You're half-right... You either press the voice button on the remote, or say "Hi TV"... It's always listening for the latter, but not sure whether that processing is done locally or remotely.
(I have a Samsung smart TV... Tried out the voice recognition, decided it was useless and stupid, and disabled it.)
When we look out the window, we see one of three things, depending on living situation:
1) An air shaft 2) Other buildings, which block our view of such interesting phenomena 3) A beautiful skyline... Except the people that see this are too rich to care.
So yes, we fail to notice...
Then it shows up on TV, and since we're busy doing ten things at once, we think it's just a commercial or a movie trailer, and ignore it. Either that, or we're so bored that we think, "Hey, that'll liven things up a bit!"
(I am a New Yorker, but I'm mostly joking about most of the above)
Since we are speaking microseconds here, is not the main advantage being the closest or even within the final exchange computer? The competition is obviously biased in favor, not of the best programmers, but of those privileged enough to be located nearest to the apex of the whole system.
Yep, the serious HFT groups run their boxes as close as possible to the exchange... Either they rent space on the floor (Or in the same building), or they're right next-door.
Someone mentioned that "BASSE" can refer to a building... "Robert Wilson Hall"...
So...
"FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE" "EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN"
So I wonder if the "BASSE" building's sixteenth floor has a room whose number is equal to Frank Shoemaker's employee number or phone extension...
Maybe there's something in that room that would be needed to decode the rest of the message.
Or maybe "BASSE SIXTEEN" refers to the building (It has sixteen floors), and it's asking for the employee number of Robert Wilson, the namesake of the building and a former director at Fermilab.
I didn't start anything like that until college, sadly... Some machines in the CS lab were dual-booting BSD and NT (One logon for the lab, not for each person), and I got nostalgic when I got bored and brought up QBasic...
Simulated the BSD logon prompt... It'd accept their username, then reject their password three times as if they'd mistyped it... Then it would start playing the hamsterdance through the PC speaker.
Sure, they could Ctrl+C out of it... But I hope I gave some people a laugh.
Stardock is amazing for the customer, but it won't work on a large scale, with "popular" games (Even the big-budget games they offer are generally several years old). They're basically trusting that if they give us something at a reasonable price without restrictions, we won't take advantage of it.
I'm sure most of Slashdot applauds this kind of business model, as do I, but you know the publishers wouldn't dream of allowing it for their blockbuster titles, because the publishers haven't gotten it through their head that no matter how well you copy-protect a game, it WILL be cracked and pirated.
Personally, though, I hope they do manage to expand the service... I've been using it since they started that flat-rate plan (Well, that's gone now - Not sustainable), and it really is a great system. Unless they're quietly watermarking everything (No objection to that), I haven't noticed any DRM at all. Click to install, click to play... Easy.
Ugh, I sound like an advertisement... Ok, so there are some crappy games on the service, but there are good ones too. Check demos and reviews, and filter out the good ones.
I do agree with you on the "programming is a day job" part, mainly because I'm going through the transition myself. I used to spend a lot of time at home playing around in different languages, writing my own games and utilities, endlessly writing and rewriting websites... Now, I just want to go home and vegetate in front of a game or the TV...
The change? Full-time job. After spending a full day programming to earn my paycheck, it just becomes mentally separated from what I do in my spare time. I kind of miss the old college days when I could just spend hours and hours doing it for fun, but now I just want to zone out.
As for the new technology part, I somewhat agree... A good programmer shouldn't be ranting about how everything MUST be done on Ruby-on-Rails, because that's the new fad (Yes, I realize it no longer is. That's the point)... A good programmer will look at a new technology, look at the needs of the project/business, and decide whether or not that technology is a good fit. If it's a major improvement that fixes existing problems, then he'll start pushing it.
On the other hand, when you're interviewing a programmer, and ask them about some personal project or technology they worked with, getting your ear talked off is a good sign, because this ties into the whole "passion" part. If they find this project or tech interesting enough to ramble on about, this is probably someone who's in the industry because they enjoy it, not because their high school guidance counselor told them it pays well.
So, on to social skills. Yes, you need to be able to communicate with and get along with other programmers, even those who aren't on the same level. Apart from that, the importance varies depending on the person's role. If they're going to be one programmer on a large team, working off design documents and style conventions, then it's not that important. If they're on a smaller team, and will be working directly with the business side to design parts of the application, then social skills become a necessity. Of course, if you find someone who just wants to sit in a dark room apart from the rest of the team, and just silently deliver code modules to them, then you might want to look elsewhere.
Qualifications... Degrees... I think the article was basically preaching against certifications, and in that respect I agree entirely. I don't care if someone passed a certification test by Microsoft or Sun... That means they know how to work with one specific area of technology, well enough to pass a test once. It doesn't say whether they can think for themselves, or adapt to a new situation.
On the other hand, an undergrad degree can be a good thing. You don't learn how to program in college (Well, I hope not), but you do learn how not to reinvent the wheel. You learn some standard algorithms, data structures, and methodologies, and you learn about lots of things that you'll consider useless at the time (Natural sciences, higher maths, etc), but will still influence the way you think. A master's degree or doctorate, well, I don't know... I've worked with PhDs who couldn't think outside the smallest box, and I've worked with a few who could work miracles. A dropout might be a bad sign (Though not a disqualifier, depending on other factors), but I wouldn't trust a PhD to necessarily be better than an MS or BS.
In short, you make some good points, but you're leaning toward the other extreme. Remember, you're looking for a programmer, not a corporate executive. This is about looking past the doublespeak and self-promotion and determining whether someone can write quality software.
On a side note... The phrase "working yourself out of a job" is starting to look really scary... I shouldn't have automated this place so well that I have nothing to do but post on slashdot...
Most languages are similar enough conceptually that any decent programmer can learn a new one fairly quickly. You won't be a wizard in a week, and you'll probably still need to keep a reference close at hand, but you'll be able to do what you need/want to do.
Of course, you do need a base, or weird syntax will throw you off... You've got the procedural/OOP languages, some of which use COBOL-style syntax (Like VB), some of which are bracket-land (Pascal/C/Java)... You've got functional languages like LISP or ML... You've got the weakly-typed scripting languages like Perl or LUA... You get the idea.
Once you've messed around with one or two of each general type, picking up a new language is like getting a new toy to play with. Or a new tool in your arsenal, if you're not into the whole "having fun" thing.
Because the little sandpit kid wouldn't give us his lunch money, so we had to beat him up and take it.
After all, we wouldn't want all of the other tough guys to think we were all talk and no action.
I know that sounds like something a bully would do, but this is -completely- different... No, really it is... Want to argue about it? Let's take this outside...
Bah, don't need security? My friend and I drove up to Toronto (From the NYC area) to visit some family he has up there (And also to see the http://www.purepwnage.com/ premiere). We got stuck in some traffic on the highway, and hit the border crossing near Niagra Falls at around 1am. So we presented our valid New York State drivers licenses, expecting for a quick pass-through so we could get to his uncle's house and get some much-needed sleep...
We were taken out of my friend's car, searched, our belongings searched, his car thoroughly searched... Hell, they even made him turn on his laptop (I left mine home) so they could spend fifteen minutes checking to make sure it didn't have any illegal porn. It took five border cops a half hour to make sure a couple of computer geeks were ok, and we were just going up there for a couple days.
On the way back, we made sure to time our journey so we'd hit the border mid-day. The border cop took a quick glance at our licenses and waved us through with a "Welcome back".
So don't assume it's just our guys who are assholes.
Interesting point of view... I'm not sure I subscribe to it (Or entirely disagree for that matter), but you have to see the image problem...
Before: Iraq is a nasty dictatorship, but is for the most part stable. Everyone hates Saddam for killing his own people During: US invades, removes the government, arms everyone, and pulls out After: Chaos ensues, the country splits up, wars start between factions, thousands or millions die (More than were dying before) before they finally (If ever) decide to just live their own lives as separate nation-states.
With your approach, this seems a likely scenario. Who do you think the world would blame for all the deaths? I mean at least with the current situation, Dubya and friends can claim they're trying to create peace.
* For the record, I think we should have just "unofficially" assassinated Saddam, located his heavy munitions (And WMDs, if they even existed at the time, which they probably didn't) and "unofficially" caused an "accident" that rendered them unusable, and skipped the whole invasion thing
I can trump that... I spent six months rewriting an entire portfolio management system for a hedge fund (Managing around $2B at the time), that had been done entirely in Excel VBA, albeit with a few C++ DLLs doing model calculations.
It used to be Access-backed, but thankfully that had been changed to Sybase before I arrived, or I may have just run away screaming.
It wasn't the zombies... You can't blame them for everything! Basically, it went something like this...
American People: We want.... A SHRUBBERY! *creepy music* Republicans: What!? American People: One that looks nice... And not too expensive... NOW GO!...Time passes...
Republicans: We couldn't find a shrubbery, but we found a slightly-warped bush. If we chain a few of them together, it would kind of be a shrubbery, wouldn't it?
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we got Bush and Chainy-- Err, Cheney.
This is why I'm a programmer, not a comedian.
Re:Yes, there are much better ways to spend our mo
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
Trust me, you don't want to start a creationism debate on Slashdot. I'll be nice and overlook that part of your post.
1) Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but why is it so hard to believe that with the billions and billions of stars in the universe (Yeah, I'm probably off by a few magnitudes), more than one might have developed life? I know you like to think that humanity is somehow special and unique, but doesn't that seem a little naive?
2) Hostile aliens, huh? Sure, it's possible. It's also possible that they'd find us first. If they're advanced enough to mount an interplanetary offensive and wipe us out, don't you think they'd be aware enough of their surroundings to find us anyway?
3) You think we should work on researching our own planet instead... Why do you think this is a binary decision? Do you think the entire science budget of the planet is being focused on SETI? No, they're getting a laughably-small amount of money and resources (Most of which is privately donated, not government funded), and guess what... We ARE researching our own planet! That's the great thing about having all these little homo-sapiens running around. We can do more than one thing at a time!
Research takes time. This isn't like Civilization, where if you throw enough money at the research project, you can buy it instantly. Even if SETI had a hundred times the budget, it would still take time. Even if we devoted ten times as much money to curing cancer, it would still take time. Why not give each project what it needs to move along at a reasonable pace, and develop everything in parallel? Multi-tasking is a good thing.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that there AREN'T other races out there, and I think most of these funny little wars and religious conflicts would go away pretty quickly if "Us" and "Them" stopped being "My side of the border" and "Your side of the border", and suddenly became "Humans" and "Aliens". We humans have a nasty little habit of finding someone or something different to be "against", even if there's no real conflict. Imagine suddenly there are real outsiders... Real men from space, or whatever they are... Suddenly you, me, that tribe in the middle of the African desert, those guys over in rural China, and the people in Iraq or Afghanistan don't seem very different anymore. MAYBE if aliens became the new "Them", world peace wouldn't be such a pipe dream.
Notice I didn't even bother with possible technological advances from discovering a more developed race. Sure, it might happen, but even finding a bunch of spear-toting tentacled slime blobs would be pretty significant.
Anyway, that's just my depreciated $0.02... Take it or leave it.
Slashdot Mirror
You're half-right... You either press the voice button on the remote, or say "Hi TV"... It's always listening for the latter, but not sure whether that processing is done locally or remotely.
(I have a Samsung smart TV... Tried out the voice recognition, decided it was useless and stupid, and disabled it.)
When we look out the window, we see one of three things, depending on living situation:
1) An air shaft
2) Other buildings, which block our view of such interesting phenomena
3) A beautiful skyline... Except the people that see this are too rich to care.
So yes, we fail to notice...
Then it shows up on TV, and since we're busy doing ten things at once, we think it's just a commercial or a movie trailer, and ignore it. Either that, or we're so bored that we think, "Hey, that'll liven things up a bit!"
(I am a New Yorker, but I'm mostly joking about most of the above)
Since we are speaking microseconds here, is not the main advantage being the closest or even within the final exchange computer?
The competition is obviously biased in favor, not of the best programmers, but of those privileged enough to be located nearest to the apex of the whole system.
Yep, the serious HFT groups run their boxes as close as possible to the exchange... Either they rent space on the floor (Or in the same building), or they're right next-door.
But the graphics are a lot better, so the headshots are even more boom.
Someone mentioned that "BASSE" can refer to a building... "Robert Wilson Hall"...
So...
"FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE"
"EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN"
So I wonder if the "BASSE" building's sixteenth floor has a room whose number is equal to Frank Shoemaker's employee number or phone extension...
Maybe there's something in that room that would be needed to decode the rest of the message.
Or maybe "BASSE SIXTEEN" refers to the building (It has sixteen floors), and it's asking for the employee number of Robert Wilson, the namesake of the building and a former director at Fermilab.
I didn't start anything like that until college, sadly... Some machines in the CS lab were dual-booting BSD and NT (One logon for the lab, not for each person), and I got nostalgic when I got bored and brought up QBasic...
Simulated the BSD logon prompt... It'd accept their username, then reject their password three times as if they'd mistyped it... Then it would start playing the hamsterdance through the PC speaker.
Sure, they could Ctrl+C out of it... But I hope I gave some people a laugh.
Woohoo! Fusion-powered floor lamp!
Tonight? Can't help ya there...
Just wait for Heroes to come back. Only major show I still watch.
Stardock is amazing for the customer, but it won't work on a large scale, with "popular" games (Even the big-budget games they offer are generally several years old). They're basically trusting that if they give us something at a reasonable price without restrictions, we won't take advantage of it.
I'm sure most of Slashdot applauds this kind of business model, as do I, but you know the publishers wouldn't dream of allowing it for their blockbuster titles, because the publishers haven't gotten it through their head that no matter how well you copy-protect a game, it WILL be cracked and pirated.
Personally, though, I hope they do manage to expand the service... I've been using it since they started that flat-rate plan (Well, that's gone now - Not sustainable), and it really is a great system. Unless they're quietly watermarking everything (No objection to that), I haven't noticed any DRM at all. Click to install, click to play... Easy.
Ugh, I sound like an advertisement... Ok, so there are some crappy games on the service, but there are good ones too. Check demos and reviews, and filter out the good ones.
I do agree with you on the "programming is a day job" part, mainly because I'm going through the transition myself. I used to spend a lot of time at home playing around in different languages, writing my own games and utilities, endlessly writing and rewriting websites... Now, I just want to go home and vegetate in front of a game or the TV...
The change? Full-time job. After spending a full day programming to earn my paycheck, it just becomes mentally separated from what I do in my spare time. I kind of miss the old college days when I could just spend hours and hours doing it for fun, but now I just want to zone out.
As for the new technology part, I somewhat agree... A good programmer shouldn't be ranting about how everything MUST be done on Ruby-on-Rails, because that's the new fad (Yes, I realize it no longer is. That's the point)... A good programmer will look at a new technology, look at the needs of the project/business, and decide whether or not that technology is a good fit. If it's a major improvement that fixes existing problems, then he'll start pushing it.
On the other hand, when you're interviewing a programmer, and ask them about some personal project or technology they worked with, getting your ear talked off is a good sign, because this ties into the whole "passion" part. If they find this project or tech interesting enough to ramble on about, this is probably someone who's in the industry because they enjoy it, not because their high school guidance counselor told them it pays well.
So, on to social skills. Yes, you need to be able to communicate with and get along with other programmers, even those who aren't on the same level. Apart from that, the importance varies depending on the person's role. If they're going to be one programmer on a large team, working off design documents and style conventions, then it's not that important. If they're on a smaller team, and will be working directly with the business side to design parts of the application, then social skills become a necessity. Of course, if you find someone who just wants to sit in a dark room apart from the rest of the team, and just silently deliver code modules to them, then you might want to look elsewhere.
Qualifications... Degrees... I think the article was basically preaching against certifications, and in that respect I agree entirely. I don't care if someone passed a certification test by Microsoft or Sun... That means they know how to work with one specific area of technology, well enough to pass a test once. It doesn't say whether they can think for themselves, or adapt to a new situation.
On the other hand, an undergrad degree can be a good thing. You don't learn how to program in college (Well, I hope not), but you do learn how not to reinvent the wheel. You learn some standard algorithms, data structures, and methodologies, and you learn about lots of things that you'll consider useless at the time (Natural sciences, higher maths, etc), but will still influence the way you think. A master's degree or doctorate, well, I don't know... I've worked with PhDs who couldn't think outside the smallest box, and I've worked with a few who could work miracles. A dropout might be a bad sign (Though not a disqualifier, depending on other factors), but I wouldn't trust a PhD to necessarily be better than an MS or BS.
In short, you make some good points, but you're leaning toward the other extreme. Remember, you're looking for a programmer, not a corporate executive. This is about looking past the doublespeak and self-promotion and determining whether someone can write quality software.
On a side note... The phrase "working yourself out of a job" is starting to look really scary... I shouldn't have automated this place so well that I have nothing to do but post on slashdot...
I partially agree...
Most languages are similar enough conceptually that any decent programmer can learn a new one fairly quickly. You won't be a wizard in a week, and you'll probably still need to keep a reference close at hand, but you'll be able to do what you need/want to do.
Of course, you do need a base, or weird syntax will throw you off... You've got the procedural/OOP languages, some of which use COBOL-style syntax (Like VB), some of which are bracket-land (Pascal/C/Java)... You've got functional languages like LISP or ML... You've got the weakly-typed scripting languages like Perl or LUA... You get the idea.
Once you've messed around with one or two of each general type, picking up a new language is like getting a new toy to play with. Or a new tool in your arsenal, if you're not into the whole "having fun" thing.
Love those B5 quotes...
"Zathras is used to this. Have sad life, likely have sad death. At least there is symmetry."
(Misquoted, I'm sure)
Careful, or he'll give ya the 132 salute.
Even without clicking the youtube link... Lieutenant-Commander Ivanova... Babylon 5. Good quote :)
I don't get it... Are you trying to deadpan, or did you completely miss his joke?
Because the little sandpit kid wouldn't give us his lunch money, so we had to beat him up and take it.
After all, we wouldn't want all of the other tough guys to think we were all talk and no action.
I know that sounds like something a bully would do, but this is -completely- different... No, really it is... Want to argue about it? Let's take this outside...
You were doomed from the start. If you posted fast enough to beat him, you would have set off the motion detectors.
Yes, and it looks like a Wolpertinger. Now that would be cool.
Bah, don't need security? My friend and I drove up to Toronto (From the NYC area) to visit some family he has up there (And also to see the http://www.purepwnage.com/ premiere). We got stuck in some traffic on the highway, and hit the border crossing near Niagra Falls at around 1am. So we presented our valid New York State drivers licenses, expecting for a quick pass-through so we could get to his uncle's house and get some much-needed sleep...
We were taken out of my friend's car, searched, our belongings searched, his car thoroughly searched... Hell, they even made him turn on his laptop (I left mine home) so they could spend fifteen minutes checking to make sure it didn't have any illegal porn. It took five border cops a half hour to make sure a couple of computer geeks were ok, and we were just going up there for a couple days.
On the way back, we made sure to time our journey so we'd hit the border mid-day. The border cop took a quick glance at our licenses and waved us through with a "Welcome back".
So don't assume it's just our guys who are assholes.
Interesting point of view... I'm not sure I subscribe to it (Or entirely disagree for that matter), but you have to see the image problem...
Before: Iraq is a nasty dictatorship, but is for the most part stable. Everyone hates Saddam for killing his own people
During: US invades, removes the government, arms everyone, and pulls out
After: Chaos ensues, the country splits up, wars start between factions, thousands or millions die (More than were dying before) before they finally (If ever) decide to just live their own lives as separate nation-states.
With your approach, this seems a likely scenario. Who do you think the world would blame for all the deaths? I mean at least with the current situation, Dubya and friends can claim they're trying to create peace.
* For the record, I think we should have just "unofficially" assassinated Saddam, located his heavy munitions (And WMDs, if they even existed at the time, which they probably didn't) and "unofficially" caused an "accident" that rendered them unusable, and skipped the whole invasion thing
I can trump that... I spent six months rewriting an entire portfolio management system for a hedge fund (Managing around $2B at the time), that had been done entirely in Excel VBA, albeit with a few C++ DLLs doing model calculations.
It used to be Access-backed, but thankfully that had been changed to Sybase before I arrived, or I may have just run away screaming.
It wasn't the zombies... You can't blame them for everything! Basically, it went something like this...
...Time passes...
American People: We want.... A SHRUBBERY!
*creepy music*
Republicans: What!?
American People: One that looks nice... And not too expensive... NOW GO!
Republicans: We couldn't find a shrubbery, but we found a slightly-warped bush. If we chain a few of them together, it would kind of be a shrubbery, wouldn't it?
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we got Bush and Chainy-- Err, Cheney.
This is why I'm a programmer, not a comedian.
Hahaha... You just made my day.
Trust me, you don't want to start a creationism debate on Slashdot. I'll be nice and overlook that part of your post.
1) Sure, Star Trek is fiction, but why is it so hard to believe that with the billions and billions of stars in the universe (Yeah, I'm probably off by a few magnitudes), more than one might have developed life? I know you like to think that humanity is somehow special and unique, but doesn't that seem a little naive?
2) Hostile aliens, huh? Sure, it's possible. It's also possible that they'd find us first. If they're advanced enough to mount an interplanetary offensive and wipe us out, don't you think they'd be aware enough of their surroundings to find us anyway?
3) You think we should work on researching our own planet instead... Why do you think this is a binary decision? Do you think the entire science budget of the planet is being focused on SETI? No, they're getting a laughably-small amount of money and resources (Most of which is privately donated, not government funded), and guess what... We ARE researching our own planet! That's the great thing about having all these little homo-sapiens running around. We can do more than one thing at a time!
Research takes time. This isn't like Civilization, where if you throw enough money at the research project, you can buy it instantly. Even if SETI had a hundred times the budget, it would still take time. Even if we devoted ten times as much money to curing cancer, it would still take time. Why not give each project what it needs to move along at a reasonable pace, and develop everything in parallel? Multi-tasking is a good thing.
Personally, I find it hard to believe that there AREN'T other races out there, and I think most of these funny little wars and religious conflicts would go away pretty quickly if "Us" and "Them" stopped being "My side of the border" and "Your side of the border", and suddenly became "Humans" and "Aliens". We humans have a nasty little habit of finding someone or something different to be "against", even if there's no real conflict. Imagine suddenly there are real outsiders... Real men from space, or whatever they are... Suddenly you, me, that tribe in the middle of the African desert, those guys over in rural China, and the people in Iraq or Afghanistan don't seem very different anymore. MAYBE if aliens became the new "Them", world peace wouldn't be such a pipe dream.
Notice I didn't even bother with possible technological advances from discovering a more developed race. Sure, it might happen, but even finding a bunch of spear-toting tentacled slime blobs would be pretty significant.
Anyway, that's just my depreciated $0.02... Take it or leave it.
Good move... I've got six 70s, a 65, a 52, and a 44... One of each class, and--
YES, I KNOW. I have no life...
But I tried quitting for about eight months, and realized all I replaced it with was watching bad television, so I went back.