I agree most wholeheartedly. Outlook is possibly the single most ripe breeding ground for viruses out there. I can't believe that anyone still uses it. In many ways the widespread use of Outlook makes email viruses possible. Whatever the security status of Microsoft applications in general, it should be clear by now that Outlook in particular is one giant gaping security hole. And there are so many alternatives. Web mail for one! For many average users it is not worth having their email account chained to a particular computer, and setting up email clients for multiple systems is not a task they are up to. So much simpler to use a web browser, which they already know how to use, and have it be identical on any system with internet access.
I'm also really tired of these security bulletins always assuming that everyone is using a particular system. You can't make generalized statements like "just clicking on the message causes x". Clicking on something can mean anything depending on the system you are using. These bulletins go out to the general public, and then they ask you if its safe to click on a message, at which point you have to interrogate them about what they use for email, etc. This invariably leads to a discussion of what Outlook is, what email clients are, how they are different from web mail, and similar headaches that most people will not understand.
For a great novel about asteroid armageddon and the resulting collapse of society, read "Lucifer's Hammer" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's slow for the first half, but man, once that asteroid hits, it's sweet, sweet chaos.
Of course. Actually I was thinking more along the lines of scams where you set up a real store with a rigged ATM machine and a camera in the ceiling, for example. This gets done a lot too; some guys in Vancouver had a gas station and made off with millions from thousands of accounts. In these cases, you own and setup the machine yourself; it's already modified to record card info, so why not the PIN?
All of these scams that I've seen use a camera to get the PIN, but why not modify the machine to electronically record the PIN as entered by the customer? It must be used electronically in the machine to verify that the correct PIN was entered, so why can't this data be snatched somewhere during the process? The camera seems like a silly and unnecessary hack.
There are tons of these schools running ads promising high paying jobs etc, because they are desperate. When tech was booming, everyone and their dog opened a school to fill the demand. Now tech is bust, and these schools can only stay alive by suckering people into buying into a tech dream that is long dead. And lots of people still believe them; with so much hype during bubble, it's hard to change peoples' minds now (especially if they don't follow the news).
My understanding of genetic algorithms etc is that you might generally create the generation from the current generation by randomly selecting members of the current generation to reproduce, each with a probability of being selected equal to its fitness relative to the other members.
So, the most fit members of the current generation are most likely to produce (and will therefore reproduce the most times, on average), but some less fit members will reproduce by sheer luck (you can imagine that this is how it works in nature too; some sick, weak animals may stumble across enormous food supplies/excellent unoccupied territory/large lonely groups of willing females/etc). So the next generation will likely have many sub-optimal members.
This is important because it allows the algorithm to simultaneously explore in different directions in the space of all possible individuals, and it will have less of a tendency to get stuck at local maximums, as one of those weaker individuals may someday evolve in a different direction to reach an even greater maximum. Not to mention, in nature there is the possibility of an environmental change that turns the tables on the currently most fit individuals. So basically, it is a good thing to have a genetically diverse population, even though that means many sub-optimal individuals; the average fitness of the overall population will still drift upward over time.
You have to look at it from the point of view of when it was written. Many of what are now cyberpunk cliches exist because of Neuromancer and its sequels. William Gibson created a whole new world, that was fresh at the time, and he did it with style. For me, the Neuromancer trilogy is to cyberpunkian sci-fi what the Lord of the Rings is to fantasy.
BTW, I've just started Snow Crash, and from what I can see, this is just Gibson's style pushed over the top, done with less class, and deserving of far less credit given that he has obviously read Gibson's books and is essentially imitating them with a moderate amount of success.
is that a story like this immediately transforms itself in the minds of some very ignorant people, into: Scientists are now able to create fully adult genetic and mental duplicates of me, who will look, talk, and act just like me, sleep with my wife and take over my life just like in The Sixth Day, and furthermore they will all be abominations in the eyes of God!! The reality of what's possible with cloning is far more mundane than our sci-fi nightmares, but the general public rarely concerns itself with the differences. Lets see: Sci-Fi | Real Life
Genetic duplicate | Check
Adult | Baby
Same memories | No memories
Same personality | Somewhat similar personality
Steals my identity | WTF?
JC wouldn't like it | You are an idiot
You can thank Bush for that - his administration denies federal funding for research like this. When biotech worldwide has left the US in the dust, at least you'll have faith based charities.
At my university there is 8 months each of calculus and discrete math, 4 months each of linear algebra, statistics, and numerical analysis as a minimum for a CS degree. It scares me two, but so far I've managed. The key is not to expect A's unless you're a math quiz, and to take the courses seriously. Do all the homework and never assume that you know something until you've actually tried it many times.
As a side note, at my school midterms are 50 minutes, which is never enough time, but the final is 3 hours and you can usually substitute it for 90-100% of your grade. I've never passed a math midterm, but I'm passing the courses. If you have such options, don't be intimidated by low midterm scores; things look a lot different when you have 3 times as long.
Also: differentiation isn't bad, but integration can sneak up on you in a bad way. And linear algebra is so cool, I'd take it just for general knowledge. You don't realize that you need this much math until after they force it down your throat.
This the main thing wrong with these movies. True, for the most part the events that take place in the films are the same as in the books, but in the books there were long periods where things slowed down. This made the more dramatic events seem important and interesting when they happened. In the movie, all of those pauses are cut; it's just one action scene after another. None of the more fantastic events seem quite as exciting as they did in the books.
This is somewhat forgivable, as I can't see how it could have been done otherwise. But I think it gives all the more reason why extra actions scenes like Aragorn's lame assed fake-death in the second movie were a bad idea. As has been pointed out by others, yet another fake death just made everybody groan; there were enough in the book as it was, but at least you had time to forget about the last one before a new one happened.
Also far too much choir music and over-emotional slow motion. Fantasy has enough trouble being taken seriously without this cheese.
The question is not whether it is "right" for IBM to try and get such a patent. Repeat after me: corporations are strictly self-interested and will do whatever you let them get away with. If you want to be mad at someone, try the Patent Office. It is supposed to be the government's job to slap down corporations when they go too far, as they surely will unless they receive said slapping.
I'd like to see the new law for that one. Something to the effect of "It is unlawful for any person to give intellectual property that they have produced to others without monetary compensation." So then people start selling their source for 1 cent. Then the government counters with a new law that sets a minimum price per line of source... This exercise is already getting silly.
I'm not trying to deny that small teams can make a good game, but these guys are not likely to grace the shelves of major stores anytime soon, and I doubt if they sell large numbers of copies. This is not to deride their games, I haven't played them, but by the screenshots I think its clear that they aren't on the level of something produced by EA.
But I wonder if a similar amount of effort, directed at, say the GBA, could produce a game that was on par with anything produced by major companies. Even the most high budget games for GBA don't have screenshots that look better than these, because the hardware limits them, not the number of artists or the quality of their engine.
The thing that I find interesting about gameboys etc is the limited hardware. In the 80s, it was possible for small teams or even individual developers to put out games without the aid of a large company (remember all those stories of people's garages filled with boxes of floppies that they copied manually?). This was largely due to the limited hardware of the time; a C64 game couldn't be made complex enough to require a large team.
Now, you can't even think of producing a commercially viable game by yourself or in small groups; a modern game, complete with art, sound, music, etc is a multi-million dollar project. But is this true of games for more limited systems, eg gameboy or cell phones? Perhaps these devices provide a venue for small time game developers to still make money. After all, a GBA game sells for roughly the price of an normal PC game, yet has a fraction of the complexity. Part of me cringes when I see the gameboy getting more powerful. Anyone have experience or comments in regard to this?
I still see only 1 class, not the 500 mentioned by the original poster. I'll grant you the speed differences, but the equivalent in C or C++ still has a mandatory main function, and a function call to output the text (but I guess those languages suck too). The filename requirement strikes me as a good thing, as does the fact that the compiled code is considered a class (an actual data type in Java that can be manipulated dynamically) instead of just an executable file, (which you can only do one thing with: execute it).
Besides which, I'm sure this has a major impact on day to day use of the language. I mean, all those Hello Worlds that you write on a daily basis.
This is a very important point that people always seem to miss. They talk about the human race evolving, or evolution doing this or that as if it will happen in their lifetime. Biological evolution works over millions of years people. Yes, I know there are some limited ways in which evolution takes place on smaller time scales, but I'm talking about changes that could be noticed by someone who is not an expert studying a particular species. For the most part, such evolution is too slow to have made any difference over all of recorded human history. Interference by humans (intentional or not) has taken over, evolution as it has occured since the beginning of life is largely over.
Which is more likely in say, the next 300 years:
a) Natural evolution substantially modifies species or creates new ones.
b) Human technology reaches the point where we re-engineer everything as we see fit and evolution is a moot point.
c) We destroy the whole damn planet.
Of these, I think a) is the least likely. Wipe out those species, and neither you nor your descendants thousands of years in the future will ever see new ones (unless they engineer them).
The problem with this and all other exporting of jobs is the "race to the bottom" effect. Developed nations have stricter regulations on things like employee rights, environmental protection, minimum wage, corporate taxes to pay for social programs etc. Many less developed countries have fewer or no such restrictions. This makes it far more attractive for companies to move jobs overseas. So what do we have to do in response? Cut corporate tax (and social programs), remove regulations that protect employees, and so on, or else lose the jobs. So what you get is the nations of the world competing to provide the least protections for their citizens and the most power for corporations.
The WTO and friends provide a corporate bill of rights around the world, but there is no world wide minimum wage or minimum health care benefit to balance it out. Even an economist will tell you that while capitalism is wonderful, it cannot efficiently provide some things, and there need to be government regulations in place to keep it in check. We have turned the beast loose in places where few such regulations exist, and it's causing havoc.
Here in B.C., our premier has been cutting social programs left and right, and everybody is really mad about it, but it's a tough problem. The programs are necessary, but without cutting the taxes that pay for them, or chipping away at workers' rights, we cannot attract foreign capital or even keep our capital from moving out. So he looks like an asshole (and maybe is), but could anyone else have done better under the current conditions?
I'm currently two years into a degree in CompSci, and I have no intention of switching, despite the grim job outlook. I have tried other jobs before, and I came to realize that IT is the only thing I will be happy doing. This is the problem with the whole "retrain" argument. When those factories workers in manufacturing lost their jobs, they were retraining and trading in a menial, low skill job that was basically about a paycheck. If they retrain, they get either another equally dull job, or maybe a more interesting one. That is good. If I have to retrain, I'm losing a career that I really wanted and would have enjoyed, and I go into what, business management (yuck)? Or trades? I think trades is a really secure field right now, but there are two problems: I have limited practical trades skills, and there are lots of guys who are the trades equivalent of geeks who were programming in junior high. You can't teach a 20 something carpenter to be a better programmer than a lifelong nerd, and neither can you teach a computer nerd to be a better carpenter than a trades nerd. I have tried working trades jobs, and there are guys my age who are at skill levels that I won't reach for 8 years! A retrained programmer cannot compete in trades. To some extent, I think retrained workers cannot compete very well in their new fields period. Again, compare the lifelong computer geek to 2 year technical school grad riding the IT goldrush; 2 years of training does not give you the necessary skills.
A new BIOS would indeed be neat, but did you read what they plan to put in it? Trusted computing. How neat is it to have a new BIOS with nifty modern features that won't run any OS but Windows and blocks you from doing unapproved things at the hardware level? You think we should welcome this change? Not all change is for the better.
The jump in stock is due to an article on Barron's where they speculate that if SCO wins its lawsuit with IBM, the stock will be worth $185 per share. Since it currently trades around $17, it would seem that the investing community at large figures the odds of the suit winning at roughly 10 to 1. That is actually encouraging.
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I agree most wholeheartedly. Outlook is possibly the single most ripe breeding ground for viruses out there. I can't believe that anyone still uses it. In many ways the widespread use of Outlook makes email viruses possible. Whatever the security status of Microsoft applications in general, it should be clear by now that Outlook in particular is one giant gaping security hole. And there are so many alternatives. Web mail for one! For many average users it is not worth having their email account chained to a particular computer, and setting up email clients for multiple systems is not a task they are up to. So much simpler to use a web browser, which they already know how to use, and have it be identical on any system with internet access.
I'm also really tired of these security bulletins always assuming that everyone is using a particular system. You can't make generalized statements like "just clicking on the message causes x". Clicking on something can mean anything depending on the system you are using. These bulletins go out to the general public, and then they ask you if its safe to click on a message, at which point you have to interrogate them about what they use for email, etc. This invariably leads to a discussion of what Outlook is, what email clients are, how they are different from web mail, and similar headaches that most people will not understand.
Yeah, I agree that was cheesy. But I loved the every-man-for-himself survival setting and cannibalism.
For a great novel about asteroid armageddon and the resulting collapse of society, read "Lucifer's Hammer" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It's slow for the first half, but man, once that asteroid hits, it's sweet, sweet chaos.
Of course. Actually I was thinking more along the lines of scams where you set up a real store with a rigged ATM machine and a camera in the ceiling, for example. This gets done a lot too; some guys in Vancouver had a gas station and made off with millions from thousands of accounts. In these cases, you own and setup the machine yourself; it's already modified to record card info, so why not the PIN?
All of these scams that I've seen use a camera to get the PIN, but why not modify the machine to electronically record the PIN as entered by the customer? It must be used electronically in the machine to verify that the correct PIN was entered, so why can't this data be snatched somewhere during the process? The camera seems like a silly and unnecessary hack.
There are tons of these schools running ads promising high paying jobs etc, because they are desperate. When tech was booming, everyone and their dog opened a school to fill the demand. Now tech is bust, and these schools can only stay alive by suckering people into buying into a tech dream that is long dead. And lots of people still believe them; with so much hype during bubble, it's hard to change peoples' minds now (especially if they don't follow the news).
I'm no expert either, but...
My understanding of genetic algorithms etc is that you might generally create the generation from the current generation by randomly selecting members of the current generation to reproduce, each with a probability of being selected equal to its fitness relative to the other members.
So, the most fit members of the current generation are most likely to produce (and will therefore reproduce the most times, on average), but some less fit members will reproduce by sheer luck (you can imagine that this is how it works in nature too; some sick, weak animals may stumble across enormous food supplies/excellent unoccupied territory/large lonely groups of willing females/etc). So the next generation will likely have many sub-optimal members.
This is important because it allows the algorithm to simultaneously explore in different directions in the space of all possible individuals, and it will have less of a tendency to get stuck at local maximums, as one of those weaker individuals may someday evolve in a different direction to reach an even greater maximum. Not to mention, in nature there is the possibility of an environmental change that turns the tables on the currently most fit individuals. So basically, it is a good thing to have a genetically diverse population, even though that means many sub-optimal individuals; the average fitness of the overall population will still drift upward over time.
You have to look at it from the point of view of when it was written. Many of what are now cyberpunk cliches exist because of Neuromancer and its sequels. William Gibson created a whole new world, that was fresh at the time, and he did it with style. For me, the Neuromancer trilogy is to cyberpunkian sci-fi what the Lord of the Rings is to fantasy.
BTW, I've just started Snow Crash, and from what I can see, this is just Gibson's style pushed over the top, done with less class, and deserving of far less credit given that he has obviously read Gibson's books and is essentially imitating them with a moderate amount of success.
is that a story like this immediately transforms itself in the minds of some very ignorant people, into: Scientists are now able to create fully adult genetic and mental duplicates of me, who will look, talk, and act just like me, sleep with my wife and take over my life just like in The Sixth Day, and furthermore they will all be abominations in the eyes of God!! The reality of what's possible with cloning is far more mundane than our sci-fi nightmares, but the general public rarely concerns itself with the differences. Lets see:
Sci-Fi | Real Life
Genetic duplicate | Check
Adult | Baby
Same memories | No memories
Same personality | Somewhat similar personality
Steals my identity | WTF?
JC wouldn't like it | You are an idiot
You can thank Bush for that - his administration denies federal funding for research like this. When biotech worldwide has left the US in the dust, at least you'll have faith based charities.
The terms "public trust" and "corporation" are incompatible. What were they thinking?
At my university there is 8 months each of calculus and discrete math, 4 months each of linear algebra, statistics, and numerical analysis as a minimum for a CS degree. It scares me two, but so far I've managed. The key is not to expect A's unless you're a math quiz, and to take the courses seriously. Do all the homework and never assume that you know something until you've actually tried it many times.
As a side note, at my school midterms are 50 minutes, which is never enough time, but the final is 3 hours and you can usually substitute it for 90-100% of your grade. I've never passed a math midterm, but I'm passing the courses. If you have such options, don't be intimidated by low midterm scores; things look a lot different when you have 3 times as long.
Also: differentiation isn't bad, but integration can sneak up on you in a bad way. And linear algebra is so cool, I'd take it just for general knowledge. You don't realize that you need this much math until after they force it down your throat.
This the main thing wrong with these movies. True, for the most part the events that take place in the films are the same as in the books, but in the books there were long periods where things slowed down. This made the more dramatic events seem important and interesting when they happened. In the movie, all of those pauses are cut; it's just one action scene after another. None of the more fantastic events seem quite as exciting as they did in the books.
This is somewhat forgivable, as I can't see how it could have been done otherwise. But I think it gives all the more reason why extra actions scenes like Aragorn's lame assed fake-death in the second movie were a bad idea. As has been pointed out by others, yet another fake death just made everybody groan; there were enough in the book as it was, but at least you had time to forget about the last one before a new one happened.
Also far too much choir music and over-emotional slow motion. Fantasy has enough trouble being taken seriously without this cheese.
The question is not whether it is "right" for IBM to try and get such a patent. Repeat after me: corporations are strictly self-interested and will do whatever you let them get away with. If you want to be mad at someone, try the Patent Office. It is supposed to be the government's job to slap down corporations when they go too far, as they surely will unless they receive said slapping.
I'd like to see the new law for that one. Something to the effect of "It is unlawful for any person to give intellectual property that they have produced to others without monetary compensation." So then people start selling their source for 1 cent. Then the government counters with a new law that sets a minimum price per line of source... This exercise is already getting silly.
I'm not trying to deny that small teams can make a good game, but these guys are not likely to grace the shelves of major stores anytime soon, and I doubt if they sell large numbers of copies. This is not to deride their games, I haven't played them, but by the screenshots I think its clear that they aren't on the level of something produced by EA.
But I wonder if a similar amount of effort, directed at, say the GBA, could produce a game that was on par with anything produced by major companies. Even the most high budget games for GBA don't have screenshots that look better than these, because the hardware limits them, not the number of artists or the quality of their engine.
The thing that I find interesting about gameboys etc is the limited hardware. In the 80s, it was possible for small teams or even individual developers to put out games without the aid of a large company (remember all those stories of people's garages filled with boxes of floppies that they copied manually?). This was largely due to the limited hardware of the time; a C64 game couldn't be made complex enough to require a large team.
Now, you can't even think of producing a commercially viable game by yourself or in small groups; a modern game, complete with art, sound, music, etc is a multi-million dollar project. But is this true of games for more limited systems, eg gameboy or cell phones? Perhaps these devices provide a venue for small time game developers to still make money. After all, a GBA game sells for roughly the price of an normal PC game, yet has a fraction of the complexity. Part of me cringes when I see the gameboy getting more powerful. Anyone have experience or comments in regard to this?
I still see only 1 class, not the 500 mentioned by the original poster. I'll grant you the speed differences, but the equivalent in C or C++ still has a mandatory main function, and a function call to output the text (but I guess those languages suck too). The filename requirement strikes me as a good thing, as does the fact that the compiled code is considered a class (an actual data type in Java that can be manipulated dynamically) instead of just an executable file, (which you can only do one thing with: execute it).
Besides which, I'm sure this has a major impact on day to day use of the language. I mean, all those Hello Worlds that you write on a daily basis.
This is a very important point that people always seem to miss. They talk about the human race evolving, or evolution doing this or that as if it will happen in their lifetime. Biological evolution works over millions of years people. Yes, I know there are some limited ways in which evolution takes place on smaller time scales, but I'm talking about changes that could be noticed by someone who is not an expert studying a particular species. For the most part, such evolution is too slow to have made any difference over all of recorded human history. Interference by humans (intentional or not) has taken over, evolution as it has occured since the beginning of life is largely over.
Which is more likely in say, the next 300 years:
a) Natural evolution substantially modifies species or creates new ones.
b) Human technology reaches the point where we re-engineer everything as we see fit and evolution is a moot point.
c) We destroy the whole damn planet.
Of these, I think a) is the least likely. Wipe out those species, and neither you nor your descendants thousands of years in the future will ever see new ones (unless they engineer them).
Michael Crichton quoted as a scientific source. I cannot find words to describe this atrocity.
The problem with this and all other exporting of jobs is the "race to the bottom" effect. Developed nations have stricter regulations on things like employee rights, environmental protection, minimum wage, corporate taxes to pay for social programs etc. Many less developed countries have fewer or no such restrictions. This makes it far more attractive for companies to move jobs overseas. So what do we have to do in response? Cut corporate tax (and social programs), remove regulations that protect employees, and so on, or else lose the jobs. So what you get is the nations of the world competing to provide the least protections for their citizens and the most power for corporations.
The WTO and friends provide a corporate bill of rights around the world, but there is no world wide minimum wage or minimum health care benefit to balance it out. Even an economist will tell you that while capitalism is wonderful, it cannot efficiently provide some things, and there need to be government regulations in place to keep it in check. We have turned the beast loose in places where few such regulations exist, and it's causing havoc. Here in B.C., our premier has been cutting social programs left and right, and everybody is really mad about it, but it's a tough problem. The programs are necessary, but without cutting the taxes that pay for them, or chipping away at workers' rights, we cannot attract foreign capital or even keep our capital from moving out. So he looks like an asshole (and maybe is), but could anyone else have done better under the current conditions?
I'm currently two years into a degree in CompSci, and I have no intention of switching, despite the grim job outlook. I have tried other jobs before, and I came to realize that IT is the only thing I will be happy doing. This is the problem with the whole "retrain" argument. When those factories workers in manufacturing lost their jobs, they were retraining and trading in a menial, low skill job that was basically about a paycheck. If they retrain, they get either another equally dull job, or maybe a more interesting one. That is good. If I have to retrain, I'm losing a career that I really wanted and would have enjoyed, and I go into what, business management (yuck)? Or trades? I think trades is a really secure field right now, but there are two problems: I have limited practical trades skills, and there are lots of guys who are the trades equivalent of geeks who were programming in junior high. You can't teach a 20 something carpenter to be a better programmer than a lifelong nerd, and neither can you teach a computer nerd to be a better carpenter than a trades nerd. I have tried working trades jobs, and there are guys my age who are at skill levels that I won't reach for 8 years! A retrained programmer cannot compete in trades. To some extent, I think retrained workers cannot compete very well in their new fields period. Again, compare the lifelong computer geek to 2 year technical school grad riding the IT goldrush; 2 years of training does not give you the necessary skills.
A new BIOS would indeed be neat, but did you read what they plan to put in it? Trusted computing. How neat is it to have a new BIOS with nifty modern features that won't run any OS but Windows and blocks you from doing unapproved things at the hardware level? You think we should welcome this change? Not all change is for the better.
The jump in stock is due to an article on Barron's where they speculate that if SCO wins its lawsuit with IBM, the stock will be worth $185 per share. Since it currently trades around $17, it would seem that the investing community at large figures the odds of the suit winning at roughly 10 to 1. That is actually encouraging.
See my post for one application I think would be huge.