The images are PD now, putting them on wikipedia won't change that
True, you can't take that djinn out of the tonic now, way too late. On the other hand, it's likely that "security by obscurity" will keep the majority of people from tainting the tests. On the gripping hand, a simple "Have you seen these before?" could give the analyst a clue, too.
Actually, proper civil engineering procedure where I come from requires you to physically cordon off the area before opening any hole in the street. Any system that depends on proper behaviour of passers-by is an unsafe one.
From the right perspective, they aren't. God is the name I give to the universe and all Her natural law. Science is my prayer (and this is not commutative). Genesis was just the Cliff's Notes pop sci version, to get the expanded text you need the Big Bang and tensor calculus. The rest of it is mostly applied psychology, hallucinogens, and a few odd interpretations of natural physical phenomena. Some of us can do interesting things, but all true metaphysics is just an open field of study that will reduce to knowledge someday.
And no, I have no interest in how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's a simple bit of spreadsheet math (read "not commutative" above).
About the only useful thing I could do at this point is point out that someone need to actually develop a real Paranoid Linuix distribution that will help people communicate who want to topple a repressive government, so it doesn't keep happening.
And publish the checksum of the distribution, too. It may not keep the authorities from creating their own compromised version of Paranoid Linux and releasing it into the wild, but it gives people a means for checking the version. Or at least making the bad guys suffer a bit in cracking it...
What would be a good name for the release? Tasty Tinfoil?
I haven't RTFA, but if he's British (and the article is on a UK site, which is the best clue I have) it's quite common for 15-16 year olds to do "work experience" in a company.
This came as a bit of a surprise to me when I emigrated to Australia.
I hate cables. I particularly hated the tangled 50 metre power cable we used for a remote server (don't ask). When our work experience student (pure maths type) started telling me about the "longest loop hypothesis" while I was struggling with it, the smile on my face was beatific. He hadn't expected my response.
Yes. A common application might be sorting the items in a shopping cart on a web site. Generally only a dozen items or less, and you can do it with about 11 lines of code or so (as opposed to bringing the sort library in, and maybe 11k). Nice to have the small footprint sometimes. But definitely not for lists of any substantial size and disorder.
Finance is all about mathematics, which suggests FORTRAN.
Umm, reality isn't so clear-cut. Finance software (the non-transactional stuff, which is *lots*) is generally written in VBA - as in "open Excel spreadsheet, write macro, alt+F11, fiddle with macro". A disturbing amount of the world's financial software is based on the two-tonne macro. (Sucks really, but there I was. Apologies to the poor sod who had to maintain that.)
That said, a lot of the quantitative stuff is very dusty-deck FORTRAN running on old Alpha VMS machines accessed through bastardised Telnet wrappers. Yes, a lot of procedural business was written in COBOL and a lot of ugly FORTRAN too, and it's still with us. One interesting aspect of the old VMS systems was the common calling sequence - it was dead easy to link FORTRAN or BASIC PLUS modules in a COBOL program, or vice versa. This led to some fairly interesting support tasks.
For new stuff, pick what seems to have the best syntax and decent performance for what you need and run with it. For the existing stuff, it could bloody well be anything. How good are your Powerhouse skills? IFTRAN? LOLCODE? SMURF? (Ok, I made that last one up. I hope...) Advice? Learn two or three. Your interviewer may not expect you to know the ZIPPIQUICK they need but experience in one or three other languages (even *shudder* Pascal) will convince them you're a programmer and not just a call centre operator with a good memory for buzzwords.
The Death Knight introductory sequence has another odd moment to it - something I found novel and rather fun. When you walk into Orgrimmar to face Thrall after your "conversion", the locals want to lynch you. They don't, but the tension it builds is remarkable. I've never seen another game where you were hit with rotten fruit and insults by NPC's on a quest, rather than swords clubs arrows and spells (sounds like a card deck, eh?).
"The Scourge killed my family, you monster! (FWAP)". You finally get to Thrall and face "You have seconds to live." I nearly wee'd meself.
In my opinion the game play has become more complex, the UI change on the various quest mounts is refreshing, the game play changes a lot - jousting takes an entirely different skill set, for example. This is not the button mashing your parents knew! Add in the "world instancing" of places like Icecrown and we have moved far, far beyond the old kill-loot-sell-equip of MMORPG's of old.
The Everquest franchise is still being vigorously defended by Sony. I have more than a strong suspicion that Sony scuttled Vanguard to keep the old EQ rolling. I moved to Vanguard after EQ. It was fun for a while, even got my little Raki Sorc "Glert" up to 50. But the day Sony bought out the Sigil IP and sacked the original development team, things went down hill in a hurry. Bugs weren't fixed, the wrong things were developed, the quality of rendering didn't cover the tendency to log on inside a rock. I am morally certain Sony bought and trashed the franchise to protect EQ.
In the mean time, WoW carries on with it's cartoonish graphics and enormous content and I think they've managed to break the gold farmers that killed EQ for me. Bind on account gear at the very high level that you can pass down to yours - and nobody else's - twinks are a rare bit of gaming insight. I am just very glad that Blizzard is too large for Sony to buy, and I will probably continue to play WoW even after seeing it all through two level 80's. I'm still discovering new content.
There was a very old comment made by Bill Gates when Microsoft was on the rise. "If we don't obsolete our own products, someone else will." Say what you will, that's a winning marketing philosophy today. It may not be to everyone's benefit (and in fact often mightily sucks, if you want a stable environment) but it's a good one for the shareholders if they can get away with it. Embedded systems? No. Consumer electronics? Shouldn't have to ask.
1: Stop throwing away 60% of our energy through "waste" heat. Which is pretty much what every electricity generating plant does.
[citation needed]
Most commercial stationary thermoelectric generators use every bit of heat they can before the exhaust is spent. Google "waste heat recovery" - 737,000 entries.
Where I come from, "from scratch" doesn't mean "configure existing solutions to my needs".
It's a variable. When I cook pancakes from scratch, I don't grow the wheat or grind the flour or milk the cow. No doubt there would be at least a subjective improvement if I did (see the online WEC for options there) but I'm perfectly happy to call any recipe that doesn't come from a commercial pancake mix "from scratch". The nice thing about open source is that you can change the mix of ingredients.
Agreed. A MAC address would be more representative of identifying a computer, but that isn't even fool-proof as one could have "cloned" the MAC address or simply swapped the network card "after the fact".
MAC addresses are definitely not a reliable ID. If you have a number of virtual machines running on a desktop (I do at the moment, for example) you have a number of virtual network cards, each with their own IP address, assigned (usually) by whatever the local DHCP server gives them.
But what of the MAC addresses those virtual machines use? You guessed it, they're generated by software - unlike the MAC addresses of hardware network interfaces, which are assigned and burned in at the factory. And I move these virtual instances from machine to machine (generally to a laptop somewhere. They're Deki wiki appliances, used as a portable knowledge base).
To further muddy the picture, I've recently gone through a number of wireless network cards for a couple of the computers in our house, and I change them whenever I find one that offers better performance. Thus, the MAC address on my wife's computer has changed several times this year, and a couple of other machines have recycled the older WNICs already this year.
Summary? MAC addresses aren't a reliable way to identify any particular computer over time, at all.
Was that an unladen European vacationer? AIIIEEEeeeee...
You Northerners and your backwards summers. We've got black ice. And penguins, musn't forget the penguins, although they're mostly down at Cape Schank. They seem to be comfortable.
What sort of books do you prefer to buy? Does your buying strategy include more "Minimal Perl" than "Blue Ocean Strategy? Do you prefer to spend on "The Definitive Guide to MySQL" or "Good to Great"? Which ones do you prefer to read nowdays? The answer to that question could point to the answer to your larger question.
I look at management - and consultancy, which is the same thing without the head count - as simply playing with lines of code that are much bigger. Bigger building blocks, if you will. Instead of data structures and algorithms I put together DBA's and network people and infrastructure agreements, and match people and tasks.
The need for correct syntax and error correction applies at any level. But it certainly pays to have learned everything up to that point; there are fewer places where gremlins can hide & catch you unawares if you're not quite that easily fooled.
Technology teaches you to think. The other stuff teaches you to value thinking correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
The images are PD now, putting them on wikipedia won't change that
True, you can't take that djinn out of the tonic now, way too late. On the other hand, it's likely that "security by obscurity" will keep the majority of people from tainting the tests. On the gripping hand, a simple "Have you seen these before?" could give the analyst a clue, too.
Actually, proper civil engineering procedure where I come from requires you to physically cordon off the area before opening any hole in the street. Any system that depends on proper behaviour of passers-by is an unsafe one.
Are you sure it was a shrink and not a scientologist you were taking the test from?
Neither, really. It was an alien with an E-meter and he kept putting his probes on me.
Quick, get the MPAA on the phone and have somebody distract NewYorkCountryLawyer so he can't interfere.
Hey Ray! Look - Shiny!! WG in 4 minutes pst for auto invite.
Religion and Science are 100% incompatible.
From the right perspective, they aren't. God is the name I give to the universe and all Her natural law. Science is my prayer (and this is not commutative). Genesis was just the Cliff's Notes pop sci version, to get the expanded text you need the Big Bang and tensor calculus. The rest of it is mostly applied psychology, hallucinogens, and a few odd interpretations of natural physical phenomena. Some of us can do interesting things, but all true metaphysics is just an open field of study that will reduce to knowledge someday.
And no, I have no interest in how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's a simple bit of spreadsheet math (read "not commutative" above).
One of the things they talked about was ftp and how it's used to upload content to your "web host"
You mean like the FileZilla utility that comes with XAMPP?
VMS is indeed still alive. It's just stuck in MWAIT.
About the only useful thing I could do at this point is point out that someone need to actually develop a real Paranoid Linuix distribution that will help people communicate who want to topple a repressive government, so it doesn't keep happening.
And publish the checksum of the distribution, too. It may not keep the authorities from creating their own compromised version of Paranoid Linux and releasing it into the wild, but it gives people a means for checking the version. Or at least making the bad guys suffer a bit in cracking it...
What would be a good name for the release? Tasty Tinfoil?
I haven't RTFA, but if he's British (and the article is on a UK site, which is the best clue I have) it's quite common for 15-16 year olds to do "work experience" in a company.
This came as a bit of a surprise to me when I emigrated to Australia.
I hate cables. I particularly hated the tangled 50 metre power cable we used for a remote server (don't ask). When our work experience student (pure maths type) started telling me about the "longest loop hypothesis" while I was struggling with it, the smile on my face was beatific. He hadn't expected my response.
(is there really a case for bubble in some cases?
Yes. A common application might be sorting the items in a shopping cart on a web site. Generally only a dozen items or less, and you can do it with about 11 lines of code or so (as opposed to bringing the sort library in, and maybe 11k). Nice to have the small footprint sometimes. But definitely not for lists of any substantial size and disorder.
Finance is all about mathematics, which suggests FORTRAN.
Umm, reality isn't so clear-cut. Finance software (the non-transactional stuff, which is *lots*) is generally written in VBA - as in "open Excel spreadsheet, write macro, alt+F11, fiddle with macro". A disturbing amount of the world's financial software is based on the two-tonne macro. (Sucks really, but there I was. Apologies to the poor sod who had to maintain that.)
That said, a lot of the quantitative stuff is very dusty-deck FORTRAN running on old Alpha VMS machines accessed through bastardised Telnet wrappers. Yes, a lot of procedural business was written in COBOL and a lot of ugly FORTRAN too, and it's still with us. One interesting aspect of the old VMS systems was the common calling sequence - it was dead easy to link FORTRAN or BASIC PLUS modules in a COBOL program, or vice versa. This led to some fairly interesting support tasks.
For new stuff, pick what seems to have the best syntax and decent performance for what you need and run with it. For the existing stuff, it could bloody well be anything. How good are your Powerhouse skills? IFTRAN? LOLCODE? SMURF? (Ok, I made that last one up. I hope...) Advice? Learn two or three. Your interviewer may not expect you to know the ZIPPIQUICK they need but experience in one or three other languages (even *shudder* Pascal) will convince them you're a programmer and not just a call centre operator with a good memory for buzzwords.
The Death Knight introductory sequence has another odd moment to it - something I found novel and rather fun. When you walk into Orgrimmar to face Thrall after your "conversion", the locals want to lynch you. They don't, but the tension it builds is remarkable. I've never seen another game where you were hit with rotten fruit and insults by NPC's on a quest, rather than swords clubs arrows and spells (sounds like a card deck, eh?).
"The Scourge killed my family, you monster! (FWAP)". You finally get to Thrall and face "You have seconds to live." I nearly wee'd meself.
In my opinion the game play has become more complex, the UI change on the various quest mounts is refreshing, the game play changes a lot - jousting takes an entirely different skill set, for example. This is not the button mashing your parents knew! Add in the "world instancing" of places like Icecrown and we have moved far, far beyond the old kill-loot-sell-equip of MMORPG's of old.
In the mean time, WoW carries on with it's cartoonish graphics and enormous content and I think they've managed to break the gold farmers that killed EQ for me. Bind on account gear at the very high level that you can pass down to yours - and nobody else's - twinks are a rare bit of gaming insight. I am just very glad that Blizzard is too large for Sony to buy, and I will probably continue to play WoW even after seeing it all through two level 80's. I'm still discovering new content.
There was a very old comment made by Bill Gates when Microsoft was on the rise. "If we don't obsolete our own products, someone else will." Say what you will, that's a winning marketing philosophy today. It may not be to everyone's benefit (and in fact often mightily sucks, if you want a stable environment) but it's a good one for the shareholders if they can get away with it. Embedded systems? No. Consumer electronics? Shouldn't have to ask.
It doesn't matter, really. At the end of the new expansion I still won't be able to afford epic flight.
1: Stop throwing away 60% of our energy through "waste" heat. Which is pretty much what every electricity generating plant does.
[citation needed]
Most commercial stationary thermoelectric generators use every bit of heat they can before the exhaust is spent. Google "waste heat recovery" - 737,000 entries.
Can't we move on to manure series of jokes? This set's old.
Actually, Offtopic is my Horde hunter on Aman'Thul. He's a troll.
So which route should I take if I answered Lonely Planet guides and any escapist fiction I can get my hands on?
Start writing it. There's never enough good escapist fiction out there.
Where I come from, "from scratch" doesn't mean "configure existing solutions to my needs".
It's a variable. When I cook pancakes from scratch, I don't grow the wheat or grind the flour or milk the cow. No doubt there would be at least a subjective improvement if I did (see the online WEC for options there) but I'm perfectly happy to call any recipe that doesn't come from a commercial pancake mix "from scratch". The nice thing about open source is that you can change the mix of ingredients.
Wow what a metaphor. Now I'm hungry.
Agreed. A MAC address would be more representative of identifying a computer, but that isn't even fool-proof as one could have "cloned" the MAC address or simply swapped the network card "after the fact".
MAC addresses are definitely not a reliable ID. If you have a number of virtual machines running on a desktop (I do at the moment, for example) you have a number of virtual network cards, each with their own IP address, assigned (usually) by whatever the local DHCP server gives them.
But what of the MAC addresses those virtual machines use? You guessed it, they're generated by software - unlike the MAC addresses of hardware network interfaces, which are assigned and burned in at the factory. And I move these virtual instances from machine to machine (generally to a laptop somewhere. They're Deki wiki appliances, used as a portable knowledge base).
To further muddy the picture, I've recently gone through a number of wireless network cards for a couple of the computers in our house, and I change them whenever I find one that offers better performance. Thus, the MAC address on my wife's computer has changed several times this year, and a couple of other machines have recycled the older WNICs already this year.
Summary? MAC addresses aren't a reliable way to identify any particular computer over time, at all.
...your staff is your tools...
Yeah, I felt that way about some of mine too. But there were a few good ones.
Was that an unladen European vacationer? AIIIEEEeeeee...
You Northerners and your backwards summers. We've got black ice. And penguins, musn't forget the penguins, although they're mostly down at Cape Schank. They seem to be comfortable.
What sort of books do you prefer to buy? Does your buying strategy include more "Minimal Perl" than "Blue Ocean Strategy? Do you prefer to spend on "The Definitive Guide to MySQL" or "Good to Great"? Which ones do you prefer to read nowdays? The answer to that question could point to the answer to your larger question.
I look at management - and consultancy, which is the same thing without the head count - as simply playing with lines of code that are much bigger. Bigger building blocks, if you will. Instead of data structures and algorithms I put together DBA's and network people and infrastructure agreements, and match people and tasks.
The need for correct syntax and error correction applies at any level. But it certainly pays to have learned everything up to that point; there are fewer places where gremlins can hide & catch you unawares if you're not quite that easily fooled.
Technology teaches you to think. The other stuff teaches you to value thinking correctly.