Pfft. The RI/MPAA business model was flawed from the get go. Analog technologies could transmit the signal just as well (AM style, w00p).
Copying Records would have been a bit more difficult, but it wouldn't have been long before someone figured out how to do it cheaply. The only hope they could have had for locking down their content was to put it in a theater, and frisk everyone going in/coming out.
5k is 5k. It pays bills. It does work. And who better to give the stipend to than College kids, who you can then later interview to work at your organization, and they've been bought into other organizations as well.
Personally, I'm hoping to get to work with GNOME, and with systems integration in my own area. Gotta love Google.
The problem is, we're really at a point where we're seeing the degredation of the Klingon empire, as they fight more and more enemies, and fight internal pressure. TNG shows a lot of this occuring.
My guess would be it wouldn't be too long until the empire fell apart completely, and the technologies of the empire get integrated into the Federation. Of course, cloaking, the best technology they could hope to have, they will get and not use for some unknown reason..
Face it, with the bringing in of the Cardassians, the Klingon were obsolete. The Cardassians are like the more intellegent battle hungry people, with better technologies (Romulan influence). All that's left is the Klingon demise, which would also make a great movie plot..
As a fan of Star Trek, I too love the story and the play of the characters, but as a curious mind, I'd like to know more about the History of Star Trek, and how they got that sophisicated technology.
While the purposes of some devices make sense, others seem to make none at all. Why can't someone program a transporter to transport something like a spacecraft, far far away? Why can't someone program a replicator to replicate an entire spacecraft, therefore having infinite war time production capabilities? These technologies don't have any practical limits as defined by the shows and movies as of now, but given a bit more history, we could easily see why.
Besides, there has already been ground laid to see the past. Enterprise (the show) took us back to pre-photon torpedos, and the seemingly magic replicator. All I ask is a story accellerated in this time era, like what they did with The Next Generation.
The beauty of Star Trek is that the explanation of these technologies is implicit; nobody has to sit down and say "this does that". The story guides us to understanding, when someone goes up to something and uses it. The problem is, some of these technologies require a definition that we've missed, it's too far back in the timeline for implicit definition and is quite frankly taken for granted by the characters.
You are completely correct, and if I had mod points you'd have them.
Star Trek was about the Final Frontier, where no man had gone before, and what all we encountered in that newly found universe. The last few Star Treks have all been about the Enterprise, which in my opinion, is what the TV show should have been about, not the movies.
I'm just glad they haven't hung it up yet. There is still so much out there to love, so much to be created. The Star Trek franchise can go on for thousands of years, even towards Andromeda and extra-galactic travel! We shouldn't be limited by the Flagship of the United Federation of Planets.
Kirk is also dead in the future timelines, or not even imagined yet in the past timeline.
Why not tell the story around Kirk. He was out in the rims of the Galaxy; tell what was going on at home, how the next starships were being built, how we meet the Romulans, or the Bejor people. etc. etc.
Who knows. Kirk isn't Star Trek though; he was Star Trek. Star Trek has since became a wonderful, creative environment for new captains and new wars. It's like saying all of Star Wars was Darth Vader; while he is very central to the story, there are plenty of the elements outside of it. And that's even an incomplete metaphor, because people like Janeway are completely detatched from the Kirk legacy (not to mention everyone else..)
I think you're one of the few traditionalists left, but I think the time for the traditionalists in Star Trek has left. With Enterprise, we went back to the very beginning of warp travel of us humans, making a story line fully incomplete from that point, to the point of the first Enterprise's mission into deep space.
Personally, I want to know more about where it all began; they have so much technology in the future that, while we have basis for it, it's so far beyond tracing back to something we have now, that we just have to accept it as fact, and move on. Things like the transport system, the Enterprise's energy systems, etc. etc. All we need is a movie in that time period to answer some of those questions, in my opinion.
Tell a great story, but leave it wholy unfinished, sit back on it for a good 20 years, and then decide the technology is there to finish it. Make billions.
For Star Trek, I believe it will help to give it some time, but it's more risky. The public expects so much already, and a pause in the franchise may bring people into thinking it was a sellout.
Besides, they have great grounds for more movies. Star Trek has much more unexplored space than Star Wars in my opinion (Star Wars tends to be a linear story, whereas Star Trek is a story following small subsets of the universe at a time; you could have a Star Trek completely without humans if you'd like), and I think they should be exploiting that advantage.
My apologies, I misread and misinformed the whole thing; I was thinking the whole time proceedural and not functional.. No posting on/. in the AM hours for me:).
I disagree. The problem has been defined, but not specified. The problem is designing a program to do a task, and then within a fixed amount of time, redesigning the program to do a similar task. Though language considerations normally wouldn't be considered so early, we can start making some decisions already.
First of all, we know we have to use a functional language to design the program. This throws out C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, Objective C, Perl, Python, Parrot, etc. etc. Next, we know that we're going to have to redesign, which means we probably want to throw out programs that tend to be a bit more tedious to design in. Languages like Assembly (general), Fortran, etc. leave in this cut. So what we're left with are languages like C and Pascal, PHP (in my world; some people call it OO, but I call it retardedly functional), Shell scripting, Maple (hey, it works), BASIC, Lisp. From there, we can begin to choose a specific language for a specific problem.
PHP comes quickly to mind. Many, many people call it a Object Oriented language, but when it comes down to it, it's really just scriptable C. Perl, Parrot and Python are all OO throwing them out of consideration. BASIC (the non-visual flavors), Pascal, C, and Haskell are all really good choices as well.
And if you really want to have some fun, write it in assembly, though this option will make you very machine-conscious.
The thing is, in the scenario you described, you wouldn't have the option to change the kind of bridge after it was in construction.
This is a lot of what ends up happening to software. A simple project gets completely finished, but ends up being too rigid and when someone wants to add functionality to it, they end up having to rewrite the whole damned thing.
This is why we moved from more functional languages, to more Object Oriented languages. If someone writes a program abstract enough, then adding functionality is as simple as throwing in a new object, inhieriting, and you're done.
For a civil engineer, it would be like modular construction; if you built a bridge out of modular sections and realized that you needed two more lanes, you could double up the number of sections and run two parallel to each other.
This competition is here to demonstrate that this kind of abstraction can be brought to functional programming as well. Things like function pointers, generic structures, generic pointers, and type casting (most of these being very Cish/Pascalish things because that's all of the functional programming I do) can make a functional language more abstract. But the cost is that these things tend to be a little bit more tricky.
I still say the best example anyone can give of the success of Functional programming is the Linux Kernel itself. It's abstract enough to have a plugin interface for file systems and general use objects, device drivers, etc, but it's functional enough to be very fast and very memory effecient.
This is often true because functional languages are not very abstract. They tend to be very mathematic and algorithmically driven.
Object Oriented design requires one to think in a way more human, and less mathematic/computerish. We classify things as "objects", we give objects "methods" and "properties". Functional languages only have properties (coeffecients and inputs, etc).
Refactoring OO programs tends to be a hobby, more than a necessity, as I find it. Every now and again you'll hit something that greatly speeds up the code, but more likely it just makes the code either look better, or more usable if you were to plug it into something else, neither of which I end up doing very much.
Good luck when you get into more complex problems.
For simple, algorithm-scale problems, planning isn't really required, it's done implicitly by the problem itself. Things like solving questions are often algorithmically scaled. "You have N sailors with numbers pinned on their shirts from 1 to N. Starting with sailor 1, you go around in a circle, telling every Mth sailor to leave the circle. If you continue forcing sailors out of the circle, what is the number of the last remaining sailor?".
The problem is when you get to problems like "Make a client that plays this game and gets the maximum score possible" tend to get more complex, but are on a scale of multi-algorithm; it often requires more than one proceedure running side by side to find the best outcome.
These higher level questions require a bit more thinking, and eventually breaking down and saying "this is how I'm going to solve this problem, this is how this one's taken care of, and this is the code that glues the two together." And believe it or not, that's planning.
Lol, your post really made me smile for some reason; like all of the conversations I spent during high school with my friends afflicted by this "Gene". In my journalling I always called us "The Center" (if you've ever seen the TV show, you'd understand. The Center is basically a corps of kids with a talent for solving the most complex problems, they trained them from a very, very young age to simply break problems and solve them, teaching them to be able to pick up a book and within a few hours of reading and trial and error, do anything), and we'd often discuss everything from the mechanization of the work force (Fast food was always a huge topic; McDonalds could spend a bit of money and develop robots to do pretty much everything they currently require humans to do, especially the registers/drive thru), to computers, to engines, everything anyone in the group could come up with.
The saddest part I think is that we aren't that rare, and we're really not at any advantage to anyone else. In a free market system, it's best to be a highly skilled laborer like the Artisans of the past, because those positions often pay more, and you usually end up doing something that you enjoy doing.
I'd entertain the thought of starting a company just to generate Intellectual Property, however; companies like Microsoft and Big Blue are pretty much there already, except the problem usually ends up that they are the ones who have to implement and use what they patent. A company like this would be more like Google; everyone comes in, does their own thing, makes a patent and moves on.
Anyways, keep in touch. You never know when the "Pretender-detector" will come into light;).
My younger years I consider to be 12 and below; as a child, we have very simple and sometimes primative thoughts, but sometimes its exactly those thoughts that propogate into being, and actually make money. I remember when I was younger my little brother showing me a drawing of a toothbrush with a tube of toothpaste as a handle, saying if he had one of those he'd never care about brushing his teeth again. Fast forward ten years, and we have mechanical, self-pasting toothbrushes, a simple, childhood idea, came to life.
Secondly, as to imagination; I can honestly say it's one of my greatest limitations. The problem with imaginations is that it takes things like physics and computational time and thermodynamics and throws it all out the window. I think the greatest challenge is actually getting things out of imagination, and into practice. For example, while designing my solution to a source control app (like CVS, but not so annoying, sure I know about alternatives, but I figured what the hell, maybe I'll learn something), I couldn't ever get anything solid to come out because my imagination kept throwing me towards ways I could implement it, but none that were any better than others. Databases vs flat files. Differences vs full copies. Compression/Encryption vs Metadata indexing. Too many choices, too many ways I could do things.
And if you're putting an egotistical interface on something that's just a general problem, then you've got issues of your own to deal with. My problem is simple; I don't know what I want to do. I'm just a shmuck sitting in college, burning my time away. And I'd rather not be, but it seems the only choice, as you can't get a degree that says "Task Monkey" or "Give me a task, time and resources." I'm not even saying I'm the best at anything. I'm saying I'm best at nothing, but average at everything.
Trust me, I'm way over myself. I hate when people call me a know-it-all, because nobody does and that's obvious. I'm a know-a-lot because I care to know a lot about a lot of things. I know about cars because I like to drive them and work on them occasionally, but I doubt if I could become an automechanic overnight. I know about computer software and hardware, but I'm not the next Bill Gates or Michael Dell, more likely the next guy you call for tech support who tells you to reboot and pray. I know about physics and mathematics, but I'm not Einstien or Gauss or Newton.
Lastly, futility comes from indecision on my part; I just feel like there's nothing I can do because there's everything I can do, to state it as plainly as I can. It's not helpless or hopeless. I just worry about my life playing out scenes from Office Space or American Beauty.
No, I think you've missed the passivity (forgive my word creation) of the saying. When I was told "You can do anything when you put your mind to it", I wasn't told that "anything" was statically defined to "any one thing". In fact, I wasn't told that it said anything about quanity or value of what I did at all. Just that the possibilies were endless if I chose to put my mind to it. And that's how I've grown up understanding it.
The irony of that post is, I often find myself doing exactly that. Sitting at a blank sheet of paper, thinking about what I want to draw, eventually getting no where.
Throw one line on that piece of paper and it's instantly like "Oh, that line looks like.." and the whole image draws itself (though IANAn Artist; sometimes a man's just gotta draw). Didn't know it was an actual phenomena.
Slashdot Mirror
Pfft. The RI/MPAA business model was flawed from the get go. Analog technologies could transmit the signal just as well (AM style, w00p).
Copying Records would have been a bit more difficult, but it wouldn't have been long before someone figured out how to do it cheaply. The only hope they could have had for locking down their content was to put it in a theater, and frisk everyone going in/coming out.
5k is 5k. It pays bills. It does work. And who better to give the stipend to than College kids, who you can then later interview to work at your organization, and they've been bought into other organizations as well.
Personally, I'm hoping to get to work with GNOME, and with systems integration in my own area. Gotta love Google.
How about a swiss army knife, car keys, and a can opener?
Oh, and a towel, just in case.
Don't worry, you'll get her yet; Hell is Exothermic remember?
The problem is, we're really at a point where we're seeing the degredation of the Klingon empire, as they fight more and more enemies, and fight internal pressure. TNG shows a lot of this occuring.
My guess would be it wouldn't be too long until the empire fell apart completely, and the technologies of the empire get integrated into the Federation. Of course, cloaking, the best technology they could hope to have, they will get and not use for some unknown reason..
Face it, with the bringing in of the Cardassians, the Klingon were obsolete. The Cardassians are like the more intellegent battle hungry people, with better technologies (Romulan influence). All that's left is the Klingon demise, which would also make a great movie plot..
As a fan of Star Trek, I too love the story and the play of the characters, but as a curious mind, I'd like to know more about the History of Star Trek, and how they got that sophisicated technology.
While the purposes of some devices make sense, others seem to make none at all. Why can't someone program a transporter to transport something like a spacecraft, far far away? Why can't someone program a replicator to replicate an entire spacecraft, therefore having infinite war time production capabilities? These technologies don't have any practical limits as defined by the shows and movies as of now, but given a bit more history, we could easily see why.
Besides, there has already been ground laid to see the past. Enterprise (the show) took us back to pre-photon torpedos, and the seemingly magic replicator. All I ask is a story accellerated in this time era, like what they did with The Next Generation.
The beauty of Star Trek is that the explanation of these technologies is implicit; nobody has to sit down and say "this does that". The story guides us to understanding, when someone goes up to something and uses it. The problem is, some of these technologies require a definition that we've missed, it's too far back in the timeline for implicit definition and is quite frankly taken for granted by the characters.
You are completely correct, and if I had mod points you'd have them.
Star Trek was about the Final Frontier, where no man had gone before, and what all we encountered in that newly found universe. The last few Star Treks have all been about the Enterprise, which in my opinion, is what the TV show should have been about, not the movies.
I'm just glad they haven't hung it up yet. There is still so much out there to love, so much to be created. The Star Trek franchise can go on for thousands of years, even towards Andromeda and extra-galactic travel! We shouldn't be limited by the Flagship of the United Federation of Planets.
Kirk is also dead in the future timelines, or not even imagined yet in the past timeline.
Why not tell the story around Kirk. He was out in the rims of the Galaxy; tell what was going on at home, how the next starships were being built, how we meet the Romulans, or the Bejor people. etc. etc.
Who knows. Kirk isn't Star Trek though; he was Star Trek. Star Trek has since became a wonderful, creative environment for new captains and new wars. It's like saying all of Star Wars was Darth Vader; while he is very central to the story, there are plenty of the elements outside of it. And that's even an incomplete metaphor, because people like Janeway are completely detatched from the Kirk legacy (not to mention everyone else..)
I think you're one of the few traditionalists left, but I think the time for the traditionalists in Star Trek has left. With Enterprise, we went back to the very beginning of warp travel of us humans, making a story line fully incomplete from that point, to the point of the first Enterprise's mission into deep space.
Personally, I want to know more about where it all began; they have so much technology in the future that, while we have basis for it, it's so far beyond tracing back to something we have now, that we just have to accept it as fact, and move on. Things like the transport system, the Enterprise's energy systems, etc. etc. All we need is a movie in that time period to answer some of those questions, in my opinion.
Worked for Star Wars.
Tell a great story, but leave it wholy unfinished, sit back on it for a good 20 years, and then decide the technology is there to finish it. Make billions.
For Star Trek, I believe it will help to give it some time, but it's more risky. The public expects so much already, and a pause in the franchise may bring people into thinking it was a sellout.
Besides, they have great grounds for more movies. Star Trek has much more unexplored space than Star Wars in my opinion (Star Wars tends to be a linear story, whereas Star Trek is a story following small subsets of the universe at a time; you could have a Star Trek completely without humans if you'd like), and I think they should be exploiting that advantage.
My apologies, I misread and misinformed the whole thing; I was thinking the whole time proceedural and not functional.. No posting on /. in the AM hours for me :).
Ah you caught me, I must have misread the blurb (didn't bother reading the articles). My mistake.
I disagree. The problem has been defined, but not specified. The problem is designing a program to do a task, and then within a fixed amount of time, redesigning the program to do a similar task. Though language considerations normally wouldn't be considered so early, we can start making some decisions already.
First of all, we know we have to use a functional language to design the program. This throws out C++, C#, Java, Visual Basic, Objective C, Perl, Python, Parrot, etc. etc. Next, we know that we're going to have to redesign, which means we probably want to throw out programs that tend to be a bit more tedious to design in. Languages like Assembly (general), Fortran, etc. leave in this cut. So what we're left with are languages like C and Pascal, PHP (in my world; some people call it OO, but I call it retardedly functional), Shell scripting, Maple (hey, it works), BASIC, Lisp. From there, we can begin to choose a specific language for a specific problem.
PHP comes quickly to mind. Many, many people call it a Object Oriented language, but when it comes down to it, it's really just scriptable C. Perl, Parrot and Python are all OO throwing them out of consideration. BASIC (the non-visual flavors), Pascal, C, and Haskell are all really good choices as well.
And if you really want to have some fun, write it in assembly, though this option will make you very machine-conscious.
The thing is, in the scenario you described, you wouldn't have the option to change the kind of bridge after it was in construction.
This is a lot of what ends up happening to software. A simple project gets completely finished, but ends up being too rigid and when someone wants to add functionality to it, they end up having to rewrite the whole damned thing.
This is why we moved from more functional languages, to more Object Oriented languages. If someone writes a program abstract enough, then adding functionality is as simple as throwing in a new object, inhieriting, and you're done.
For a civil engineer, it would be like modular construction; if you built a bridge out of modular sections and realized that you needed two more lanes, you could double up the number of sections and run two parallel to each other.
This competition is here to demonstrate that this kind of abstraction can be brought to functional programming as well. Things like function pointers, generic structures, generic pointers, and type casting (most of these being very Cish/Pascalish things because that's all of the functional programming I do) can make a functional language more abstract. But the cost is that these things tend to be a little bit more tricky.
I still say the best example anyone can give of the success of Functional programming is the Linux Kernel itself. It's abstract enough to have a plugin interface for file systems and general use objects, device drivers, etc, but it's functional enough to be very fast and very memory effecient.
grr, should use the preview button;
..code WORK better or more usable.. neither of which ends up very useful to me...sigh.
This is often true because functional languages are not very abstract. They tend to be very mathematic and algorithmically driven.
Object Oriented design requires one to think in a way more human, and less mathematic/computerish. We classify things as "objects", we give objects "methods" and "properties". Functional languages only have properties (coeffecients and inputs, etc).
Refactoring OO programs tends to be a hobby, more than a necessity, as I find it. Every now and again you'll hit something that greatly speeds up the code, but more likely it just makes the code either look better, or more usable if you were to plug it into something else, neither of which I end up doing very much.
Good luck when you get into more complex problems.
For simple, algorithm-scale problems, planning isn't really required, it's done implicitly by the problem itself. Things like solving questions are often algorithmically scaled. "You have N sailors with numbers pinned on their shirts from 1 to N. Starting with sailor 1, you go around in a circle, telling every Mth sailor to leave the circle. If you continue forcing sailors out of the circle, what is the number of the last remaining sailor?".
The problem is when you get to problems like "Make a client that plays this game and gets the maximum score possible" tend to get more complex, but are on a scale of multi-algorithm; it often requires more than one proceedure running side by side to find the best outcome.
These higher level questions require a bit more thinking, and eventually breaking down and saying "this is how I'm going to solve this problem, this is how this one's taken care of, and this is the code that glues the two together." And believe it or not, that's planning.
So.. what are they discussing exactly?
Thanks for the incredible good advice, I'm just sorry you posted as a Coward. Someone who actually understands a cry for help eh. :)
Lol, your post really made me smile for some reason; like all of the conversations I spent during high school with my friends afflicted by this "Gene". In my journalling I always called us "The Center" (if you've ever seen the TV show, you'd understand. The Center is basically a corps of kids with a talent for solving the most complex problems, they trained them from a very, very young age to simply break problems and solve them, teaching them to be able to pick up a book and within a few hours of reading and trial and error, do anything), and we'd often discuss everything from the mechanization of the work force (Fast food was always a huge topic; McDonalds could spend a bit of money and develop robots to do pretty much everything they currently require humans to do, especially the registers/drive thru), to computers, to engines, everything anyone in the group could come up with.
;).
The saddest part I think is that we aren't that rare, and we're really not at any advantage to anyone else. In a free market system, it's best to be a highly skilled laborer like the Artisans of the past, because those positions often pay more, and you usually end up doing something that you enjoy doing.
I'd entertain the thought of starting a company just to generate Intellectual Property, however; companies like Microsoft and Big Blue are pretty much there already, except the problem usually ends up that they are the ones who have to implement and use what they patent. A company like this would be more like Google; everyone comes in, does their own thing, makes a patent and moves on.
Anyways, keep in touch. You never know when the "Pretender-detector" will come into light
Hehe, just be a Republican or a Democrat and vote in your leaders accordingly ;).
Great cure for AIDs, hunger, starvation, and the human condition.
My younger years I consider to be 12 and below; as a child, we have very simple and sometimes primative thoughts, but sometimes its exactly those thoughts that propogate into being, and actually make money. I remember when I was younger my little brother showing me a drawing of a toothbrush with a tube of toothpaste as a handle, saying if he had one of those he'd never care about brushing his teeth again. Fast forward ten years, and we have mechanical, self-pasting toothbrushes, a simple, childhood idea, came to life.
Secondly, as to imagination; I can honestly say it's one of my greatest limitations. The problem with imaginations is that it takes things like physics and computational time and thermodynamics and throws it all out the window. I think the greatest challenge is actually getting things out of imagination, and into practice. For example, while designing my solution to a source control app (like CVS, but not so annoying, sure I know about alternatives, but I figured what the hell, maybe I'll learn something), I couldn't ever get anything solid to come out because my imagination kept throwing me towards ways I could implement it, but none that were any better than others. Databases vs flat files. Differences vs full copies. Compression/Encryption vs Metadata indexing. Too many choices, too many ways I could do things.
And if you're putting an egotistical interface on something that's just a general problem, then you've got issues of your own to deal with. My problem is simple; I don't know what I want to do. I'm just a shmuck sitting in college, burning my time away. And I'd rather not be, but it seems the only choice, as you can't get a degree that says "Task Monkey" or "Give me a task, time and resources." I'm not even saying I'm the best at anything. I'm saying I'm best at nothing, but average at everything.
Trust me, I'm way over myself. I hate when people call me a know-it-all, because nobody does and that's obvious. I'm a know-a-lot because I care to know a lot about a lot of things. I know about cars because I like to drive them and work on them occasionally, but I doubt if I could become an automechanic overnight. I know about computer software and hardware, but I'm not the next Bill Gates or Michael Dell, more likely the next guy you call for tech support who tells you to reboot and pray. I know about physics and mathematics, but I'm not Einstien or Gauss or Newton.
Lastly, futility comes from indecision on my part; I just feel like there's nothing I can do because there's everything I can do, to state it as plainly as I can. It's not helpless or hopeless. I just worry about my life playing out scenes from Office Space or American Beauty.
No, I think you've missed the passivity (forgive my word creation) of the saying. When I was told "You can do anything when you put your mind to it", I wasn't told that "anything" was statically defined to "any one thing". In fact, I wasn't told that it said anything about quanity or value of what I did at all. Just that the possibilies were endless if I chose to put my mind to it. And that's how I've grown up understanding it.
Logic says imply nothing.
The irony of that post is, I often find myself doing exactly that. Sitting at a blank sheet of paper, thinking about what I want to draw, eventually getting no where.
Throw one line on that piece of paper and it's instantly like "Oh, that line looks like.." and the whole image draws itself (though IANAn Artist; sometimes a man's just gotta draw). Didn't know it was an actual phenomena.