You could easily make it that the laser only comes on when the mouse is pressed flat against a surface, either by photo-sensors or micro switches, or something of the sort.
I got a resume from some kid just out of University. He attached some samples of the code he wrote. One of them was the perennial "calendar" app that I think we all were tasked to write.
Anyhow, I was perusing the code. It was pretty sloppy, one-letter variable names, multiple statements crammed together on single lines.
So I get to this one section of code. I can't even remember how it worked now, but it was this convoluded for() statement that flipped a flag and did some weird ass computation. It took me about 10 minutes of "stepping through" it in my head to figure out what it was doing.
It was calculating leap-years. I actually stared at it in shock, imagining how much time and energy this kid spent figuring out the worlds most assinine way to figure out if it's leapyear. I would have just wrote "if (year%4 == 0) { days_in_feb=29; }" or something of the sort. I wouldnt write "if (!(year%4)) {};" because perfoming boolean tests on integers is another pet peeve, it doesn't improve the code, just detracts slightly from its readability.
I actually interviewed the kid, and pointed the lines out to him. I asked him why he didn't just use the modulus operator. He just stared at me blankly. He had no clue what "modulus" meant.
As creative as his "solution" was, his code was bad, and he was a shitty programmer with a very very poor understanding of the language.
It's all cool to have this contest, and if that's how people want to spend their spare time, go ahead. I'm just trying to send a message to the newbies reading slashdot who are still in school and tend to think this is a hallmark of a good coder in the "real world". In the real world or business, anything that makes your day more of a hassle than it needs to be, is a bad thing.
Leave the obfuscation to the marketing department. We have one who actually listed double-ROT13 encryption as a "feature" of our product. Ok, he asked me what encryption we supported by default, and I told him double-ROT13 not realizing just how dense he was. The story gets better! The marketing shpiel he put together was going to the IT security folks at the NSA! One of them called me up, in tears from laughing. He asked if I could implement quad-ROT13. I told him I could implement 2^n-ROT13, iff n>0.
No, you need to have a poor understanding of the language. You need to merly know syntax, but not the intent.
You need to be willing to replace standard library math calls with unreadble one-line pieces of crap. You need to pick undescriptive one-letter variable names.
You need to think that recursion is a good solution to simple problems like factorial, and that it's appropriate to jam function calls and assignment operators into if and for declarations, etc.
Plenty of folks out there think this is "good programming". If it's too readable then it's "dumb".
Mechanics could have a contest to see who could to the shittiest job on an old car and get it running. They can pack the transmission with sawdust, jack it up on hockey pucks, do every "ghetto" technique in the book. You may say they're very knowledgeable about cars, you may even call them great mechanics. But I wouldn't take my car to one.
Newbie C programmers get all into this kind of crap. They think it makes them look smarter or something. It really doesn't, it makes them look like newbies. I guess they get a rush from thinking that noone else is smart enough to read their code, like they're some kind of elite genious or something.
Seriously kids, grow out of this phase as fast as you can. It only hurts you in real life.
Recursion too, every newbie programmer who learns recursion wants to use it for every frickin problem. In reality, it's rarely a good solution. We all learned recursion with the factorial example, imagine 20!. With recursion you get 20 function calls with all their associated overhead. A for loop is a much better solution.
I've thrown resume's straight into the trash can that had this kind of stuff attached as examples of the applicants great genious.
You know the shit I'm talking about, jamming all kinds of operations into a for() declaration, badly chosen one-letter variable names, etc..
Those suckers never even got their foot in the door. I don't care how smart they think they are, we have to get products out fast, and realistically be able to maintain/upgrade them 10+ years or so.
Plus the CPUs in this box are gutless, designed (IIRC) for embedded applications, not FPU-intensive stuff like rendering, or most scientific apps.
I'm stumped to think who the target audience is. Guess people with a lot of money and little brains.
Actaully, I see them shipping lots of $10,000 models to 13 year olds with rich parents who then wonder why they cant run Doom 3 at 6000x12000 resolution.
This from a parent who has had to pay to clean up sidewalk art when a whiny neighbour caused a fuss about it.
Just like the little girl in florida who was busted for running a lemonade stand without licenses.
What gets the cops interested? Someone bitching and moaning. If you saw a couple 6 year olds playing hopscotch on the sidewalk would you phone up the local PD and bitch? What if they were covering the road with their political messages? Maybe you like this guys message. Maybe if he was with the KKK you wouldn't like his message.
Non-permanent doesn't mean shit, and doesn't mean it's not vandalism.
Can I write "$RACIAL_EPIPHET GO HOME" in 6 foot letters on a minority person's house with sidewalk chalk? Water based paints?
Hell even exterior latexes are non-permanent, I can attest to that, as I've spent most of the weekend outside repainting. It washes off after a mere 5 years or so!
The article is just the typical hand-waving of the liberal media. Oh this poor man has no idea why he's under arrest! Some sergeant agreed on the scene it was non permanent! Facts are, the guy knows precisely why he was arrested, and some sergeants opinion doesn't mean anything. Eg, what if some cop didn't think that your two black eyes and bleeding lip didn't constitute "assault"? What he thinks is irrelevant.
Any citizen who was inconvenienced by this twit has the right to ask charges be filed.
As for "dissent", NYC is encouraging anti-Bush protests. Blooomberg is staunchly anti-republican and has been organizing the hell out of protesting the RNC.
Maybe they just have a little more class than to dump a potentially large bandwidth load onto wikipidia.
Once upon a time, people on the 'net weren't a bunch of assholes, and would politely inquire before knowingly burdening your machines with a ton of bandwidth. (*cough* slashdot)
Or maybe, the info might be a little dynamic for wikipedia to handle effectively, I dunno.
This list could change daily, or even hourly.
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is incompatible" No wait "GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is supported with kernel patch 3432-231" no wait "GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is unsupported again" (patch withdrawn because of patent infringment) no wait "GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is supported from rev 2.6 and up, excluding rev 3.4" etc, etc..
This list is a good idea though. I hope they're smart and put a good "cellphone/PDA" compatible interface on it. This is the type of search I'd like to do while standing in the checkout line of CompUSA.
Fox realized Family Guy was popular right about the same time that Cartoon Network started leading the ratings during the 11-midnight slot adult swim is in. That is, when CN shows Family Guy and Futurama in syndication.
Now it's back in syndication on Fox. Also, it's there to promote Seth MacFarlane's new show for fox, "American Dad". Don't worry though, they'll cancel that one after it doesn't become as big as "Simpsons" after a couple seasons.
It's happening now, didn't you read that article on what Red Hat has to do to "succeed" the other day?
The summary: To succeed, Red Hat has to posture itself to attract more investors.
Forget attracting customers, who needs customers? We only want investors! And forget having a product or service that you can exchange for revenue. Nope, these.com whiz-kids actually count on VC as "revenue".
It makes SCO's "sue people for money" business model look intelligent.
This is a problem we're facing now. "Copyrighting" public officials.
IMO, anything someone in public office, or campaigning for public office says, in any forum, should be public domain.
But, if GWB goes on Larry King Live, anything he says is owned by CNN. So if I want to use a clip of his appearance, I have to get their approval. And if they don't like what I'm doing politically (my piece is anti-bush, etc), they can deny me.
So what happens when the President does less and less public appearances, and just addresses the nation via talk shows and news interviews? He can lie, say stupid shit, and just sweep it off underneath the "copyright" rug.
To answer your question: since it was at a public appearance, the scream is not copyrighted. If he did it on the Today show, it would be. And if the Today show's producers were Dean's buddy, you'd never see or hear the scream again.
How big would LOTR be if you kept it at it's original theatre resolution (the resolution that all that CG was rendered at/for), and wanted to keep the raw video and audio data, and not subject it to lossy compression techniques like MPEG2?
This is an actual physically existing thing, not some theory and buzzwords written in a proposal.
The technology exists. It just isn't sitting on the shelves at Office Depot yet, but it exists and works. And if you had deep enough pockets, I'm sure you could acquire one.
It's not vapor. It's just not ready to compete with, say, an array of HDDs or big-ass tapes in terms of price yet.
This one is big, though. They have a way to write on "normal" media, that is, preformatted optical discs very much like DVD-Rs. So producing the media won't be a problem. The writing technique they came up with sound's like it requires much less engineering than other holographic processes.
My bucks are on this being the first "holo" tech to market. Probably won't beat BluRay or HD-DVD, but will likely be the tech that makes both of those obsolete.
These guys actually made one that works, though. The difference between this and those other announcements, is that the other ones rely on "magical technology" to be invented for them to work.
Just like we could build a space elevator in 10 years - just so long as someone invents a way to make carbon nanotubes.
As others have said, the telescope didn't find the planet, nor did it's owner. The software found the planet.
All stars "dim" or twinkle to a regular viewer, due to our atomsphere. If it were just atmospheric stuff, the dimming cycle should be pretty much random. But software can find a pattern in the "dimming" that a human couldnt. (The "cycle" would last months, if not years, would it not)
It's an pyramid scheme, and I'm surprised they're still running, being as such operations are illegal in the US, and most other first world nations. They must be running offshore somewhere.
Hibernate works fine on most modern laptop hardware. It screws up on desktops, generally because of driver or hardware incompatibilities.
My laptop hibernates when I shut the lid. It pops right back up when I open it. I watch DVDs, etc. It's all good. It works like the OP says it should.
My laptop, however, is too big to get out and sit on one of those fold-down trays in an airplane. It'd be cool to be able to just reach into the back, plug in headphones, and have it work like an iPod (no mouse/keyboard/screen) needed. No power is being wasted on the display, because the lids shut and it's not in use.
If it came with a remote, I could plug it into the TV in a hotel, and use it like a standalone, without having to get out of bed to FF/RW.
That's the idea. The CPU barely does anything, and can be throttled back.
How well it works in RL, we'll see.
There's more to power usage than just the CPU. Consider watching a DVD - you've got the dvd-rom spinning and its motors grinding away reading the disc, that sucks power (a device I normally don't use on a laptop).
Chances are, if you're on a plane, you've got the backlight jacked all the way up, and the volume on full through the headphone jack.
And all that dedicated hardware still sucks 'it down, especially if it's doing fancy post-processing jibber jabber. Bob and weave and all that.
It'll surely be more convenient to watch a movie or listen to a CD, since it would function like a standalone unit. As for the power savings, someone else can beta test that while I wait for the results.
- Checks for disc in drive - If disc is present, and is a DVD or CD Audio Disc, the device boots the "media player" burned into roms on the board - If not, it boots normally.
This is really dual-booting, except one of the OS's lives in firmware.
In other words, it doesn't "save RAM" when running windows, it doesn't have to do with Windows Update. It doesn't have anything to do with windows at all.
It's as if you booted from a floppy that had a linux-based media player on it.
Slashdot Mirror
You could easily make it that the laser only comes on when the mouse is pressed flat against a surface, either by photo-sensors or micro switches, or something of the sort.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about:
I got a resume from some kid just out of University. He attached some samples of the code he wrote. One of them was the perennial "calendar" app that I think we all were tasked to write.
Anyhow, I was perusing the code. It was pretty sloppy, one-letter variable names, multiple statements crammed together on single lines.
So I get to this one section of code. I can't even remember how it worked now, but it was this convoluded for() statement that flipped a flag and did some weird ass computation. It took me about 10 minutes of "stepping through" it in my head to figure out what it was doing.
It was calculating leap-years. I actually stared at it in shock, imagining how much time and energy this kid spent figuring out the worlds most assinine way to figure out if it's leapyear. I would have just wrote "if (year%4 == 0) { days_in_feb=29; }" or something of the sort. I wouldnt write "if (!(year%4)) {};" because perfoming boolean tests on integers is another pet peeve, it doesn't improve the code, just detracts slightly from its readability.
I actually interviewed the kid, and pointed the lines out to him. I asked him why he didn't just use the modulus operator. He just stared at me blankly. He had no clue what "modulus" meant.
As creative as his "solution" was, his code was bad, and he was a shitty programmer with a very very poor understanding of the language.
It's all cool to have this contest, and if that's how people want to spend their spare time, go ahead. I'm just trying to send a message to the newbies reading slashdot who are still in school and tend to think this is a hallmark of a good coder in the "real world". In the real world or business, anything that makes your day more of a hassle than it needs to be, is a bad thing.
Leave the obfuscation to the marketing department. We have one who actually listed double-ROT13 encryption as a "feature" of our product. Ok, he asked me what encryption we supported by default, and I told him double-ROT13 not realizing just how dense he was. The story gets better! The marketing shpiel he put together was going to the IT security folks at the NSA! One of them called me up, in tears from laughing. He asked if I could implement quad-ROT13. I told him I could implement 2^n-ROT13, iff n>0.
But that's another story for another article.
No, you need to have a poor understanding of the language. You need to merly know syntax, but not the intent.
You need to be willing to replace standard library math calls with unreadble one-line pieces of crap. You need to pick undescriptive one-letter variable names.
You need to think that recursion is a good solution to simple problems like factorial, and that it's appropriate to jam function calls and assignment operators into if and for declarations, etc.
Plenty of folks out there think this is "good programming". If it's too readable then it's "dumb".
Mechanics could have a contest to see who could to the shittiest job on an old car and get it running. They can pack the transmission with sawdust, jack it up on hockey pucks, do every "ghetto" technique in the book. You may say they're very knowledgeable about cars, you may even call them great mechanics. But I wouldn't take my car to one.
Newbie C programmers get all into this kind of crap. They think it makes them look smarter or something. It really doesn't, it makes them look like newbies. I guess they get a rush from thinking that noone else is smart enough to read their code, like they're some kind of elite genious or something.
Seriously kids, grow out of this phase as fast as you can. It only hurts you in real life.
Recursion too, every newbie programmer who learns recursion wants to use it for every frickin problem. In reality, it's rarely a good solution. We all learned recursion with the factorial example, imagine 20!. With recursion you get 20 function calls with all their associated overhead. A for loop is a much better solution.
I've thrown resume's straight into the trash can that had this kind of stuff attached as examples of the applicants great genious.
You know the shit I'm talking about, jamming all kinds of operations into a for() declaration, badly chosen one-letter variable names, etc..
Those suckers never even got their foot in the door. I don't care how smart they think they are, we have to get products out fast, and realistically be able to maintain/upgrade them 10+ years or so.
Never had one, never even applied for one.
Not only that, I don't consider the ability to churn out unreadable code a good trait in a programmer. Nothing geeky about it, just sloppy.
As I understand it, this contest is basically "who can turn out the shittiest code that still runs?"
Note to unemployed IOCCC contest winners. Don't try to play this up on your resume.
Who's the IOCCC and what was this contest about? Some programming thing obviously. Is this that obfuscated perl thing?
Seriously, a sentence or two of information in the submissions doesn't hurt.
Plus the CPUs in this box are gutless, designed (IIRC) for embedded applications, not FPU-intensive stuff like rendering, or most scientific apps.
I'm stumped to think who the target audience is. Guess people with a lot of money and little brains.
Actaully, I see them shipping lots of $10,000 models to 13 year olds with rich parents who then wonder why they cant run Doom 3 at 6000x12000 resolution.
The law does apply to little kids, you dope.
This from a parent who has had to pay to clean up sidewalk art when a whiny neighbour caused a fuss about it.
Just like the little girl in florida who was busted for running a lemonade stand without licenses.
What gets the cops interested? Someone bitching and moaning. If you saw a couple 6 year olds playing hopscotch on the sidewalk would you phone up the local PD and bitch? What if they were covering the road with their political messages? Maybe you like this guys message. Maybe if he was with the KKK you wouldn't like his message.
It's no less illegal no matter who does it.
Non-permanent doesn't mean shit, and doesn't mean it's not vandalism.
Can I write "$RACIAL_EPIPHET GO HOME" in 6 foot letters on a minority person's house with sidewalk chalk? Water based paints?
Hell even exterior latexes are non-permanent, I can attest to that, as I've spent most of the weekend outside repainting. It washes off after a mere 5 years or so!
The article is just the typical hand-waving of the liberal media. Oh this poor man has no idea why he's under arrest! Some sergeant agreed on the scene it was non permanent! Facts are, the guy knows precisely why he was arrested, and some sergeants opinion doesn't mean anything. Eg, what if some cop didn't think that your two black eyes and bleeding lip didn't constitute "assault"? What he thinks is irrelevant.
Any citizen who was inconvenienced by this twit has the right to ask charges be filed.
As for "dissent", NYC is encouraging anti-Bush protests. Blooomberg is staunchly anti-republican and has been organizing the hell out of protesting the RNC.
How has this affected his ski-boxing?
Maybe they just have a little more class than to dump a potentially large bandwidth load onto wikipidia.
Once upon a time, people on the 'net weren't a bunch of assholes, and would politely inquire before knowingly burdening your machines with a ton of bandwidth. (*cough* slashdot)
Or maybe, the info might be a little dynamic for wikipedia to handle effectively, I dunno.
This list could change daily, or even hourly.
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is incompatible"
No wait
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is supported with kernel patch 3432-231"
no wait
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is unsupported again" (patch withdrawn because of patent infringment)
no wait
"GooberTech PCI Master Xtreme is supported from rev 2.6 and up, excluding rev 3.4"
etc, etc..
This list is a good idea though. I hope they're smart and put a good "cellphone/PDA" compatible interface on it. This is the type of search I'd like to do while standing in the checkout line of CompUSA.
Fans shmans. The fans had nothing to do with it!
Fox realized Family Guy was popular right about the same time that Cartoon Network started leading the ratings during the 11-midnight slot adult swim is in. That is, when CN shows Family Guy and Futurama in syndication.
Now it's back in syndication on Fox. Also, it's there to promote Seth MacFarlane's new show for fox, "American Dad". Don't worry though, they'll cancel that one after it doesn't become as big as "Simpsons" after a couple seasons.
Lost in Space was muppets.
Oh wait, that was Pigs in Space. NM.
(Still it had much better writing and way better SFX than FarScape)
It's happening now, didn't you read that article on what Red Hat has to do to "succeed" the other day?
.com whiz-kids actually count on VC as "revenue".
The summary: To succeed, Red Hat has to posture itself to attract more investors.
Forget attracting customers, who needs customers? We only want investors! And forget having a product or service that you can exchange for revenue. Nope, these
It makes SCO's "sue people for money" business model look intelligent.
This is a problem we're facing now. "Copyrighting" public officials.
IMO, anything someone in public office, or campaigning for public office says, in any forum, should be public domain.
But, if GWB goes on Larry King Live, anything he says is owned by CNN. So if I want to use a clip of his appearance, I have to get their approval. And if they don't like what I'm doing politically (my piece is anti-bush, etc), they can deny me.
So what happens when the President does less and less public appearances, and just addresses the nation via talk shows and news interviews? He can lie, say stupid shit, and just sweep it off underneath the "copyright" rug.
To answer your question: since it was at a public appearance, the scream is not copyrighted. If he did it on the Today show, it would be. And if the Today show's producers were Dean's buddy, you'd never see or hear the scream again.
And Weird Al won the ensuing "legal fight", because parody is indeed protected as fair use. The album is still available with "Amish Paradise".
Weird Al doesn't have to ask for permission, but he does, and usually gets it.
Oh, I don't know.
How big would LOTR be if you kept it at it's original theatre resolution (the resolution that all that CG was rendered at/for), and wanted to keep the raw video and audio data, and not subject it to lossy compression techniques like MPEG2?
We do have it, did you not RTFA?
This is an actual physically existing thing, not some theory and buzzwords written in a proposal.
The technology exists. It just isn't sitting on the shelves at Office Depot yet, but it exists and works. And if you had deep enough pockets, I'm sure you could acquire one.
It's not vapor. It's just not ready to compete with, say, an array of HDDs or big-ass tapes in terms of price yet.
This one is big, though. They have a way to write on "normal" media, that is, preformatted optical discs very much like DVD-Rs. So producing the media won't be a problem. The writing technique they came up with sound's like it requires much less engineering than other holographic processes.
My bucks are on this being the first "holo" tech to market. Probably won't beat BluRay or HD-DVD, but will likely be the tech that makes both of those obsolete.
These guys actually made one that works, though. The difference between this and those other announcements, is that the other ones rely on "magical technology" to be invented for them to work.
Just like we could build a space elevator in 10 years - just so long as someone invents a way to make carbon nanotubes.
This is actually a group of PhD's running some advanced data collection and aggregation software on a beowulf cluster of small telescopes.
This isnt, as the slashdot blurb suggests, some weekend warrior on his back porch who discovered a new planet.
As others have said, the telescope didn't find the planet, nor did it's owner. The software found the planet.
All stars "dim" or twinkle to a regular viewer, due to our atomsphere. If it were just atmospheric stuff, the dimming cycle should be pretty much random. But software can find a pattern in the "dimming" that a human couldnt. (The "cycle" would last months, if not years, would it not)
2 decades ago this software didn't exist.
"Legit" my ass.
It's an pyramid scheme, and I'm surprised they're still running, being as such operations are illegal in the US, and most other first world nations. They must be running offshore somewhere.
Hibernate works fine on most modern laptop hardware. It screws up on desktops, generally because of driver or hardware incompatibilities.
My laptop hibernates when I shut the lid. It pops right back up when I open it. I watch DVDs, etc. It's all good. It works like the OP says it should.
My laptop, however, is too big to get out and sit on one of those fold-down trays in an airplane. It'd be cool to be able to just reach into the back, plug in headphones, and have it work like an iPod (no mouse/keyboard/screen) needed. No power is being wasted on the display, because the lids shut and it's not in use.
If it came with a remote, I could plug it into the TV in a hotel, and use it like a standalone, without having to get out of bed to FF/RW.
All of this could be done with software, though.
That's the idea. The CPU barely does anything, and can be throttled back.
How well it works in RL, we'll see.
There's more to power usage than just the CPU. Consider watching a DVD - you've got the dvd-rom spinning and its motors grinding away reading the disc, that sucks power (a device I normally don't use on a laptop).
Chances are, if you're on a plane, you've got the backlight jacked all the way up, and the volume on full through the headphone jack.
And all that dedicated hardware still sucks 'it down, especially if it's doing fancy post-processing jibber jabber. Bob and weave and all that.
It'll surely be more convenient to watch a movie or listen to a CD, since it would function like a standalone unit. As for the power savings, someone else can beta test that while I wait for the results.
Do you, or any of the other slashbots get it?
This is what the device does when you turn it on:
- Checks for disc in drive
- If disc is present, and is a DVD or CD Audio Disc, the device boots the "media player" burned into roms on the board
- If not, it boots normally.
This is really dual-booting, except one of the OS's lives in firmware.
In other words, it doesn't "save RAM" when running windows, it doesn't have to do with Windows Update. It doesn't have anything to do with windows at all.
It's as if you booted from a floppy that had a linux-based media player on it.