Perhaps he lacks a degree from a four year institution. Perhaps he has the primadonna attitude many "superstar programmers" have. Maybe he has very poor social skills, which leads him to making a less than favorable impression during interviews.
These things can actually be good things for a programmer though.. Most of the best programmers I know, and we're talking real code wizards here, lack Comp Sci degrees, aren't very social, and have big egos amongst their type.. but they do the work and don't complain.
They're just not good things when you're interviewing;-) But this is why I believe setting tests and challenges at an interview is better than seeing whether they party or have outside interests. Sometimes you NEED social programmers who get on well with everyone.. but certain roles demand hard-headed introverted geeks who can get the hard stuff done quick!
For Windows users... like Firebird (pre 0.8) you can just unzip this and go. However, you may get it bitching about missing DLLs (I did, on a reasonably clean install of XP). The two that were missing were C runtime libraries, which I managed to download at dll-files.com (never heard of it before, but it works). msvcp70.dll and msvcr70.dll. As ever, exercise caution, although it has worked for me:-)
Regarding your latter idea, wouldn't that screw things up when it comes to running CGI scripts, and the like? After all, every single thing would be running as the apache process, rather than in a chrooted environment, as many secure systems do. I may, of course, be missing the point.
The main story here assumes that pure gameplay is everything in a game. Sure, gameplay is important, but our standards for other things go up over time too.
I agree with what the guy says about Half-Life, and that it's still more playable than many games today.. but that's because today's games don't have as good gameplay as Half-Life. If a modern game with excellent graphics had the same game-play than Half-Life, then it'd be better. PC games have just tended to suck over the past year.
But, no, we haven't gone far enough yet. When you can render something and it looks just like you're 'really there' (i.e. photo quality), with no lines between texture changes, and the like, then we'll be there. Of course, we'll also want excellent AI, and excellent scaling. I mean.. who wants something that looks like real life (Max Payne and Half Life 2 come surprisingly close here!) but which forces you to take a very defined route to the end?
It's all got to scale. Not just the gameplay, not just the graphics, not just the sound.. but everything.
Would 2.6 result in a performance increase if you were using something like VMWare to run Linux? For example, I've found Redhat 9 to be UBER slow in VMWare, but SuSE 8 is quite fast. And Redhat 9 has certain 2.6 features backported... which is why I worry.
The other day I had to remember a name from ten years ago. I could picture the person but no name was forthcoming. Several hours later, while doing something quite menial, and not actively thinking about earlier, the name just suddenly appeared.
A couple of friends remarked that this was quite common for them, but I'd never really thought of it before. It seems some dark area of your brain remembers tasks you're trying to achieve, or things you're trying to remember, and sets about working on them in the background, while you get on with something else entirely.
This may be why people often come up with great ideas in the shower or while driving in the car, as their minds were 'set the task' earlier, and finally it's finished. Not too unlike a computer I guess, but certainly cool when you do it yourself. You realize that brain has a lot more tricks up its sleeve than are mentioned in the handbook.
Are you sure you actually bothered to look? #1 regular result for 'scotland map' is a link to an excellent Scottish map. And anyway, this is what Google Images is for. Search for 'scotland map' then hit the 'Images' tab. Tons of maps at your fingertips. Can't see where your problem was. I found many maps in seconds, and didn't see any ads.
Can you get portable MP3-DVD players yet? You know, just like the MP3-CD clamshell ones, barely bigger than a CD, but that can play DVD-Rs?
If so, that'd rock far more than this iPod stuff. 4.7GB on a single DVD-R, you could carry a pretty great portable collection on a single DVD. And most people could fit their whole CD library onto just three or four in total.
Sure, it'd be quite a bit bigger than an iPod, but not necessarily any heavier, and my regular CD player fits in my pocket, doesn't skip. I'd be happy to pay $100 for a portable 4.7GB MP3-DVD player, compared to $300 for a 10GB iPod. (Considering you can get MP3-CD players for less than $50 now, $100 for a DVD version doesn't sound unreasonable)
The benefits of this? You can swap discs around quickly, you can (maybe) use DVD-RWs, you can use rechargable batteries, and you can get WAY MORE than 8 crappy hours (like the iPod gets).
Just interested, but what are you considering to be the first (and therefore 'only', by what you say) 'half-decent' open source FPS? Quake? If it's not Quake, I'd like to check it out, whatever it is.
I run a small ISP (not dialup, but Web space/e-mail/etc) and have SpamAssassin tweaked this way and that, and my users get barely any spam (a few a day, at most, compared to 50-100 a day before the filtering), and we haven't had any false positives yet (we check).
What I don't get is why don't more ISPs do this? Is it a legal angle that I'm unaware of (SpamAssassin filtering mail is not what I'd consider eavesdropping)? Of course, all users are aware of the filtering, so it's not a big surprise to them, I imagine you might have problems if they didn't know, and you actually ditched half of their mail.
Despite a ban on all tobacco advertising in the UK, how comes Formula 1 has an exemption? If you have influence or bring benefits to a certain place, you can make demands backed up with threats, and often win.
Fair enough, if you're not an active music aficionado, then that's all well and good. The only problem is if everyone took the same opinion, and then your friends wouldn't have heard anything to bother recommending;-)
On the flip side, I'm listening to music sixteen hours a day, much of it new or alien to me, simply because that's what I like to do. I guess I should take into account that not everyone else is a music nut. Some of those 'friends' you mention are probably music nuts themselves, and I guess you get them to do the filtering:-)
The UK isn't the world's largest creditor, it is one of the world's largest creditors (Japan being the largest creditor nation). Banks located in the UK, however, are the world's largest creditors. Oops.
I would agree with some of your points, but this almost reads like a troll given some blazing factual errors.
Blocking advancement in 3rd world countries by covering every rubbish with patents.
Patents currently work on a per-country basis. The Chinese can develop whatever they like under their own system. If Western civilization does crumble, as you predict, then China won't be interested in selling to the US so much anymore, but to its own citizens and neighbours, whose patents will be different to those of the US.
The military advantage is already gone in thecase of e.g. France or UK or is already decreasing like e.g. US and Germany.
Germany has a weak military compared to both the UK and France. I'm not sure where you're getting your statistics from. You're also confusing military power with power in general. Israel has a very powerful army by international standards, but they're hardly a superpower in any sense.
You have also missed that the UK (and the US, to a point) holds an advantage over its European peers by being the world's largest creditor, raking in billions from ever growing third world debt.
I do not see the gloom and doom you seem to, however. I think the development of the second and third worlds will improve the world as a whole, even if it puts a little dent into our own standard of living. As a supplier, myself, I'll take a dip in my standard of living if it means I can have the whole world as a giant marketplace, rather than just the US and Europe.
'Pop' isn't just 'what's in the charts'. Believe it or not, there's a lot of unpopular pop music. Music doesn't have to be popular to be pop music, it just has to be in the popular style. There's a lot of good 'pop' music, that isn't bubble-gum pop, twee over-produced crap, or Britney Spears diva-esque stuff. It's sad to see people throw out whole genres because of the stigma they attach to them.
There are so many people who'll say 'I love all music, except country', or 'I love all music, except pop', and they're missing out on a lot of music they'd probably actually like simply because they're labellers ('I don't like foreigners, children, black people..' etc.)
In that case, I'll directly rip the particular scene from the script for your perusal;-) And to your question, yeah, it's a fetish, some people are particularly turned on by that stuff. Takes all sorts..
~~
Randal Graves: [reading a magazine] Have you ever wondered how much the average jizz-mopper makes per hour? Dante Hicks: What's a jizz-mopper? RG: He's the guy that cleans up the nudie booth after each guy jerks off. DH: Nudie booth? RG: Yeah, nudie booth. You've never been in a nudie booth? DH: I guess not. RG: Oh, it's great. There's this glass between you and these chicks, and they put on a show for you for like 10 bucks. DH: What kinda show?
[Customer walks up to counter with a bottle of glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels.]
RG: They do the weirdest, craziest shit you like to see chicks do. They insert things into any opening on their body - ANY opening. DH: Could we not talk about this right now? RG: The jizz-mopper's job is to clean off the glass after each guy shoots a load. I don't know if you noticed, but cum leaves streaks if you don't clean it right away. Offended Customer: I will never come to this place again! DH: I'm sorry? Offended Customer: Using filthy language in front of the customers, you both should be fired! DH: I'm sorry, I guess we got carried away. Offended Customer: I don't know if sorry could make up for it, you've highly offended me. RG: Well if you thinks that's offensive, check this out!
while the electricity for a full hour of CPU time (on a PIII/933) costs me only 0.0045 cents...
Where do you live? Let's assume your 'CPU time' refers to just your CPU, and let's be totally conservative, and say your CPU uses 50W (to edge the calculations in your favor).
So, you're saying that you pay 0.0045 cents for 50W/h, or 0.09 cents per kilowatt hour. Where I live, we pay about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, or 111 times what you claim to be paying. I think your sums were a bit off or you threw a decimal place somewhere you shouldn't have!:-)
I think 2004 is going to be a bumper year for open source (and Linux, in particular) thanks to the advances made in 2003. Linux is finally a term that is recognized by many businesses, and the concept of 'open source' is invading even the most stoic of companies. More developers than ever are joining the ranks (although many only because they're out of work, unfortunately), and there are lots of cool projects.
Mike Home, who works on Wine, posted a great summary of planned open source developments in 2004, mentioning Wine's continuing development (0.9 should be out in 2004), and planned leaps in KDE and GNOME. GNOME will finally get a full and stable version of Epiphany, too.
Development continues on Perl 6 and the Parrot virtual machine, and I am particularly interested in the development of Dashboard, a GNOME 'just in time' information manager project created by Nat Friedman, of Ximian fame.
Alan Cox should have his MBE this year, er, MBA, rather;-) And perhaps he'll stop using Welsh only on his diary. And as discussed over at KernelTrap, Reiser4 may also be merged into 2.6, although this is not certain, and may be merged into 2.7 first for further testing.
So, what do YOU see happening in open source in 2004? Fill us in on what you plan to do, and why 2004 is going to be a bumper year for open source, Linux, and all. What technologies are going to spring up this time around?
But claiming that there is no need for good graphical HTML editors (Dreamweaver is the only one that currently really rates as good, BTW) is a nonsense.
That may have been the case a few years ago, but as anyone who claims to know anything about the field knows, you should be using XHTML and CSS now.
When you separate presentation from content, you can easily use a text editor for the content, and not lose any context.
What would be more useful, however, is a CSS previewer, but CSS is, mostly, consistent so producing the look you want isn't so difficult anyway.
I agree with you. On a recent trip to California, I was really peeved at the way prices are never what they seemed.
In certain places, like McDonald's, you paid what you saw. $1.99 for a McWhatever.. you paid $1.99. But at In'N'Out (oh I miss that place), for a $2.99 burger, you ended up paying like $3.23 or some similarly bizarre amount. Shopping at Ralph's was as interesting, which certain trips resulting in no tax, and others resulting in a few dollars (I believe this is because food is exempt from CA sales tax?).
In the UK, however, almost everywhere includes the VAT (like a 17.5% sales tax). So much so, that most people don't realise that most items have 17.5% tax.
The only places that predominantly list prices without VAT are trade magazines, parts catalogs, and so on.. because most businesses can 'claim the VAT back' from the taxman on purchases for business use.
The one BENEFIT I see of not including taxes on the display price is that people learn that their government is taxing them heavily. As I said before, most British people just pay the sticker price, and go on their way.. Americans, however, have that tax burden in their face everytime they go to In'N'Out. This might make a difference when it comes to voting on taxes in the future.
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Perhaps he lacks a degree from a four year institution. Perhaps he has the primadonna attitude many "superstar programmers" have. Maybe he has very poor social skills, which leads him to making a less than favorable impression during interviews.
;-) But this is why I believe setting tests and challenges at an interview is better than seeing whether they party or have outside interests. Sometimes you NEED social programmers who get on well with everyone.. but certain roles demand hard-headed introverted geeks who can get the hard stuff done quick!
These things can actually be good things for a programmer though.. Most of the best programmers I know, and we're talking real code wizards here, lack Comp Sci degrees, aren't very social, and have big egos amongst their type.. but they do the work and don't complain.
They're just not good things when you're interviewing
For Windows users... like Firebird (pre 0.8) you can just unzip this and go. However, you may get it bitching about missing DLLs (I did, on a reasonably clean install of XP). The two that were missing were C runtime libraries, which I managed to download at dll-files.com (never heard of it before, but it works). msvcp70.dll and msvcr70.dll. As ever, exercise caution, although it has worked for me :-)
Since when does 'a lot' have to mean 'the majority'? What the original poster said is true, a lot of spammers are based overseas.
Regarding your latter idea, wouldn't that screw things up when it comes to running CGI scripts, and the like? After all, every single thing would be running as the apache process, rather than in a chrooted environment, as many secure systems do. I may, of course, be missing the point.
The main story here assumes that pure gameplay is everything in a game. Sure, gameplay is important, but our standards for other things go up over time too.
I agree with what the guy says about Half-Life, and that it's still more playable than many games today.. but that's because today's games don't have as good gameplay as Half-Life. If a modern game with excellent graphics had the same game-play than Half-Life, then it'd be better. PC games have just tended to suck over the past year.
But, no, we haven't gone far enough yet. When you can render something and it looks just like you're 'really there' (i.e. photo quality), with no lines between texture changes, and the like, then we'll be there. Of course, we'll also want excellent AI, and excellent scaling. I mean.. who wants something that looks like real life (Max Payne and Half Life 2 come surprisingly close here!) but which forces you to take a very defined route to the end?
It's all got to scale. Not just the gameplay, not just the graphics, not just the sound.. but everything.
Would 2.6 result in a performance increase if you were using something like VMWare to run Linux? For example, I've found Redhat 9 to be UBER slow in VMWare, but SuSE 8 is quite fast. And Redhat 9 has certain 2.6 features backported... which is why I worry.
The other day I had to remember a name from ten years ago. I could picture the person but no name was forthcoming. Several hours later, while doing something quite menial, and not actively thinking about earlier, the name just suddenly appeared.
A couple of friends remarked that this was quite common for them, but I'd never really thought of it before. It seems some dark area of your brain remembers tasks you're trying to achieve, or things you're trying to remember, and sets about working on them in the background, while you get on with something else entirely.
This may be why people often come up with great ideas in the shower or while driving in the car, as their minds were 'set the task' earlier, and finally it's finished. Not too unlike a computer I guess, but certainly cool when you do it yourself. You realize that brain has a lot more tricks up its sleeve than are mentioned in the handbook.
Are you sure you actually bothered to look? #1 regular result for 'scotland map' is a link to an excellent Scottish map. And anyway, this is what Google Images is for. Search for 'scotland map' then hit the 'Images' tab. Tons of maps at your fingertips. Can't see where your problem was. I found many maps in seconds, and didn't see any ads.
Can you get portable MP3-DVD players yet? You know, just like the MP3-CD clamshell ones, barely bigger than a CD, but that can play DVD-Rs?
If so, that'd rock far more than this iPod stuff. 4.7GB on a single DVD-R, you could carry a pretty great portable collection on a single DVD. And most people could fit their whole CD library onto just three or four in total.
Sure, it'd be quite a bit bigger than an iPod, but not necessarily any heavier, and my regular CD player fits in my pocket, doesn't skip. I'd be happy to pay $100 for a portable 4.7GB MP3-DVD player, compared to $300 for a 10GB iPod. (Considering you can get MP3-CD players for less than $50 now, $100 for a DVD version doesn't sound unreasonable)
The benefits of this? You can swap discs around quickly, you can (maybe) use DVD-RWs, you can use rechargable batteries, and you can get WAY MORE than 8 crappy hours (like the iPod gets).
Just interested, but what are you considering to be the first (and therefore 'only', by what you say) 'half-decent' open source FPS? Quake? If it's not Quake, I'd like to check it out, whatever it is.
I run a small ISP (not dialup, but Web space/e-mail/etc) and have SpamAssassin tweaked this way and that, and my users get barely any spam (a few a day, at most, compared to 50-100 a day before the filtering), and we haven't had any false positives yet (we check).
What I don't get is why don't more ISPs do this? Is it a legal angle that I'm unaware of (SpamAssassin filtering mail is not what I'd consider eavesdropping)? Of course, all users are aware of the filtering, so it's not a big surprise to them, I imagine you might have problems if they didn't know, and you actually ditched half of their mail.
A lot of power is beyond the law.
Despite a ban on all tobacco advertising in the UK, how comes Formula 1 has an exemption? If you have influence or bring benefits to a certain place, you can make demands backed up with threats, and often win.
Fair enough, if you're not an active music aficionado, then that's all well and good. The only problem is if everyone took the same opinion, and then your friends wouldn't have heard anything to bother recommending ;-)
:-)
On the flip side, I'm listening to music sixteen hours a day, much of it new or alien to me, simply because that's what I like to do. I guess I should take into account that not everyone else is a music nut. Some of those 'friends' you mention are probably music nuts themselves, and I guess you get them to do the filtering
The UK isn't the world's largest creditor, it is one of the world's largest creditors (Japan being the largest creditor nation). Banks located in the UK, however, are the world's largest creditors. Oops.
I would agree with some of your points, but this almost reads like a troll given some blazing factual errors.
Blocking advancement in 3rd world countries by covering every rubbish with patents.
Patents currently work on a per-country basis. The Chinese can develop whatever they like under their own system. If Western civilization does crumble, as you predict, then China won't be interested in selling to the US so much anymore, but to its own citizens and neighbours, whose patents will be different to those of the US.
The military advantage is already gone in thecase of e.g. France or UK or is already decreasing like e.g. US and Germany.
Germany has a weak military compared to both the UK and France. I'm not sure where you're getting your statistics from. You're also confusing military power with power in general. Israel has a very powerful army by international standards, but they're hardly a superpower in any sense.
You have also missed that the UK (and the US, to a point) holds an advantage over its European peers by being the world's largest creditor, raking in billions from ever growing third world debt.
I do not see the gloom and doom you seem to, however. I think the development of the second and third worlds will improve the world as a whole, even if it puts a little dent into our own standard of living. As a supplier, myself, I'll take a dip in my standard of living if it means I can have the whole world as a giant marketplace, rather than just the US and Europe.
'Pop' isn't just 'what's in the charts'. Believe it or not, there's a lot of unpopular pop music. Music doesn't have to be popular to be pop music, it just has to be in the popular style. There's a lot of good 'pop' music, that isn't bubble-gum pop, twee over-produced crap, or Britney Spears diva-esque stuff. It's sad to see people throw out whole genres because of the stigma they attach to them.
There are so many people who'll say 'I love all music, except country', or 'I love all music, except pop', and they're missing out on a lot of music they'd probably actually like simply because they're labellers ('I don't like foreigners, children, black people..' etc.)
In that case, I'll directly rip the particular scene from the script for your perusal ;-) And to your question, yeah, it's a fetish, some people are particularly turned on by that stuff. Takes all sorts..
~~
Randal Graves: [reading a magazine] Have you ever wondered how much the average jizz-mopper makes per hour?
Dante Hicks: What's a jizz-mopper?
RG: He's the guy that cleans up the nudie booth after each guy jerks off.
DH: Nudie booth?
RG: Yeah, nudie booth. You've never been in a nudie booth?
DH: I guess not.
RG: Oh, it's great. There's this glass between you and these chicks, and they put on a show for you for like 10 bucks.
DH: What kinda show?
[Customer walks up to counter with a bottle of glass cleaner and a roll of paper towels.]
RG: They do the weirdest, craziest shit you like to see chicks do. They insert things into any opening on their body - ANY opening.
DH: Could we not talk about this right now?
RG: The jizz-mopper's job is to clean off the glass after each guy shoots a load. I don't know if you noticed, but cum leaves streaks if you don't clean it right away.
Offended Customer: I will never come to this place again!
DH: I'm sorry?
Offended Customer: Using filthy language in front of the customers, you both should be fired!
DH: I'm sorry, I guess we got carried away.
Offended Customer: I don't know if sorry could make up for it, you've highly offended me.
RG: Well if you thinks that's offensive, check this out!
[Shows him graphic picture from porn mag.]
RG: I think you can see her kidneys!
Haha, you just sounded so like that customer in Clerks who complained after the guy was talking about jizz mopping.
while the electricity for a full hour of CPU time (on a PIII/933) costs me only 0.0045 cents...
:-)
Where do you live? Let's assume your 'CPU time' refers to just your CPU, and let's be totally conservative, and say your CPU uses 50W (to edge the calculations in your favor).
So, you're saying that you pay 0.0045 cents for 50W/h, or 0.09 cents per kilowatt hour. Where I live, we pay about 10 cents per kilowatt hour, or 111 times what you claim to be paying. I think your sums were a bit off or you threw a decimal place somewhere you shouldn't have!
I think 2004 is going to be a bumper year for open source (and Linux, in particular) thanks to the advances made in 2003. Linux is finally a term that is recognized by many businesses, and the concept of 'open source' is invading even the most stoic of companies. More developers than ever are joining the ranks (although many only because they're out of work, unfortunately), and there are lots of cool projects.
;-) And perhaps he'll stop using Welsh only on his diary. And as discussed over at KernelTrap, Reiser4 may also be merged into 2.6, although this is not certain, and may be merged into 2.7 first for further testing.
Mike Home, who works on Wine, posted a great summary of planned open source developments in 2004, mentioning Wine's continuing development (0.9 should be out in 2004), and planned leaps in KDE and GNOME. GNOME will finally get a full and stable version of Epiphany, too.
Development continues on Perl 6 and the Parrot virtual machine, and I am particularly interested in the development of Dashboard, a GNOME 'just in time' information manager project created by Nat Friedman, of Ximian fame.
Alan Cox should have his MBE this year, er, MBA, rather
So, what do YOU see happening in open source in 2004? Fill us in on what you plan to do, and why 2004 is going to be a bumper year for open source, Linux, and all. What technologies are going to spring up this time around?
I'm a physics dummy. What use do these 'jerk' units have in the field?
Are there people who deliberately submit old stories to Slashdot over and over again just to see if they can catch the moderators out? Just wondering.
which kills 100% of animals it infects - even when the mice have been treated with vaccination and anti-virals
Finally, we can destroy our mice overlords!
But claiming that there is no need for good graphical HTML editors (Dreamweaver is the only one that currently really rates as good, BTW) is a nonsense.
That may have been the case a few years ago, but as anyone who claims to know anything about the field knows, you should be using XHTML and CSS now.
When you separate presentation from content, you can easily use a text editor for the content, and not lose any context.
What would be more useful, however, is a CSS previewer, but CSS is, mostly, consistent so producing the look you want isn't so difficult anyway.
I agree with you. On a recent trip to California, I was really peeved at the way prices are never what they seemed.
In certain places, like McDonald's, you paid what you saw. $1.99 for a McWhatever.. you paid $1.99. But at In'N'Out (oh I miss that place), for a $2.99 burger, you ended up paying like $3.23 or some similarly bizarre amount. Shopping at Ralph's was as interesting, which certain trips resulting in no tax, and others resulting in a few dollars (I believe this is because food is exempt from CA sales tax?).
In the UK, however, almost everywhere includes the VAT (like a 17.5% sales tax). So much so, that most people don't realise that most items have 17.5% tax.
The only places that predominantly list prices without VAT are trade magazines, parts catalogs, and so on.. because most businesses can 'claim the VAT back' from the taxman on purchases for business use.
The one BENEFIT I see of not including taxes on the display price is that people learn that their government is taxing them heavily. As I said before, most British people just pay the sticker price, and go on their way.. Americans, however, have that tax burden in their face everytime they go to In'N'Out. This might make a difference when it comes to voting on taxes in the future.