbey Road not Abby Road and they are alive and well and still playing games with the famous photo (and have a webcam pointed at the zebra crossing so you too can see loads of tourists getting nearly run over while trying to re-create that photo). Plenty of geek technology there too, for anyone who's into serious playing around with analog and digital sound recording and manipulation.
Disclaimer: I do have links with people there, and yes it is a nice place to hang out (it's still the best place to record the soundtrack for big movies such as Star Wars, LoTR, etc).
.. because you end up hiring people who've heard the tricks, not smart people.
Me, I ask questions that lead to "discuss how this has affected your professional/personal life" type conversations.
My approach to Q's like "4 people crossing a bridge" is to give a silly answer "they all cross the bridge at once and find it is in fact strong enough to take the combined weight" and then accuse the questioner of being "overly constrained by the problem, whereas I'm thinking outside the box".
Disclaimer: I've walked out of interviews 'cos the interviewer was too dumb. I've also done enough to be able to afford to be this arrogant.
--
T
But 3G apps calling vibrate()? Come on!
OK, but how about if it detects no jiggles for a while (ie you're not walking etc and generating energy for it that way) and it's running a bit low on juice, it vibrates briefly to tell you "hey, jump up and down or shake me a bit - I'm getting running down".
Not perpetual motion, but a way to tell you "if you're there, I'll be turning off pretty soon unless you do something". And before you say "That's dumb, to use up power when you're running low", all my phones beep to tell me they're running low in battery.
And I always remember the number of seconds in a year as PI * 10 ^ 7 - comes from someone's physics lecturer dropping it into an equation as an estimate that produced quite a pretty result at the end !
The Kx guys? Promoting OO++? I'd like to see where. The Kx guys are as anti-OO as any professional can be these days without risking being laughed at by the uninformed community (that thinks OO is a silver bullet).
This was back when Arthur was working at UBS in New York - maybe 6 or 7 years ago, and had a core K development team of a dozen or so. They were very anti-OO, but lost quite a lot of credibility through putting up straw man OO arguments and knocking them down - such as the example I gave above, and claiming these proved the "fundamental flaws of the OO approach". It was one of the core team who then showed another solution, and claimed this as his new technique to be called "OO++".
Don't get me wrong, I quite like some features of K, and I had quite a bit of respect for Arthur and some of the K internals... it was just some of the hype and deliberate obfuscation of arguments from the crowd that was sour.
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Strong typing (compilation time type checking) exists in C/C++ Java,... but has nothing to do with OO as such. The first 'real' OO language (Smalltalk) has runtime type checking. No casting, no template/generics mechanisms necessary. Takes a lot of overhead out of programming... Not really new. Still, I agree with your conclusion about strong typing.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that dropping strong typing was new, or that it was fundamental to OO (more that it was taken as given in so many OO systems) - more that it was coming back into vogue.
I've argued for some time that of the oft-quoted 3 fundamentals of OO (polymorphism, encapsulation, and inheritance) then inheritance is often mis-understood (if not redundant) as a fundamental. "Inheritance" meaning the way that you can re-use functionality by "Coding by Differences" sure, whereas "Inheritance as the only way to do Polymorphism" isn't wrong, but it's a feature of some OO implementations - others (such as SmallTalk) can choose to polymorphism in other ways.
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First: yeah, right because XP (et al) re-writes OO: pair programming, early delivery, RAD, iterative development etc are different ways of running a life cycle, not different ways of structuring your model of a domain.
Second: this reminds of when the K boys did a big rant about "I prove OO is flawed because if you have a class Person and derive from it Customer and Staff classes then you break stuff when a staff member quits his job and walks into the shop and buys stuff as you need to get the object to mutate classes". They claimed to instead invent "OO++" (they called it that). The correct OO answer is that you've got a poor design, you need to revisit it (and aspects or attributes or roles as concepts may help you think about this), but that doesn't break or replace OO (ie straw man argument).
Now meta-programming, such as the (now rather old but still a head-fuck for those who program in one language only) Meta Object Protocol is the direction that I see code structure moving: more Lisp-like structures and flexibility to change your object protocol on the fly, losing strong typing as a fundamental mechanism for OO, these are ways to let you manipulate the larger level structure of your code whilst keeping the lowest level of syntax constant . You let people write their OO code as they like, but as an over-coordinator you can suddenly change the way inheritance works, or the way method-dispatch works to get different effects. It's what I like about Perl (which is making me realise what all those Lisp hackers were raving about for so long, but I prefer the pragmatic approach of perl over the rather purist lisp).
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The theoretical maximum of USB 1.x has not increased; it remains at 12 Mbps. However, the theoretical maximum of USB LATEST has increased from 12 Mbps in USB 1.x to 480 Mbps in USB 2.0
;^)
I think you're agreeing with my pedantry... "theoretical max" of "a single design implementation" doesn't increase, but a significant change to the design, or a "new technology" may have a different theoretical max (eg theoretical max of an analog modem on a frequency capped line, theoretical max resolution of X-Ray lithography for circuit design, theoretical maximum speed of a body), or a change in technique may take "currently achievable/economic levels" closer to the theoretical max... it's his poor writing I'm having a go at, not the idea that performance is expected to improve over time.
Hey, my writing might be poor, but I'm not claiming to be worth being paid for this couple of paragraphs
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Ooh yes, you have to write a BIOS in "machine language", but can use C for EFI - gee, imagine all the programs that you couldn't write in ASM (yeah, I know, he means because of storage and accessibility, but for a former editor of Byte it's a pretty dumb statement).
Hey great, are we going to get rid of the legacy "power supply" ?? And "speakers". And a battery backed clock ? It's like pointing out that modern cars still have seats (like the "old" ones) and the ability to move...
And Serial ATA...
Again, you know what he's trying to say, but a "theoretical maximum" doesn't increase over time.
Oh well... that's what I.W. is good for I suppose, but I hope I don't get a printout of this dropped on my desk by my boss with a Post-It saying "Thought this very technical article has some important points that we should consider"...
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Will their virtual machines run operating systems other than Microsoft's?
At first yes, but with a few bugs which they promise to fix real quick (if you get the Service Pack hotfix to XP, which brings a few other nasties with it, Paladium, Media Player, etc)... but over a year of so they'll quietly drop what they call "support for legacy products" (ie anything not delivering a large profit margin to MS, Windows 95, OS/2 and any OS ending in the letters "ix")... anyone remember the nasty bits of code to deliberately break DR-DOS ??
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