Yes, coke, coffee or alcohol all dehydrate you (make you thirsty). In the case of alcohol, thats why drinking as much water as you can the night before helps in the morning after. And if you still hurt in the morning, drink more water (and coffee doesn't count, but apple juice does, water is still best).
I don't actually own a cat but I have looked after a few while their owners were on holidays. Their mess is nothing compared to the mess a horse can make.
I should a figured...
I turned of the nortons personal firewall on the new one, and pop, both PCs present and correct in the network neighbourhood...
without ipx but with netbeui (which maybe I don't need anymore)...
Nope, this colour has nothing in common with peas whirled or otherwise. It's more like violets or the original colour of Iris Flowers as painted by Vincent Van Gogh, which probably all look like whirled peas to you anyway.
Now combine that happy shade of purple with the glow of a neon sign...I hate to think what it looks like on a mac which tends to intensify colours that look ok on a PC
The Unreal thing uses a fair bit of this colour too.
OK now for the very original plot:
[*
As John Dalton, an ex-Marine assigned to patrol the edge of human space...
Unhappy patrolling the ass-end of nowhere...
Violent turmoil has errupted on your watch
*]
Does this feel like
David Weber "On Basilisk Station" to anyone? and his stuff was loosely based on the Hornblower series by CS Forrester (written before "Hornblower" developped new meaning)
Well I guess this the version for people who want more than just a book.
Of course I live in the arse-end of nowhere so I guess I'd better start preparing for action.
We all started out somewhat smaller than pencil tip size. Just some of us got lucky and got bigger.
So now we might guess that after the apocalpyse, along with cockroaches, there will be worms?
When people ask David Attenborough if he believes in God, given all the beautiful things in the world he gets to see, he cites the case of a parasitic worm infecting the eye of a small african child sending the child blind.
I like earth worms but pencil-tip worms are frightening. Especially ones that can survive spacecraft crashes.
But maybe the competition don't spend as much on marketing. I find that bigpond is taken up by people who don't do any research of their own about the best ISP for them.
On the other hand Telstra is still choking the broadband adsl market all by itself. It is getting more difficult for it to get away with that. Everyone has to go thru Telstra one way or another for ADSL, but nearly every other ISP still manages to offer a better deal and better service even though they have to purchase thru Telstra. Except the ISPs with worse management than Telstra.
When my friends ask me who to sign up with I won't let them sign up with Telstra. Or Optus.
Look for the geeks running ISPs, who have just enough sense to hire a business manager to make sure they cover their costs. These guys aren't solely profit motivated, they have a great understanding of the technology and always keep up. Stay clear of the corporate monsters, or entrepreneur types, who don't care about anything except separating customers from their money. Service? what is that?.
My current favourite is internode.com.au. I also like adam.com.au although they're adelaide based. I like Goldweb in Canberra. iinet.com.au and ihug.com.au seem to be ok but I'd need to check a bit more. ihug seems a little secretive but iinet have the right kind of history. And yes I've been burned by isp mergers like dynamite.com.au -> eisa -> austar, thats why you have to steer clear of the entrepreneurs.
Hmm, if I'd spent a bit longer thinking what I wrote through, it probably wouldn't sound that way. And you seem to have eliminated the aspergers for you. I'm afraid I score close to 30 +/- 2 on that test, and it explains a lot about why people misunderstand what I'm trying to say. But the test alone is not a diagnosis. It's more like a measure of how far apart I am from what many people think is important. That by itself is not "Autism".
Eg I'm not suggesting you are broken in the least. I am perhaps suggesting that the people who say your communicaiton skills are lacking may be broken, and that you can probably if you want to perhaps...use that to your advantage by communicating with them on their level.
I suspect however, it is one way of weeding out bosses you don't need. Like working for someone who doesn't understand you and wants you to tell them what they want to hear, not what they ask for, would be very irritating. Well I'd find it very irritating. I do find it irritating. In fact, I've rarely had a boss that had a clue what I did. This is not a problem with some bosses, who don't mind that they don't understand so long as my clients are happy. Its a bit hard getting references from them. About all they can say is that I keep the clients happy... Unfortunatley there are some bosses who want details but cannot cope with them.
On the coms side of things, too. I find it interesting that in most forums where people are talking about improvement, they want themselves or their kids to be "smarter". I've found being very smart (eg good at maths, puzzles, english lit or whatever) is not conducive to making friends, being popular or earning lots of money. The smartest guy I know is working at a uni in the philosophy department. He isn't the CEO of GE, doesn't want to be, and never will be.
Still haven't tried the IPX thing for the windows machines. And I know what you mean about forcing the frame types. I used to work with an application that required it. And I had to teach the network admins how to set it on the win95 machines and make them give me admin access to do it for the Win2K machines. These pesky things ought to be able to see each other with tcp/ip. I never had a hard time making peer to peer windows work before. Strangely both computers have no trouble working over the internet. Which means they are happily talking through the Freebsd gateway - which I can use if I really have to mount the hard disks so I can copy stuff across. sigh. There must be a better way.
And what I'd really like to do is stop messing around on/. and go to bed so tomorrow I won't procrastinate so much.
Art is Marketing Re:Art is ....
on
HTML: Is it Art?
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· Score: 1
Ie if you can get your stuff or shit or whatever into a gallery and get people to pay for it, photograph it, or put it into the evening news, then you're doing well.
It is better if the art is a little bit durable but it doesn't seem to matter necessarily.
The tricky thing is knowing when you are doing something new or just rehashing something that's been done and presented as "art" before.
Mostly it is marketing.
I quite like Blue Poles (Pollock) which is just as well cos we paid a lot of money for it. Strangely, based on what his other stuff is going for at the moment, we've made quite a good investment. It may also mean that other people like it or think it is good art. I like that art is controversial, ie whether or not something is art makes for thought, debate and discussion. BTW the painting itself is a bitch to move around because it seems to be made of some stuff that has the flexibility of frozen glass so if the canvas gets the slightest bend in it, all the paint cracks off.
I mostly solved it by joining a toastmasters club. Ironically the interviewer that recommended that to me, ended up joining about 3 years after I did, and I thought he recommended it because he'd been in it...
There is always a way of saying what you have to say in a way that is absorbable by your audience.
Example: Nobody likes to hear "you did that wrong" but most people are interested in how they might do something better so they will usually absorb "I think there is room for improvement here, and you might like to try blah".
Often now, when asked a technical question that might have a superficially simple answer, I answer "the simple or usual answer is blah", and then I ask "Do you want more technical detail on the possible variations?" Mostly they don't.
The other possibility is you might have a mild case of aspergers (nearly autism), where things that are important to most people like who is having a good day, what their family is up to, what clothes to wear, and which famous person is dating whom, etc is completely unimportant to you.
And then you have to learn modified communication systems to talk to these people. Unfortunately, you'll frequently find them in management. ie your boss.
It isn't really unreasonable, after all you wouldn't expect a computer that speaks netbeui to understand one that speaks tcp/ip?
Which reminds me I can't get my win98 machines to see each other. curses. I'm trying IPX/SPX next. Eventually if I ever figure out how to make gnome2 work I might be able to give up win98..
There it is, I knew, I could hear a voice squeaking away in the back of my head "6 bit bytes, 6 bit bytes" and I couldn't remember why.
And you have to go and remind me. I thought I had successfully repressed all memory of the cybers even if I couldn't quite forget the gi-normous cobol programs.
Don't click here Is it art if it makes you laugh and nauseous at the same time? I expect Salvidor Dali and Picasso thought so.
This Alien Shore by CS Friedman, featured a lot of stuff about code as art, including the interesting idea of "charting a program" to see if it made a "pretty picture".
I think there may have been some similar concepts in "Crytonomicon", and definitely "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson.
BTW my very first instructions for a computer were pencil on something that looked like a punched card but used pencil marks instead of punch holes, to generate calendars with ascii art pictures. We all wanted the picture of the horse, but mostly we got wizard of id, or Einstein. Ie the picture was selected randomly or sequentially or something but we didn't get to choose it.
And I'd been playing with the shapes you could make out of lcd numbers on calculators before that. 3838383;8383838 then x / y them etc.
I always seek "elegance" in mathematical equations and programming code, but I'm not sure that makes it "art".
# like? $mediocre_ref = \@quality_input; #you keep saying things they don't want to hear @good_values = @{$mediocre_ref};
$good_ref = $mediocre_ref if $code !~/bugs/; #all refs work unless you coded them wrong (eg messed up ${@ )
# unfortunately being a newbie and having a hard # time figuring out # 1. variable syntax (many ways) and # 2. which names, structures are required/reserved and which can be customised... # I write bugs everywhere...
I also wonder about the problem with prosthetic limbs - having an artificial arm doesn't make someone a monster. But they might need a separate category for competition. Like the wheelchair athletes in Marathons, can beat the pants off the ones that have to leg it. Not that the leggy ones would want to swap.
Right now it is ok to take a painkiller like panadol for competition (but last I heard it was banned in Greece so maybe not in the next Olympics), and definitely making headache go away usually improves performance. But you are not allowed to take a steroid to help heal an injury like a broken leg. Where as non-competitive people would be prescribed steriods for this.
And what does it mean if people are breeding for genetic improvements like athletes who meet at the olympics...
And what if some poor unfortunate gets gene spliced by a wild virus or natural mutation. How will they be able to tell for sure.
Even now they aren't too sure with the naturally occuring performance enhancers. Eg what happens if you have a naturally high EPO. You get banned, but if you don't then everyone else gets to artificially elevate their EPO to the same as yours (because it is impossible to tell what really is natural and people metabolise differently).
Maybe you could have the open category, the non-gm category, the gm category, and the mechanically supported category (excluding those russian piston legs), and the wheeled category.
It's all about as stuffed as the mentally handicapped basketball. But I guess we gotta try. Ie trying to get it right probably reduces the cheats to a manageable number. But some talented innocents are going to get caught in the cross fire too. They will just have to start their own competition, and categorise it or not as they see fit.
Trouble is, the sucker that has to come back and fix up the weird code is usually me. And I hate it when I have to figure out something from scratch again. And I hate having to do it over again.
If it is readable by the newbie, that means I get to work on something new and challenging, instead. If there is no newbie, at least I can change it quickly and accurately.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't be interested in running an obfuscator over code for distribution, while I am dependent and interested in income from it, but the minute I lose interest, I want someone else to be able to handle it.
And I have had several employers request me specifically because they could read, understand and maintain my code. It was actually good for my employment.
10 lines of tangled code, ok, but 20000 lines per program times 500 programs, puts you off deliberate complications for life.
Actually it was trying to get help debugging a program with lots of loops, when I'd named all the loop counters after different America's cup boats, that made me switch to obvious var names and straightforward coding structures.
Surely you could tell they didn't know the basics because their job application would be in all uppercase and they have spelled the name of the company that they are applying to wrong
The one I like is when the salary is commonly expressed in K like $75K and the applicant asks if they can have 1024 dollars in a K-dollar.
I have met people who are really up on theory of computing but cannot write a useful program to save themselves. I can't explain it, and they have their place but it isn't in applications development or maintenance. I'd give them a short but interesting coding spec and ask them to write or design an algorithym to implement it. And then do a "code review" of it with them.
And having worked in the public service, the other thing I get very wary of is the "glowing" reference. I look for a "balanced" reference. Although I know in some twisted countries, applicants sue if they don't like their reference.
I guess I ask for a balanced reference when I'm asking for myself and I ask if the person who asks me for a reference whether they want glowing or balanced and then I discuss it with them until they're happy. There's nothing worse than a surprise reference. References are a whole new topic.
Does it matter if they know how many bits are in a byte if they're coding applications (eg payroll, finance, hr) on windows with VB or MS Access etc?
or does this only matter if they're coding with C and variants
There used to be 8 balls in an over but now there are only 6. cricket. When is this question relevant?
I can't think of many times when the 8 bits per Byte was the least bit relevant. I did have to learn about longwords and stuff when I was doing cobol, but never had to worry doing PICK-Basic. And I'm yet to figure out if it matters with PERL. I guess it depends what I'm coding more. So my answer would usually be "I forget" most of what was in my CS program. But things like bits and bytes and balls and overs interest me.
I think Microsoft would hate me because I like my code to work and be hard to break with intuitive user-like use.
I am an idiot some of the time. I like to make the most of taking things literally most of the time
So I guess HB0457 Part 2B makes it illegal to own a computer is capable of running NATD and the rest of it seems to make owning or building a computer illegal.
*SB0213 by *Person, Curtis . (HB0457 by *Briley.)
Telecommunications - Increases penalties for existing offenses and creates new offenses relative to theft of electronic communications devices and data. - Amends TCA Title 39, Chapter 14, Part 1.
Defines theft offences as any conduct involved in theft of telecommunication services or data, including the making, distributing or use of devices,plans or materials for the unauthorised interception or disruption of media, and the fraudulent use of telephone or credit card numbers to avoid payment of tolls. Violations involving 5 or more devices constitutes a class D, less than 5 class E felony other violations class B...
HB0457 00210530 -1- (a) It is an offense for any person knowingly to:
(1) Possess, use, make, develop, assemble, sell, distribute, lease, license, transfer, import into this state or offer, promote or advertise any unlawful communication device:
(A) For the unauthorized acquisition or theft of any communication service or to receive, intercept, disrupt, transmit, re-transmit, decrypt, acquire or facilitate the receipt, interception, disruption, transmission, retransmission, decryption or acquisition of any communication service without the express consent or express authorization of the communication service provider; or
- 2 - 00210530 (B) To conceal, or to assist another to conceal, from any communication service provider or from any lawful authority the existence or place of origin or destination of any communication.
(2) Modify, alter, program or reprogram a communication device designed or adapted, or which is used, for the purposes prohibited in subsections (a)(1)(A) and (B) above;
(3) Possess, use, manufacture, assemble, develop, distribute, import into this state, license, transfer, sell, lease or offer, promote or advertise for sale, use, lease or distribution any unlawful access device;
(4) Possess, use, distribute, sell, give, transfer or offer, promote or advertise for sale, use or distribution any:
(A) Plans or instructions for making or assembling any unlawful communication or access device under circumstances evincing an intent to use or employ the unlawful communication or access device, or to allow the same to be used or employed, for a purpose prohibited by this section, or knowing or having reason to believe that the same is intended to be so used, or that the plans or instructions are intended to be used for making or assembling the unlawful communication or access device for a purpose prohibited by this section; or
(B) Material, including hardware, cables, tools, data, computer software or other information or equipment, knowing that the purchaser or a third person intends to use the material in the manufacture, development or assembly of an unlawful communication or access device for a purpose prohibited by this section;
(5) Publish plans or instructions for making, assembling or using any unlawful communication or access device with the intent of promoting the - 3 - 00210530 making, assembling or using of an unlawful communication or access device for a purpose prohibited by this section;
(6) Publish the number or code of an existing, cancelled, revoked or nonexistent telephone number, credit number or other credit device, or method of numbering or coding which is employed in the issuance of telephone numbers, credit numbers or other credit devices with knowledge or reason to believe that it may be used to avoid the payment of any lawful telephone or telegraph toll charge under circumstances evincing an intent to have the telephone number, credit number, credit device or method of numbering or coding so used; o
Give us an example of what would you ask in an interview to sort the problem solvers from the human computers (need all the instructions to write the instructions)?
The computer science students tended not to view women as objects quite the same way as the engineering students (mechanical, electrical, chemical etc) did. At least the comp sci students either found the computers way more interesting most of the time, or were gentle and appreciative of a woman's presence. The engies tended to yell helpful stuff like "get your gear off" and "show us your tits" and all their social functions included blue movies. Generally not conducive to polite mixed company. The female engineering students, outnumbered by about 100-1 in a hostile environment tended to be a very special breed of thug-woman. One I quote as saying "you haven't lived until you've woken up in a pool of your own vomit". Something that would naturally impress a male engineering student in the classroom.
I think that's why there aren't many female engineers yet.
I do wonder if the spacial thing might be why one of my female friends prefers to print out her programs to work on. But then she's way better at navigating, and finding her way geographically with or without a map than most men. Maybe it's more a hereditary skill. Maybe the tests are biased towards things that men tend to be more familiar with. If you made the spacial test using "stacking a dishwasher" as a kind of 3D puzzle, I bet women would score higher than men most of the time (except perhaps the female engineers).
Not specifically that case, but I think that is what the Australian farmers do not want to happen. Along with the unanticipated allergy problem.
I think a legal system that allows big money and lawyers to win every time, instead of fairness and justice, will self implode in the long run. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
we already have natural clones, they're called twins.
so we already know how alike and how different clones might be. There are lots of clones in the plant world too, every time you make a new plant by striking a cutting, you're dealing with a clone.
It's when we start doing it artificially that things get weird. There is already some evidence to suggest the cloning technique used for sheep will never work on humans or monkeys because our eggs are different.
What scares me about gene splicing is that we can introduce toxic complications without really knowing. That can happen naturally too but not nearly so quickly.
The other thing that really annoys me about gene tech is that the big companies like Monsanto claim ownership of the "pattern", and if their plantings cross pollinate with the next field then they may sue the neighbouring farmer for seed "piracy". Hopefully that will be difficult to enforce. It isn't exactly fair if Monsanto don't do anything to prevent the cross pollination.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, coke, coffee or alcohol all dehydrate you (make you thirsty). In the case of alcohol, thats why drinking as much water as you can the night before helps in the morning after. And if you still hurt in the morning, drink more water (and coffee doesn't count, but apple juice does, water is still best).
http://www.littermaid.com/ Probably scare the cat too.
0 .html
t ml
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/pet-guys/-72350350002
http://www.hdw-inc.com/clevercat.htm I like these best
http://www.petdiscounters.com/cat/litter/op_box.h
http://www.petdiscounters.com/cat/litter/
http://www.lovemypet.com.au/cats/litterboxs.htm
I don't actually own a cat but I have looked after a few while their owners were on holidays. Their mess is nothing compared to the mess a horse can make.
http://www.littermaid.com/ http://shop.store.yahoo.com/pet-guys/-723503500020 .html
http://www.hdw-inc.com/clevercat.htm
http://www.petdiscounters.com/cat/litter/op_box.ht ml
http://www.petdiscounters.com/cat/litter/
http://www.lovemypet.com.au/cats/litterboxs.htm
I should a figured... I turned of the nortons personal firewall on the new one, and pop, both PCs present and correct in the network neighbourhood... without ipx but with netbeui (which maybe I don't need anymore)...
yes the ac option is gone but the no karma bonus is still there.
but there is still a post as ac option in the user comment preferences...
maybe its something to do with slashdot attempt to get this site to pay for itself.
Nope, this colour has nothing in common with peas whirled or otherwise. It's more like violets or the original colour of Iris Flowers as painted by Vincent Van Gogh, which probably all look like whirled peas to you anyway.
Now combine that happy shade of purple with the glow of a neon sign...I hate to think what it looks like on a mac which tends to intensify colours that look ok on a PC
The Unreal thing uses a fair bit of this colour too.
OK now for the very original plot:
[* As John Dalton, an ex-Marine assigned to patrol the edge of human space... Unhappy patrolling the ass-end of nowhere...
Violent turmoil has errupted on your watch *]
Does this feel like David Weber "On Basilisk Station" to anyone? and his stuff was loosely based on the Hornblower series by CS Forrester (written before "Hornblower" developped new meaning)
Well I guess this the version for people who want more than just a book.
Of course I live in the arse-end of nowhere so I guess I'd better start preparing for action.
who knew purple could be so bright and its my favourite colour but I don't think I can handle this shade of unreal purple.
from little things, big things grow.
We all started out somewhat smaller than pencil tip size. Just some of us got lucky and got bigger.
So now we might guess that after the apocalpyse, along with cockroaches, there will be worms?
When people ask David Attenborough if he believes in God, given all the beautiful things in the world he gets to see, he cites the case of a parasitic worm infecting the eye of a small african child sending the child blind.
I like earth worms but pencil-tip worms are frightening. Especially ones that can survive spacecraft crashes.
But maybe the competition don't spend as much on marketing. I find that bigpond is taken up by people who don't do any research of their own about the best ISP for them.
On the other hand Telstra is still choking the broadband adsl market all by itself. It is getting more difficult for it to get away with that. Everyone has to go thru Telstra one way or another for ADSL, but nearly every other ISP still manages to offer a better deal and better service even though they have to purchase thru Telstra. Except the ISPs with worse management than Telstra.
When my friends ask me who to sign up with I won't let them sign up with Telstra. Or Optus.
Look for the geeks running ISPs, who have just enough sense to hire a business manager to make sure they cover their costs. These guys aren't solely profit motivated, they have a great understanding of the technology and always keep up. Stay clear of the corporate monsters, or entrepreneur types, who don't care about anything except separating customers from their money. Service? what is that?.
My current favourite is internode.com.au. I also like adam.com.au although they're adelaide based. I like Goldweb in Canberra. iinet.com.au and ihug.com.au seem to be ok but I'd need to check a bit more. ihug seems a little secretive but iinet have the right kind of history. And yes I've been burned by isp mergers like dynamite.com.au -> eisa -> austar, thats why you have to steer clear of the entrepreneurs.
Hmm, if I'd spent a bit longer thinking what I wrote through, it probably wouldn't sound that way. And you seem to have eliminated the aspergers for you. I'm afraid I score close to 30 +/- 2 on that test, and it explains a lot about why people misunderstand what I'm trying to say. But the test alone is not a diagnosis. It's more like a measure of how far apart I am from what many people think is important. That by itself is not "Autism".
/. and go to bed so tomorrow I won't procrastinate so much.
Eg I'm not suggesting you are broken in the least. I am perhaps suggesting that the people who say your communicaiton skills are lacking may be broken, and that you can probably if you want to perhaps...use that to your advantage by communicating with them on their level.
I suspect however, it is one way of weeding out bosses you don't need. Like working for someone who doesn't understand you and wants you to tell them what they want to hear, not what they ask for, would be very irritating. Well I'd find it very irritating. I do find it irritating. In fact, I've rarely had a boss that had a clue what I did. This is not a problem with some bosses, who don't mind that they don't understand so long as my clients are happy. Its a bit hard getting references from them. About all they can say is that I keep the clients happy... Unfortunatley there are some bosses who want details but cannot cope with them.
On the coms side of things, too. I find it interesting that in most forums where people are talking about improvement, they want themselves or their kids to be "smarter". I've found being very smart (eg good at maths, puzzles, english lit or whatever) is not conducive to making friends, being popular or earning lots of money. The smartest guy I know is working at a uni in the philosophy department. He isn't the CEO of GE, doesn't want to be, and never will be.
Still haven't tried the IPX thing for the windows machines. And I know what you mean about forcing the frame types. I used to work with an application that required it. And I had to teach the network admins how to set it on the win95 machines and make them give me admin access to do it for the Win2K machines. These pesky things ought to be able to see each other with tcp/ip. I never had a hard time making peer to peer windows work before. Strangely both computers have no trouble working over the internet. Which means they are happily talking through the Freebsd gateway - which I can use if I really have to mount the hard disks so I can copy stuff across. sigh. There must be a better way.
And what I'd really like to do is stop messing around on
Ie if you can get your stuff or shit or whatever into a gallery and get people to pay for it, photograph it, or put it into the evening news, then you're doing well.
It is better if the art is a little bit durable but it doesn't seem to matter necessarily.
The tricky thing is knowing when you are doing something new or just rehashing something that's been done and presented as "art" before.
Mostly it is marketing.
I quite like Blue Poles (Pollock) which is just as well cos we paid a lot of money for it. Strangely, based on what his other stuff is going for at the moment, we've made quite a good investment. It may also mean that other people like it or think it is good art. I like that art is controversial, ie whether or not something is art makes for thought, debate and discussion. BTW the painting itself is a bitch to move around because it seems to be made of some stuff that has the flexibility of frozen glass so if the canvas gets the slightest bend in it, all the paint cracks off.
I used to get that kind of answer...
I mostly solved it by joining a toastmasters club. Ironically the interviewer that recommended that to me, ended up joining about 3 years after I did, and I thought he recommended it because he'd been in it...
There is always a way of saying what you have to say in a way that is absorbable by your audience.
Example: Nobody likes to hear "you did that wrong" but most people are interested in how they might do something better so they will usually absorb "I think there is room for improvement here, and you might like to try blah".
Often now, when asked a technical question that might have a superficially simple answer, I answer "the simple or usual answer is blah", and then I ask "Do you want more technical detail on the possible variations?" Mostly they don't.
The other possibility is you might have a mild case of aspergers (nearly autism), where things that are important to most people like who is having a good day, what their family is up to, what clothes to wear, and which famous person is dating whom, etc is completely unimportant to you.
And then you have to learn modified communication systems to talk to these people. Unfortunately, you'll frequently find them in management. ie your boss.
It isn't really unreasonable, after all you wouldn't expect a computer that speaks netbeui to understand one that speaks tcp/ip?
Which reminds me I can't get my win98 machines to see each other. curses. I'm trying IPX/SPX next. Eventually if I ever figure out how to make gnome2 work I might be able to give up win98..
There it is, I knew, I could hear a voice squeaking away in the back of my head "6 bit bytes, 6 bit bytes" and I couldn't remember why.
And you have to go and remind me. I thought I had successfully repressed all memory of the cybers even if I couldn't quite forget the gi-normous cobol programs.
And the damn byte size actually mattered then...
Don't click here Is it art if it makes you laugh and nauseous at the same time? I expect Salvidor Dali and Picasso thought so.
This Alien Shore by CS Friedman, featured a lot of stuff about code as art, including the interesting idea of "charting a program" to see if it made a "pretty picture".
I think there may have been some similar concepts in "Crytonomicon", and definitely "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson.
BTW my very first instructions for a computer were pencil on something that looked like a punched card but used pencil marks instead of punch holes, to generate calendars with ascii art pictures. We all wanted the picture of the horse, but mostly we got wizard of id, or Einstein. Ie the picture was selected randomly or sequentially or something but we didn't get to choose it.
And I'd been playing with the shapes you could make out of lcd numbers on calculators before that. 3838383;8383838 then x / y them etc.
I always seek "elegance" in mathematical equations and programming code, but I'm not sure that makes it "art".
# like?
/bugs/; #all refs work unless you coded them wrong (eg messed up ${@ )
$mediocre_ref = \@quality_input; #you keep saying things they don't want to hear
@good_values = @{$mediocre_ref};
$good_ref = $mediocre_ref if $code !~
# unfortunately being a newbie and having a hard
# time figuring out
# 1. variable syntax (many ways) and
# 2. which names, structures are required/reserved and which can be customised...
# I write bugs everywhere...
Which would be a pity.
I also wonder about the problem with prosthetic limbs - having an artificial arm doesn't make someone a monster. But they might need a separate category for competition. Like the wheelchair athletes in Marathons, can beat the pants off the ones that have to leg it. Not that the leggy ones would want to swap.
Right now it is ok to take a painkiller like panadol for competition (but last I heard it was banned in Greece so maybe not in the next Olympics), and definitely making headache go away usually improves performance. But you are not allowed to take a steroid to help heal an injury like a broken leg. Where as non-competitive people would be prescribed steriods for this.
And what does it mean if people are breeding for genetic improvements like athletes who meet at the olympics...
And what if some poor unfortunate gets gene spliced by a wild virus or natural mutation. How will they be able to tell for sure.
Even now they aren't too sure with the naturally occuring performance enhancers. Eg what happens if you have a naturally high EPO. You get banned, but if you don't then everyone else gets to artificially elevate their EPO to the same as yours (because it is impossible to tell what really is natural and people metabolise differently).
Maybe you could have the open category, the non-gm category, the gm category, and the mechanically supported category (excluding those russian piston legs), and the wheeled category.
It's all about as stuffed as the mentally handicapped basketball. But I guess we gotta try. Ie trying to get it right probably reduces the cheats to a manageable number. But some talented innocents are going to get caught in the cross fire too. They will just have to start their own competition, and categorise it or not as they see fit.
Trouble is, the sucker that has to come back and fix up the weird code is usually me. And I hate it when I have to figure out something from scratch again. And I hate having to do it over again.
If it is readable by the newbie, that means I get to work on something new and challenging, instead. If there is no newbie, at least I can change it quickly and accurately.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't be interested in running an obfuscator over code for distribution, while I am dependent and interested in income from it, but the minute I lose interest, I want someone else to be able to handle it.
And I have had several employers request me specifically because they could read, understand and maintain my code. It was actually good for my employment.
10 lines of tangled code, ok, but 20000 lines per program times 500 programs, puts you off deliberate complications for life.
Actually it was trying to get help debugging a program with lots of loops, when I'd named all the loop counters after different America's cup boats, that made me switch to obvious var names and straightforward coding structures.
Surely you could tell they didn't know the basics because their job application would be in all uppercase and they have spelled the name of the company that they are applying to wrong
The one I like is when the salary is commonly expressed in K like $75K and the applicant asks if they can have 1024 dollars in a K-dollar.
I have met people who are really up on theory of computing but cannot write a useful program to save themselves. I can't explain it, and they have their place but it isn't in applications development or maintenance. I'd give them a short but interesting coding spec and ask them to write or design an algorithym to implement it. And then do a "code review" of it with them.
And having worked in the public service, the other thing I get very wary of is the "glowing" reference. I look for a "balanced" reference. Although I know in some twisted countries, applicants sue if they don't like their reference.
I guess I ask for a balanced reference when I'm asking for myself and I ask if the person who asks me for a reference whether they want glowing or balanced and then I discuss it with them until they're happy. There's nothing worse than a surprise reference. References are a whole new topic.
Does it matter if they know how many bits are in a byte if they're coding applications (eg payroll, finance, hr) on windows with VB or MS Access etc?
or does this only matter if they're coding with C and variants
There used to be 8 balls in an over but now there are only 6. cricket. When is this question relevant?
I can't think of many times when the 8 bits per Byte was the least bit relevant. I did have to learn about longwords and stuff when I was doing cobol, but never had to worry doing PICK-Basic. And I'm yet to figure out if it matters with PERL. I guess it depends what I'm coding more. So my answer would usually be "I forget" most of what was in my CS program. But things like bits and bytes and balls and overs interest me.
I think Microsoft would hate me because I like my code to work and be hard to break with intuitive user-like use.
I am an idiot some of the time. I like to make the most of taking things literally most of the time
How I hate legal jargon and pdf files
So I guess HB0457 Part 2B makes it illegal to own a computer is capable of running NATD and the rest of it seems to make owning or building a computer illegal.
*SB0213 by *Person, Curtis . (HB0457 by *Briley.)
Telecommunications - Increases penalties for existing offenses and creates new offenses relative to theft of electronic communications devices and data. - Amends TCA Title 39, Chapter 14, Part 1.
Defines theft offences as any conduct involved in theft of telecommunication services or data, including the making, distributing or use of devices,plans or materials for the unauthorised interception or disruption of media, and the fraudulent use of telephone or credit card numbers to avoid payment of tolls. Violations involving 5 or more devices constitutes a class D, less than 5 class E felony other violations class B...
HB0457
00210530
-1-
(a) It is an offense for any person knowingly to:
(1) Possess, use, make, develop, assemble, sell, distribute, lease,
license, transfer, import into this state or offer, promote or advertise any unlawful
communication device:
(A) For the unauthorized acquisition or theft of any communication
service or to receive, intercept, disrupt, transmit, re-transmit, decrypt,
acquire or facilitate the receipt, interception, disruption, transmission, retransmission,
decryption or acquisition of any communication service
without the express consent or express authorization of the
communication service provider; or
- 2 - 00210530
(B) To conceal, or to assist another to conceal, from any
communication service provider or from any lawful authority the existence
or place of origin or destination of any communication.
(2) Modify, alter, program or reprogram a communication device
designed or adapted, or which is used, for the purposes prohibited in subsections
(a)(1)(A) and (B) above;
(3) Possess, use, manufacture, assemble, develop, distribute, import into
this state, license, transfer, sell, lease or offer, promote or advertise for sale, use,
lease or distribution any unlawful access device;
(4) Possess, use, distribute, sell, give, transfer or offer, promote or
advertise for sale, use or distribution any:
(A) Plans or instructions for making or assembling any unlawful
communication or access device under circumstances evincing an intent
to use or employ the unlawful communication or access device, or to
allow the same to be used or employed, for a purpose prohibited by this
section, or knowing or having reason to believe that the same is intended
to be so used, or that the plans or instructions are intended to be used for
making or assembling the unlawful communication or access device for a
purpose prohibited by this section; or
(B) Material, including hardware, cables, tools, data, computer
software or other information or equipment, knowing that the purchaser or
a third person intends to use the material in the manufacture,
development or assembly of an unlawful communication or access device
for a purpose prohibited by this section;
(5) Publish plans or instructions for making, assembling or using any
unlawful communication or access device with the intent of promoting the
- 3 - 00210530
making, assembling or using of an unlawful communication or access device for
a purpose prohibited by this section;
(6) Publish the number or code of an existing, cancelled, revoked or
nonexistent telephone number, credit number or other credit device, or method of
numbering or coding which is employed in the issuance of telephone numbers,
credit numbers or other credit devices with knowledge or reason to believe that it
may be used to avoid the payment of any lawful telephone or telegraph toll
charge under circumstances evincing an intent to have the telephone number,
credit number, credit device or method of numbering or coding so used; o
Give us an example of what would you ask in an interview to sort the problem solvers from the human computers (need all the instructions to write the instructions)?
toggling the boot strap switches (or sorting and loading punched cards)
That doesn't mean you're real, it just means you're old.
reality is much more ephemeral than age.
The computer science students tended not to view women as objects quite the same way as the engineering students (mechanical, electrical, chemical etc) did. At least the comp sci students either found the computers way more interesting most of the time, or were gentle and appreciative of a woman's presence. The engies tended to yell helpful stuff like "get your gear off" and "show us your tits" and all their social functions included blue movies. Generally not conducive to polite mixed company. The female engineering students, outnumbered by about 100-1 in a hostile environment tended to be a very special breed of thug-woman. One I quote as saying "you haven't lived until you've woken up in a pool of your own vomit". Something that would naturally impress a male engineering student in the classroom.
I think that's why there aren't many female engineers yet.
I do wonder if the spacial thing might be why one of my female friends prefers to print out her programs to work on. But then she's way better at navigating, and finding her way geographically with or without a map than most men. Maybe it's more a hereditary skill. Maybe the tests are biased towards things that men tend to be more familiar with. If you made the spacial test using "stacking a dishwasher" as a kind of 3D puzzle, I bet women would score higher than men most of the time (except perhaps the female engineers).
Not specifically that case, but I think that is what the Australian farmers do not want to happen. Along with the unanticipated allergy problem.
I think a legal system that allows big money and lawyers to win every time, instead of fairness and justice, will self implode in the long run. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
we already have natural clones, they're called twins.
so we already know how alike and how different clones might be. There are lots of clones in the plant world too, every time you make a new plant by striking a cutting, you're dealing with a clone.
It's when we start doing it artificially that things get weird. There is already some evidence to suggest the cloning technique used for sheep will never work on humans or monkeys because our eggs are different.
What scares me about gene splicing is that we can introduce toxic complications without really knowing. That can happen naturally too but not nearly so quickly.
The other thing that really annoys me about gene tech is that the big companies like Monsanto claim ownership of the "pattern", and if their plantings cross pollinate with the next field then they may sue the neighbouring farmer for seed "piracy". Hopefully that will be difficult to enforce. It isn't exactly fair if Monsanto don't do anything to prevent the cross pollination.