the thing is, the topcoder infrastructure supports certain languages and it costs them $$$ to implement additional ones. When there is a payoff to adding Ruby, I'm certain they will add it.
Using Python is problematic anyway as they state that due to slow runtime of python, some problems won't be solvable. They will time out. I expect this would apply to Ruby also. And I would hate to invest the time to solve something in Python/Ruby only to find out that it won't run, then have to port it.
On the other hand, if the productivity claims of Python/Ruby are true, then a more fair contest might weight time to complete the problem vs. runtime. E.g. if you implement a correct solution quickly, then you get more runtime to test. Something like that.
If you read mini-microsoft and some other blogs about MS, there is a weird, unhealthy sounding obsession with the details of ranking and how everyone thinks they are better than everyone else but they got screwed by the system. It must be a strange, depressing bureaucratic place to work.
It almost sounds like a civil service environment, where people focus on the science of how to work at the place, rather then the science of actually doing something.
In my way of thinking, I don't really care about the ersatz scientific details of the ranking/review system. If I am not paid enough or the work sucks and I have other options, I take them. If I have no other options, then it sucks to be me.
How will this affect Opengl or is it completely independent of SGI now?
I recently took an opengl class at SGI in Mountain View. The class and material was good but the desktop SGI machines were less than impressive. The final application I ended up with ran at 20 fps on the SGI machine and at 250 fps on my vanilla dell 2.5ghz pentium with intel integrated graphics. I mean come on, they are supposed to be the graphics dudes. I forget which SGI model it was but is was a weirdly shaped purple mini-tower (couldn't stack anything on top of it, thats for sure). If they hoped to ever sell anything to the classroom attendees then they shouldn't have given us something that made them look so bad.
One cool phenom of this boom-bubble is the number of parasite companies spawned by Google API's, especially Google Map integration. Just google (heh) for 'venture capital google maps' and you get a ton of hits. Here's one thats even self-referential.
The issue of private keys, DRM, code signing and the effect of GPL V3 has been in discussion for a long time. Linus has said he might in some circumstances sign binaries, in which case you would need the private key to regenerate the signed binary.
"And since I can imaging [sic] signing binaries myself, I don't feel that I can disallow anybody else doing so." Linus Torvalds, LKML April 2003
Microsoft trumpets this issue like its a new thing, not a 30 year old principle.
the whole thing is MS's fault. not the users. The app developers have secondary responsibility but MS caused the problem in the first place. Their developer resources promote doing all kinds of bogus things in their apps. For years MSDN has gone out of its way to promote all the OS level hooks that are available to developers, many of which only work as admin.
free as in beer anyway. And neither is flawed or inadequate compared to their competition. So what's the problem? People are complaining that they want their free stuff to be perfect?
If you are typing on a web page that uses XMLHTTPRequest, then you should treat it as if you were running a live program remotely. I.E. the web page could forward information about everything you type, how you move your mouse, etc, without an explicit 'submit'. Example : it if were an email app, and you typed 'my boss is a dick and my SSN is 555-55-5555' in an edit control, and then thought better of it and erased what you typed and killed the browser window without submitting, the contents could already have been captured and forwarded to the host with XMLHTTPRequest and you never knew it. Looks like a good cross site scripting opportunity.
Of course, you usually don't know if a page is using XMLHTTPRequest in a hidden frame unless you look really hard, so I guess the bottom line is never type anything on a web page you don't want the world to see. On the other hand, AFAIK (which doesn't mean much) this hasn't shown up in practice, so maybe it isn't that big a deal.
People, read some Schneier for layman's explanations of what crypto is, how it works and how it is cracked. Or read some Mitnick. The algorithms take essentially forever to brute force (triple DES, AES 128, 256 etc). certainly not 90 days. The cryptanalysts always attack the implementation, the key management or simply social engineer the keys out of someone.
Sony should take a page from the Johnson and Johnson book. When the Tylenol poisonings happened, J&J took aggressive action to limit the damage and help the people concerned. They pulled the product off the shelves at a huge financial hit. They turned around a potential PR nightmare by doing the right thing (and the tragedy wasn't even their fault)
Instead, Sony is using the Intel Floating Point strategy of obfuscation, excuses, hard line statements etc.
From BBC News:
"A spokesman for Sony BMG said the licence agreement was explicit about what was being installed and how to go about removing it. It referred technical questions to First 4 Internet.
Mr Gilliat-Smith said Mr Russinovich had problems removing XCP because he tried to do it manually something that was not a "recommended action". Instead, said Mr Gilliat-Smith, he should have contacted Sony BMG which gives consumers advice about how to remove the software.
Getting the software removed involves filling in a form on the Sony website, visiting a unique URL and agreeing to have another program downloaded on to a user's PC that then does the uninstallation. "
XmlHttpRequest breaks the ingrained UI idiom of 'nothing happens until I click something'.
Ajax (specifically XmlHttpRequest) has some scary implications for phishing. From a post on JoelOnSoftware discussion list by 'JD'
For example, when someone clicks a link in an email that is out phishing for an SSN and personal info, you could be half-way through the form, and think - wait, I don't want to do this. BUT, with XmlHttpRequest, your information that you've only typed into the form has already been nabbed and sent to someone overseas - and you didn't see ANYTHING happen.
Of any non-academic magazines, Game Developer Magazine is by the far the hardest of the hardcore when it comes to programming and computer science. Plus its fun stuff (but not easy!). Its tough to get a sub if you aren't in the games industry, but if you manage to get one, you won't be disappointed.
The proposed rockets aren't supersonic, hyperpersonic, or even half-sonic. They are way too slow to win at Reno. per TFA "The rocket planes will be flying in the range of 200 to 300 miles per hour."
There are 2 or 3 classes of aircraft that go faster than that at the Reno Air Races. I don't have the exact figures at hand, but The WWII fighters do about 400-450 kts average and over 500 in the straights. The Lancairs/Questairs go somewhere in the range 300-400. at 200-300 mph there is no need to just go straight. Yea, the technology is important but these things won't be particulary exciting to watch at 5000 feet/AGL. you'll barely see them. Come to Reno. The racers go by so close to the crowd you can see the expressions on the pilots faces.
in the defense/aerospace world I work in, the older workers (40 on up to 60 something) do the cool hard stuff. we give the crap maintenance assignments to the new kids. You are no longer new after about 10 years experience. Our management knows that there is a large body of experience-based knowledge that you need to be able to cover all the bases when you are designing and building something to work in the real world and not in an air conditioned computer room. In this world, being an employee with 20 years+ at the company is a big plus, not a negative.
the one thing in mini-ms's stuff that revolted me the most was the apparent morbid fixation on ranking and eval scores at MS. The blog says that raises are hard to come by at MS and that there is a lot of backstabbing and infighting to up one's rank so as to get a percent or two. That sounds like a very unpleasant work environment to me.
damaging a company does damage people. employees get laid off. shareholders lose money. the companies vendors lose business which ripples thru again. the company is fictitious but the stakeholders aren't.
there is a section on this fiasco In "waltzing with bears' a book on software risk management by demarco and lister.
they point out that although the software is blamed for the 1.1m / day cost of lateness, the reality is that many other contractors unrelated to the baggage handling system hid their own lateness behind the very public software problems. Even if the baggage system was on time the airport likely wouldn't have opened when it was supposed to.
The book is pretty interesting and uses the Denver thing to show how a lack of risk management played a big part in the software woes.
One thing I really like about BSG is that the weapons are realistic and the visual effects are outstanding. The missile salvos are really really cool. Unlike Star Trek, Star Wars and SG-1, the BSG folks use guided weapons. In those other shows, in the future, the engineers have forgotten how to make guided or tracking weapons. They just shoot stuff randomly and most of the time they miss. The Stargate Atlantis finale from last season was a prime example. The marines show up with 'rail guns' that they are so fracking proud of. But then they just spray out into space with no radar tracking or anything else, hitting nothing. Jesus, a 20th century Phalanx is way better than the crap they have.
Oh, Babylon 5 was one of the few good ones also. The way they tracked the beam weapons and sliced things up was believable and cool.
It may not be exactly what you want, but C++ has pointers to member functions already.
class X { public: virtual int member(int x) { return x; } };
int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { X x; int a; int (X::*p)(int) = &X::member;
a = (x.*p)(0); }
the missing thing is that the pointer-to-member doesn't bind to a specific object. you need to have an object reference also, so you would need to store the pointer to member and also a pointer to the object you wanted to access.
why should poor, elderly and plain old non-computer folks have their money confiscated by force (extra taxes) to support free wifi for 20 something slackers? Tell those freeloaders to get a second job at Macdonalds and earn the extra $30 a month they need for internet access.
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the thing is, the topcoder infrastructure supports certain languages and it costs them $$$ to implement additional ones. When there is a payoff to adding Ruby, I'm certain they will add it.
Using Python is problematic anyway as they state that due to slow runtime of python, some problems won't be solvable. They will time out. I expect this would apply to Ruby also. And I would hate to invest the time to solve something in Python/Ruby only to find out that it won't run, then have to port it.
On the other hand, if the productivity claims of Python/Ruby are true, then a more fair contest might weight time to complete the problem vs. runtime. E.g. if you implement a correct solution quickly, then you get more runtime to test. Something like that.
If you read mini-microsoft and some other blogs about MS, there is a weird, unhealthy sounding obsession with the details of ranking and how everyone thinks they are better than everyone else but they got screwed by the system. It must be a strange, depressing bureaucratic place to work.
It almost sounds like a civil service environment, where people focus on the science of how to work at the place, rather then the science of actually doing something.
In my way of thinking, I don't really care about the ersatz scientific details of the ranking/review system. If I am not paid enough or the work sucks and I have other options, I take them. If I have no other options, then it sucks to be me.
A question and a comment:
How will this affect Opengl or is it completely independent of SGI now?
I recently took an opengl class at SGI in Mountain View. The class and material was good but the desktop SGI machines were less than impressive. The final application I ended up with ran at 20 fps on the SGI machine and at 250 fps on my vanilla dell 2.5ghz pentium with intel integrated graphics. I mean come on, they are supposed to be the graphics dudes. I forget which SGI model it was but is was a weirdly shaped purple mini-tower (couldn't stack anything on top of it, thats for sure). If they hoped to ever sell anything to the classroom attendees then they shouldn't have given us something that made them look so bad.
One cool phenom of this boom-bubble is the number of parasite companies spawned by Google API's, especially Google Map integration. Just google (heh) for 'venture capital google maps' and you get a ton of hits. Here's one thats even self-referential.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2003/4/24/19
The issue of private keys, DRM, code signing and the effect of GPL V3 has been in discussion for a long time. Linus has said he might in some circumstances sign binaries, in which case you would need the private key to regenerate the signed binary.
"And since I can imaging [sic] signing binaries myself, I don't feel that I can
disallow anybody else doing so."
Linus Torvalds, LKML April 2003
Anyone building a company would love to have it become the same size as Nike, Cadbury and even that English store thingie. That's not chump change.
the whole thing is MS's fault. not the users. The app developers have secondary responsibility but MS caused the problem in the first place. Their developer resources promote doing all kinds of bogus things in their apps. For years MSDN has gone out of its way to promote all the OS level hooks that are available to developers, many of which only work as admin.
here's an example from a couple of months ago:How to capture the print screen key and totally change how your user's GUI works. Just what I want, the ability for some random application to subvert basic elements of the system interface.
WTF does that even mean?
free as in beer anyway. And neither is flawed or inadequate compared to their competition. So what's the problem? People are complaining that they want their free stuff to be perfect?
If you are typing on a web page that uses XMLHTTPRequest, then you should treat it as if you were running a live program remotely. I.E. the web page could forward information about everything you type, how you move your mouse, etc, without an explicit 'submit'. Example : it if were an email app, and you typed 'my boss is a dick and my SSN is 555-55-5555' in an edit control, and then thought better of it and erased what you typed and killed the browser window without submitting, the contents could already have been captured and forwarded to the host with XMLHTTPRequest and you never knew it. Looks like a good cross site scripting opportunity.
Of course, you usually don't know if a page is using XMLHTTPRequest in a hidden frame unless you look really hard, so I guess the bottom line is never type anything on a web page you don't want the world to see. On the other hand, AFAIK (which doesn't mean much) this hasn't shown up in practice, so maybe it isn't that big a deal.
"Nobody will ever need more than 640 bits in their encryption key"
Bill Gates, October 2005
People, read some Schneier for layman's explanations of what crypto is, how it works and how it is cracked. Or read some Mitnick. The algorithms take essentially forever to brute force (triple DES, AES 128, 256 etc). certainly not 90 days. The cryptanalysts always attack the implementation, the key management or simply social engineer the keys out of someone.
Sony should take a page from the Johnson and Johnson book. When the Tylenol poisonings happened, J&J took aggressive action to limit the damage and help the people concerned. They pulled the product off the shelves at a huge financial hit. They turned around a potential PR nightmare by doing the right thing (and the tragedy wasn't even their fault)
Instead, Sony is using the Intel Floating Point strategy of obfuscation, excuses, hard line statements etc.
From BBC News:
"A spokesman for Sony BMG said the licence agreement was explicit about what was being installed and how to go about removing it. It referred technical questions to First 4 Internet.
Mr Gilliat-Smith said Mr Russinovich had problems removing XCP because he tried to do it manually something that was not a "recommended action". Instead, said Mr Gilliat-Smith, he should have contacted Sony BMG which gives consumers advice about how to remove the software.
Getting the software removed involves filling in a form on the Sony website, visiting a unique URL and agreeing to have another program downloaded on to a user's PC that then does the uninstallation. "
XmlHttpRequest breaks the ingrained UI idiom of 'nothing happens until I click something'. Ajax (specifically XmlHttpRequest) has some scary implications for phishing. From a post on JoelOnSoftware discussion list by 'JD'
For example, when someone clicks a link in an email that is out phishing for an SSN and personal info, you could be half-way through the form, and think - wait, I don't want to do this. BUT, with XmlHttpRequest, your information that you've only typed into the form has already been nabbed and sent to someone overseas - and you didn't see ANYTHING happen.
Of any non-academic magazines, Game Developer Magazine is by the far the hardest of the hardcore when it comes to programming and computer science. Plus its fun stuff (but not easy!). Its tough to get a sub if you aren't in the games industry, but if you manage to get one, you won't be disappointed.
I don't get what the excitement is about.
The proposed rockets aren't supersonic, hyperpersonic, or even half-sonic. They are way too slow to win at Reno. per TFA "The rocket planes will be flying in the range of 200 to 300 miles per hour."
There are 2 or 3 classes of aircraft that go faster than that at the Reno Air Races. I don't have the exact figures at hand, but The WWII fighters do about 400-450 kts average and over 500 in the straights. The Lancairs/Questairs go somewhere in the range 300-400. at 200-300 mph there is no need to just go straight. Yea, the technology is important but these things won't be particulary exciting to watch at 5000 feet/AGL. you'll barely see them. Come to Reno. The racers go by so close to the crowd you can see the expressions on the pilots faces.
in the defense/aerospace world I work in, the older workers (40 on up to 60 something) do the cool hard stuff. we give the crap maintenance assignments to the new kids. You are no longer new after about 10 years experience. Our management knows that there is a large body of experience-based knowledge that you need to be able to cover all the bases when you are designing and building something to work in the real world and not in an air conditioned computer room. In this world, being an employee with 20 years+ at the company is a big plus, not a negative.
the one thing in mini-ms's stuff that revolted me the most was the apparent morbid fixation on ranking and eval scores at MS. The blog says that raises are hard to come by at MS and that there is a lot of backstabbing and infighting to up one's rank so as to get a percent or two. That sounds like a very unpleasant work environment to me.
damaging a company does damage people. employees get laid off. shareholders lose money. the companies vendors lose business which ripples thru again. the company is fictitious but the stakeholders aren't.
uh, they are talking about what they do in their own code, in Microsoft products. You are free to use whatever algorithms you want in your own stuff.
there is a section on this fiasco In "waltzing with bears' a book on software risk management by demarco and lister.
they point out that although the software is blamed for the 1.1m / day cost of lateness, the reality is that many other contractors unrelated to the baggage handling system hid their own lateness behind the very public software problems. Even if the baggage system was on time the airport likely wouldn't have opened when it was supposed to.
The book is pretty interesting and uses the Denver thing to show how a lack of risk management played a big part in the software woes.
if they are teaching Active Directory as a class, then its not computer science, its IT
One thing I really like about BSG is that the weapons are realistic and the visual effects are outstanding. The missile salvos are really really cool. Unlike Star Trek, Star Wars and SG-1, the BSG folks use guided weapons. In those other shows, in the future, the engineers have forgotten how to make guided or tracking weapons. They just shoot stuff randomly and most of the time they miss. The Stargate Atlantis finale from last season was a prime example. The marines show up with 'rail guns' that they are so fracking proud of. But then they just spray out into space with no radar tracking or anything else, hitting nothing. Jesus, a 20th century Phalanx is way better than the crap they have.
Oh, Babylon 5 was one of the few good ones also. The way they tracked the beam weapons and sliced things up was believable and cool.
why should poor, elderly and plain old non-computer folks have their money confiscated by force (extra taxes) to support free wifi for 20 something slackers? Tell those freeloaders to get a second job at Macdonalds and earn the extra $30 a month they need for internet access.