I clicked on one of those "You've just won an iMac!" banners, which I'd heard were legitimate if you can jump through hoops for an hour, and foolishly gave away my name, address, mailto url and even phone number on the VERY FIRST flytrap screen that came up. I rationalized this by telling myself I knew what I was getting myself into. Heh heh. Hoo hoo. Haw haw haw, what a maroon! I bailed after 20 minutes of hoop jumping, leaving a few "Mark all options NO if you DON'T want someone to call" bullets untouched.
Within 48 hours I received about eight or nine calls, all from earnest young telemarketers who'd obviously been told "THESE numbers are HOT numbers from pre-screened folks who WANT your phone call!" I told each of them politely and firmly that our number is on the Do Not Call list -- and the calls stopped. I haven't had a sales call in weeks, now.
Only the self-appointed exceptions, political party callers and alleged non-profits, still call. I do get an occasional rogue caller who been trained in the old hard-sell school and knows enough to keep the mark talking and on the line, but those get a hangup, not a civil "No thanks."
I still remember listening to the news the day before DNC was passed by Congress. An "industry spokesman" hepped up on Libertarian vitamins and me-first definitions of the First Amendment harangued a meek-looking Congresswoman about how Congress was stupid and dead wrong and the Congresslady was being an obstructionist idiot against free enterprise and perfectly law-abiding business. Ah, democracy in action. Within 24 hours, she handed that clown his industry's head on a platter. I've never been prouder of politicians.
Meanwhile, there'll be an ICBM... err... moon rocket... able to carry the 50 megaton Mitsubishi Monshoujou Infinity chromodynamics research package anywhere on Earth by 2007, which might not actually be a bad idea the way things are going near Tel Armagiddo.
Pirates of the Caribbean II is a perfect example of what's wrong with American entertainment: It was storyboarded as a cartoon and produced as cgi jive. And only Disney could drag up the squid from 24,000 Leagues Under The Sea and (tsk... so gratuitously) "do it right." The simple answer is, Japan has deflowered the cultural soul of America with Zelda, GITS and Miyazaki, so all those Mary Tyler Moore joke writers left over from the 20th Century have nowhere to peddle their 300-baudville.
Forgetting for the moment that chimps are apes and us humans are betrayed angels who have nothing in common with animals (especially not limbic systems!), I'd say those chimpanzees regard the python with reverent awe. Why stop at "respect"? You can go all the way to religious awe, only 3/5ths of a mile, in 10 seconds. Ok, a little Buddhist logic here: Humans are a subset of apes, right? If all apes have religious awe, then human beings are entitled to similar peculiarities in their mental evolution.
My favorite project karaoke is Rawhide. I never actually sang it on the job, but I had the joyous pleasure (after I left, throwing my mug in the drink and wishing river trolls on the morgul-minded) of watching that management style self-destruct within three months. From "my way or the highway" to chapter eleven in 90 days, wow. No, folks, rawhiding your most creative people is stupid.
Provided it's got a theater gamma and a minimum of those top-right-corner blackburn QQs for TV commercials, maybe. The real theatrical release had a Sam Spade underlogue and a nice upbeat fantasy ending, just like Original Release Brazil. Pris rolled her eyes in appreciation of Sebastian's toy soldiers in a nicely realized bit of big screen cinematography, and Daryl Hannah's death scene in theaters was awesome -- Pris was designed to be an android soldier's sex toy after all, and her tastes, scents, joy, hormones and lust for life were absolutely nailed by Hannah in the original cut, with its original pace, original frame count and original timing. If this "original cut" is just another salvage job from somebody's 3-inch television studio tape (like the $9 edition of 16 Candles), I'm not sanguine.
IIRC, Steve Wozniak wrote the original Apple Monitor code in a now-legendary all-nighter, and anyone who took the trouble to disassemble it from that night onward saw Revelation. That night joins a short list of epiphanies that lifted the human condition forever after.
So it's possible to write bug-free code. But! If Quality Control mattered, geniuses would be hired to test software, as well as write it. If Customer Support mattered, geniuses, not average schmucks, would answer the phones and take the flamethrowers in the face.
This reminds me of a job interview I had in which the question was broached whether I wrote Quark XTensions from scratch, or modified existing code? It was late in the afternoon, so I scratched my head and jumped on the wrong side of the rail. (The answer by the way is, "Uhh, gosh, I CAN write from scratch, but I ACTUALLY modify existing code. It's faster.")
In the real world, nobody in their right minds works without an IDE. So teach it that way.
"Id, id, id, id, id! It's an obsolete term, I'm afraid, once used to describe the elementary basis of the subconscious mind... Even the Krell must have evolved from that beginning!... All well and good, young man, except for one obvious fallacy!"
The Big Bang is not very aesthetically pleasing. Everything else depends on context, but we're supposed to hang it all like a Calder mobile on some unsupported skyhook? That's Creation Science, kiddies.
The concept of automating code scans to check for "errors" is essentially delusional. You cannot create a catalog of 4,000 known bugs (or some huge number) in software you intend to ship, not when you save money on coding costs by kicking the original bums who understand the code upstairs (or curbside) and then hire RCG's to maintain, or worse, improve, the crap they'll never own. I have never, ever, fixed a bug that wasn't coated with a diamantine millimeter of solid acrimony - but no lintpicking automaton found those errors, either. There was always a human dimension. My favorite was a screaming hysteric who threw a stack of printouts six inches thick at me, all documenting the exact same one-word typo. You want to run a company like coding is the bottom rung of your personal Jacob's Ladder, be my eternal guest.
What killed it for most of us old coots is credentialing, and I can't honestly argue that that's a bad thing. Us autodidacts were plagued by idiosyncracies and a lot of unperceived conceptual blind spots. I personally loved 6502 assembler language and Apple Pascal, eventually graduating to Metrowerks CodeWarrior and Microsoft Foundation Classes. Microsoft killed the joy for me personally by their policy of fixing compiler bugs in incremental updates which you paid for, each and every time. I give 'em credit -- if you'd report a bug, they'd fix it, but not now, and for your current project, not ever. The M$ protection racket yielded Open Source, but that's another can of worms. As far as programming goes, the final final straw, for me, came when Apple introduced Objective C, for no good reason that I ever saw. I could learn Forth and Lisp, but having to learn Objective C was too much. On the heels of AppleScript, the counterintuitive scripting nightmare for the rest of us geezers who loved Perl, Bash and Ruby lots better, Objective C just faded behind the black velvet curtains of obscurantist obfuscation, and I tore down my shingle. I still program, but not for everyone else. And why would kids bother? The real tools these days are larger metamorphs that express bigger ideas closer to the point of even having a computer -- things like Gimp, Open Office, PostgreSQL.
Imagine Condoleezza Rice in red hot pants running down the halls of irony, the desperately dilatory demons of delay at her heels, sports bra in the laundry, flinging her Patriot Act at the screen... Who woulda thunk IBM would ever turn out to be the guys in white hats?
I was going to do a rant about how Google hires Deep Thinkers who can crack bizarre mathematical conundrums, but na'atheless can't write a search algorithm that dredges up the history of toilet paper, but it turns out they've nailed that one. More or less. If you want the sources instead of the dissertations, it ain't so charmin'.
Seriously, the entire 10 CD set of Barron's version of Eleanor Harz Jordan's Beginning Japanese language laboratory materials I first heard in 1971 (!) fit in a few megabytes of your average iPod. This particular course is pretty steep, learning curve wise, but extremely valuable in the long run. There may be modern Japanese materials that are not as formal. If you launch the Barron set in iTunes, you can download the chapter and track descriptions from the internet.
After that, IMMEDIATELY familiarize yourself with Jim Breen's EDict from Monash University in Australia (Google it!), and any of the Japanese-English dictionary utilities that support it -- on Macintosh OS X 10.4, the best of these bar none is Sergey Kurkin's JEDict 4.0.
This will lead you to the realization that the best Pacific Rim computer system is Macintosh, for one simple reason: Kotoeri Input Method. Look into it, dude! Kotoeri is the quickest, slickest way to enter hiragana, katakana, 2-byte English(1) and MOST FREQUENTLY USED Kanji into Unicode text ever invented. The system modifies itself to some extent to match your preferences.
What a bizarre concept! Stable url's? It may be true that information resides somewhere on the internet forever, but if it's useful, chances are it's not going to be revealed (to you) by Google. At a guess, I'd say 99% of the curious url's I collected over the last five years are kaput.
Mac OS X has the best, easiest-to-use Japanese language support on English-speaking computers. While I'm not as familiar with input methods for Korean or Chinese (whether mainland or diehard), they look about as simple as kotoeri. Also, Macs have the fewest problems with mojibake (2-byte-character screwups), as near as I can tell. In fact, kotoeri input method on a Mac is so second nature that I'm afraid to try whatever Windows XP has, and my one foray into Linux multilingual support ended by reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling Windows '95. Not a fun experience. Macs rule the Pacific rim, or did. Maybe other systems have gotten better, but justifiable F.U.D. casts a long shadow.
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I clicked on one of those "You've just won an iMac!" banners, which I'd heard were legitimate if you can jump through hoops for an hour, and foolishly gave away my name, address, mailto url and even phone number on the VERY FIRST flytrap screen that came up. I rationalized this by telling myself I knew what I was getting myself into. Heh heh. Hoo hoo. Haw haw haw, what a maroon! I bailed after 20 minutes of hoop jumping, leaving a few "Mark all options NO if you DON'T want someone to call" bullets untouched.
Within 48 hours I received about eight or nine calls, all from earnest young telemarketers who'd obviously been told "THESE numbers are HOT numbers from pre-screened folks who WANT your phone call!" I told each of them politely and firmly that our number is on the Do Not Call list -- and the calls stopped. I haven't had a sales call in weeks, now.
Only the self-appointed exceptions, political party callers and alleged non-profits, still call. I do get an occasional rogue caller who been trained in the old hard-sell school and knows enough to keep the mark talking and on the line, but those get a hangup, not a civil "No thanks."
I still remember listening to the news the day before DNC was passed by Congress. An "industry spokesman" hepped up on Libertarian vitamins and me-first definitions of the First Amendment harangued a meek-looking Congresswoman about how Congress was stupid and dead wrong and the Congresslady was being an obstructionist idiot against free enterprise and perfectly law-abiding business. Ah, democracy in action. Within 24 hours, she handed that clown his industry's head on a platter. I've never been prouder of politicians.
What's tiny print compared to war, to paraphrase George Patton? On the other hand, I wish this could matter.
On Mac OSX systems at least, /dev/urandom is Yarrow, so it's no wonder.
And this is better than Mersenne Twister (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_twister) with improved initialization because...? Even completely determinate, MT is preferable because brute force searching the number of starting states exceeds heat death of the universe. Full discussion at http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/em t.html
The highbrow designers are right where they should be, designing for Japanese kids who live two decades beyond the stuff us Merkins get.
Meanwhile, there'll be an ICBM... err... moon rocket ... able to carry the 50 megaton Mitsubishi Monshoujou Infinity chromodynamics research package anywhere on Earth by 2007, which might not actually be a bad idea the way things are going near Tel Armagiddo.
Pirates of the Caribbean II is a perfect example of what's wrong with American entertainment: It was storyboarded as a cartoon and produced as cgi jive. And only Disney could drag up the squid from 24,000 Leagues Under The Sea and (tsk ... so gratuitously) "do it right." The simple answer is, Japan has deflowered the cultural soul of America with Zelda, GITS and Miyazaki, so all those Mary Tyler Moore joke writers left over from the 20th Century have nowhere to peddle their 300-baudville.
You could fit two of those pups between here and Betelguese (425 ly). Missing a few naughts, are we?
"What? Waves AND particles simultaneously?" There's something to be said for noticing that a model of reality is a modality of a rule.
Fantasy lies within, subjective. Get it wrong and its your own fault. Lighten up!
Sci Fi lies without, objective. Get it wrong and its R&D's fault. The bastards!
Forgetting for the moment that chimps are apes and us humans are betrayed angels who have nothing in common with animals (especially not limbic systems!), I'd say those chimpanzees regard the python with reverent awe. Why stop at "respect"? You can go all the way to religious awe, only 3/5ths of a mile, in 10 seconds. Ok, a little Buddhist logic here: Humans are a subset of apes, right? If all apes have religious awe, then human beings are entitled to similar peculiarities in their mental evolution.
My favorite project karaoke is Rawhide. I never actually sang it on the job, but I had the joyous pleasure (after I left, throwing my mug in the drink and wishing river trolls on the morgul-minded) of watching that management style self-destruct within three months. From "my way or the highway" to chapter eleven in 90 days, wow. No, folks, rawhiding your most creative people is stupid.
Provided it's got a theater gamma and a minimum of those top-right-corner blackburn QQs for TV commercials, maybe. The real theatrical release had a Sam Spade underlogue and a nice upbeat fantasy ending, just like Original Release Brazil. Pris rolled her eyes in appreciation of Sebastian's toy soldiers in a nicely realized bit of big screen cinematography, and Daryl Hannah's death scene in theaters was awesome -- Pris was designed to be an android soldier's sex toy after all, and her tastes, scents, joy, hormones and lust for life were absolutely nailed by Hannah in the original cut, with its original pace, original frame count and original timing. If this "original cut" is just another salvage job from somebody's 3-inch television studio tape (like the $9 edition of 16 Candles), I'm not sanguine.
IIRC, Steve Wozniak wrote the original Apple Monitor code in a now-legendary all-nighter, and anyone who took the trouble to disassemble it from that night onward saw Revelation. That night joins a short list of epiphanies that lifted the human condition forever after.
So it's possible to write bug-free code. But! If Quality Control mattered, geniuses would be hired to test software, as well as write it. If Customer Support mattered, geniuses, not average schmucks, would answer the phones and take the flamethrowers in the face.
...but there's no handholding.
This reminds me of a job interview I had in which the question was broached whether I wrote Quark XTensions from scratch, or modified existing code? It was late in the afternoon, so I scratched my head and jumped on the wrong side of the rail. (The answer by the way is, "Uhh, gosh, I CAN write from scratch, but I ACTUALLY modify existing code. It's faster.")
In the real world, nobody in their right minds works without an IDE. So teach it that way.
"Morbius! What is the id?"
... Even the Krell must have evolved from that beginning! ... All well and good, young man, except for one obvious fallacy!"
"Id, id, id, id, id! It's an obsolete term, I'm afraid, once used to describe the elementary basis of the subconscious mind
The Big Bang is not very aesthetically pleasing. Everything else depends on context, but we're supposed to hang it all like a Calder mobile on some unsupported skyhook? That's Creation Science, kiddies.
The concept of automating code scans to check for "errors" is essentially delusional. You cannot create a catalog of 4,000 known bugs (or some huge number) in software you intend to ship, not when you save money on coding costs by kicking the original bums who understand the code upstairs (or curbside) and then hire RCG's to maintain, or worse, improve, the crap they'll never own. I have never, ever, fixed a bug that wasn't coated with a diamantine millimeter of solid acrimony - but no lintpicking automaton found those errors, either. There was always a human dimension. My favorite was a screaming hysteric who threw a stack of printouts six inches thick at me, all documenting the exact same one-word typo. You want to run a company like coding is the bottom rung of your personal Jacob's Ladder, be my eternal guest.
What killed it for most of us old coots is credentialing, and I can't honestly argue that that's a bad thing. Us autodidacts were plagued by idiosyncracies and a lot of unperceived conceptual blind spots. I personally loved 6502 assembler language and Apple Pascal, eventually graduating to Metrowerks CodeWarrior and Microsoft Foundation Classes. Microsoft killed the joy for me personally by their policy of fixing compiler bugs in incremental updates which you paid for, each and every time. I give 'em credit -- if you'd report a bug, they'd fix it, but not now, and for your current project, not ever. The M$ protection racket yielded Open Source, but that's another can of worms. As far as programming goes, the final final straw, for me, came when Apple introduced Objective C, for no good reason that I ever saw. I could learn Forth and Lisp, but having to learn Objective C was too much. On the heels of AppleScript, the counterintuitive scripting nightmare for the rest of us geezers who loved Perl, Bash and Ruby lots better, Objective C just faded behind the black velvet curtains of obscurantist obfuscation, and I tore down my shingle. I still program, but not for everyone else. And why would kids bother? The real tools these days are larger metamorphs that express bigger ideas closer to the point of even having a computer -- things like Gimp, Open Office, PostgreSQL.
Imagine Condoleezza Rice in red hot pants running down the halls of irony, the desperately dilatory demons of delay at her heels, sports bra in the laundry, flinging her Patriot Act at the screen... Who woulda thunk IBM would ever turn out to be the guys in white hats?
I was going to do a rant about how Google hires Deep Thinkers who can crack bizarre mathematical conundrums, but na'atheless can't write a search algorithm that dredges up the history of toilet paper, but it turns out they've nailed that one. More or less. If you want the sources instead of the dissertations, it ain't so charmin'.
Seriously, the entire 10 CD set of Barron's version of Eleanor Harz Jordan's Beginning Japanese language laboratory materials I first heard in 1971 (!) fit in a few megabytes of your average iPod. This particular course is pretty steep, learning curve wise, but extremely valuable in the long run. There may be modern Japanese materials that are not as formal. If you launch the Barron set in iTunes, you can download the chapter and track descriptions from the internet.
After that, IMMEDIATELY familiarize yourself with Jim Breen's EDict from Monash University in Australia (Google it!), and any of the Japanese-English dictionary utilities that support it -- on Macintosh OS X 10.4, the best of these bar none is Sergey Kurkin's JEDict 4.0.
This will lead you to the realization that the best Pacific Rim computer system is Macintosh, for one simple reason: Kotoeri Input Method. Look into it, dude! Kotoeri is the quickest, slickest way to enter hiragana, katakana, 2-byte English(1) and MOST FREQUENTLY USED Kanji into Unicode text ever invented. The system modifies itself to some extent to match your preferences.
What a bizarre concept! Stable url's? It may be true that information resides somewhere on the internet forever, but if it's useful, chances are it's not going to be revealed (to you) by Google. At a guess, I'd say 99% of the curious url's I collected over the last five years are kaput.
Mac OS X has the best, easiest-to-use Japanese language support on English-speaking computers. While I'm not as familiar with input methods for Korean or Chinese (whether mainland or diehard), they look about as simple as kotoeri. Also, Macs have the fewest problems with mojibake (2-byte-character screwups), as near as I can tell. In fact, kotoeri input method on a Mac is so second nature that I'm afraid to try whatever Windows XP has, and my one foray into Linux multilingual support ended by reformatting my hard drive and reinstalling Windows '95. Not a fun experience. Macs rule the Pacific rim, or did. Maybe other systems have gotten better, but justifiable F.U.D. casts a long shadow.