Seems by now we could have something a little more advanced -- holograms maybe, or at least all images as stereographs. If these robot missions are to take the place of manned exploration as some have indicated, then wouldn't it make sense to do the best you can so that people would feel they were actually there? Even the use of false color bothers me -- do people even know what the real planets look like anymore? Sky and Telescope magazine ran an article last month about how newcomers to astronomy are sometimes dissapointed when they see the real thing! It's because most of the pictures in the mass media have been "enhanced".
Seriously. Why are we still building giant fireworks? Couldn't a mass-driver work with new heat-resistant materials? Or those JP Aerospace guys with the blimps-to-orbit plan?
Even the Space Elevator doesn't have this problem. Surely there are better things to do with the money to lower cost-to-orbit than building giant bottle-rockets. As long as we remain under the paradigm of taking our fuel with us, it seems to me the cost and complexity goes through the roof. My two cents only.
I read these every year but I wonder how useful they are. I've never heard of anybody going to their boss with survey results to ask for a raise, and I can't imagine getting your pay cut because others are making more. Perhaps the benefit is in planning for new hires? Telling people you pay better than market rates?
As a consultant, I don't use these to set my rates, and the information is usually historical rather than predictive -- what I'd like to know is what's going to be paying more next year, not last year. But I'm sure there are other uses. Makes for great gossip if nothing else.
It would take hours just to recite all of that. I wonder how many days or months it took to learn it? Unless they are able to memorize on sight, which is a rare talent, just repeating the digits several times could easily take up a few months.
I guess it's a claim to fame, but geesh, isn't there better ways to spend your time, like posting on slashdot or something?
So if I'm somewhere else, say orbiting in the space station, do I have to now lookup every country, every state and province, to see whom I can email or not?
Hey. I love protecting the kids. Perhaps we should all get a law. I'd also like to grow hair and be taller. But until leglislators can change the fabric of reality, these things are not going to happen. Makes for nice press. Little else.
Although after "Zork" I didn't see the point. He is building his own MUD MMOG in C#, porting it from older sources. So there must be something about the genre that is enduring. Just guessing, I would imagine the audience averaging around 22. And I don't understand the way the area is evolving. Sharpen up the graphics, use ray-tracing, etc, but isn't the whole point to use your imagination?
At some point, this genre, movies, and cartoons all kind of become the same thing. Maybe that's a good thing? It's definitely a new world. It will be fun to be an old guy going "Back in the day, we had to use a joy stick to move our guy around! And we didn't have holograms, either!
We just agree on a biometric standard? Then instead of worrying about whether somebody stole some silly precious number of yours, you could log in to your computer with a retinal scan or something and be done with it? (Yes. I know there are issues with biometrics, but certainly a triple-system from different vendors, locked into tamper-resistant hardware -- there has to be a solution available, right?) I was blogging about something like that this morning New Biometric Device From Fujitsu
With all those millions and millions online in China swapping programs, songs and such, you'd think the RIAA would go after them, if the purpose was really to prevent damage to the intellectual property holder.
What's going to be extremely interesting is watching a closed society like China start talking one-on-one to the rest of the world. I'd give it twenty years before public opinion changes in China. I can't see them sharing information freely and being as nationalistic as they currently are. If you want to stop a future war with China, help them talk to each other all you can. My two cents.
This is an excellent article, and one that anybody with a brain could agree with. But it looks like the history behind this (the last 30 years or so) and the high-priced legal firms will do everything they can to keep the status quo.
I'm afraid that we will eventually have to push for a constitutional ammendment to fix this copyright issue -- there is simply too much inertia for the law to catch up with reality. Who knows how long this will take? If you thought the "war on drugs" was fun, just wait until we do about 40 years of the "war on pirates"
Didn't slashdot run a story a while back about GPL being a price-fixing scheme? Aside from the inital buzz, I never heard any more about it. Is the GPL just kind of a social abstract to kick around, or is it really being enforced and used?
I think FSF and the GPL are great ideas, but they're really more _ideas_ than anything else. The articles I found about GPL were mostly companies settling out of case before the case was heard. How Much Is A Friend Worth?"
From CNN -- "US keeps control over internet computers"
From the Brits -- "US appears to affirm its authority on the internet"
From the Canadians -- "US to control internet traffic"
India -- "US won't cede monopoly on the internet"
Seems like the same story has several different headlines, and to the uniformed eye some of them in conflict (yes. I know you can make the case they're not all that different. But monopoly on the internet it isn't). It would be nice if the people writing the stories understood what a root server was. Might make for a more informed public, you know? Check out "SarBox And The World Of Tomorrow"
I've just started up a new blog (Captain Picard is following me around!) and it's a hosted site with MySQL and PHP
I'm an old windows programmer, Oracle, SQL Server, Access, VB, C#, etc. I keep wondering: should I take the time to learn PHP for the new site? As an enterprise architect, I used to recommend the "big" solutions to most problems my clients brought me, but I can't help but wonder if in a lot of cases simpler isn't better. I've always understood the simplicity concept with code construction but to some degree it is true of the technology itself.
There has to be a crossover point: where scripting and non-pooled database connections stop being useful, but all I hear are absolute arguments on both sides (stay open source! Stick with the big boys, kid!)
It'd be nice to see an unbiased view of the spectrum from somebody. Anybody know where there's one out there?
Because RSS allows enclosures, and because enclosures contain songs, and because songs can be ill-formed to allow overflow attacks -- therefore there is a weakness in RSS?
Perhaps a weakness in the codec, sure. Or a weakness in who you decide to download files from. Or even a weakness in your firewall applicaiton allowing sneaky code to talk to outside IP addresses. But a bug in RSS itself?
I must be missing something, because that doesn't add up, unless the goal is to change RSS somehow, simply because Longhorn is going to implement it?
Perhaps the unwritten story is that Microsoft is going to allow auto-code distribution and execution, in which case, I would humbly suggest, Microsoft has a problem, not the standard.
My two cents only
The guiness of Einstein was that he synthesized some more arcane work into some fairly simple equations, continuing to refine what we knew about the universe
But it's already common knowledge that we don't have a GUT yet, and everything we do have seems very complex and overdone, much the same as it was before E=mc2
I can't help but wonder if someone will come along in the next decade or so and synthesize these more complex equations into another step forward for mankind. Who knows? Maybe the answer is something like "42"
So picture this: two years from now you're surfing arond on IE when an ad pops up "Click here for a free vacation to Bermuda" suddenly another ad pops-up on top of that one "Pay no attention to the previous ad, the prevsious ad was not authorized by Microsoft. If you click right away, you can buy Steve Ballmer a new golf club"
Seriously. Does Microsoft have so much cash sitting around they need to buy things? It doesn't even make sense. You would think they had an acquisition strategy, but instead it looks like "Have money, will purchase"
In the middle of the presentation there's a slide titled "Changing the Game in Candy Bars" with some cool phones in the background.
These are some really hot products. I wish I had these guys on-board last time I did a demo to a client! But I wonder if cell phones are the new candy bars for geeks?
Candy bars, I would guess, are a fairly stable commodity. A Mars bar last year is going to be the same as this year. Eye candy, sure, but not candy bars.
Will all that consumer production value, it makes you wonder how much these companies actually pay product designers to keep new stuff churning out. There's got to be a lot of money in that business. Everybody's getting into it.
Re:Sapir Whorf hypothesis
on
Effective C#
·
· Score: 1
Thanks. Excellent article. I would prefer to disagree, however. There is a natural affination, once one begins "thinking" in a certain language to solve problems certain ways. But all computers are Von Neumann machines, and the trick is just to line up the 1s an 0s so the solution appears.
Academically, perhaps this is an area worth further study. Pragmatically, however, it's the equivalent of saying fat people prefer bigger belts. True, but uninformative, imo. Plus. I never liked Whorf that much anyway. He was always trying to shoot something with his phaser.
Re:So Call Me Old And Cranky
on
Effective C#
·
· Score: 1
I completely agree.
C++ is a high-wire act without a net, no doubt. But more "polished" lanugages, like Java and C# keep the sharp objects away from the developers. Some of those issues you mention are truly gnarly -- and you can get in a world of trouble with C++ code. You can still cut your foot off with Java, but you have to saw at it a little more. My two cents only.
So Call Me Old And Cranky
on
Effective C#
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"..in the same class as Code Complete"
But do we really need a "programming good C#" book? Isn't good programming all about, well, good programming? If I remember Code Complete correctly, it used pascal and C, I think. It definitely was one of the best books I've read, but how many times can you say the same thing over and over again?
Languages come and go. But good coding techniques don't dependent on a certain vendor or technology.
Maybe this is a good book if you don't know much of any programming language and want to pick up C#. Speaking as a C# developer who does Java, C, C++, and VB, I just read some of the rags and jumped in. Then when I wanted to do something else, like create a custom web control, I got a book in C#. Presto/Bingo, I'm coding in C#. OOP as a concept is going to have similar constructs, no matter what the language, right?
Sorry for the rant. It's probably a great book. I just don't understand how good coding practice is dependent on the flavor-of-the-week. Perhaps in his comparisons the reviewer does a disservice to the intent of the work.
This was a good article, not too techie and not too high-level.
There was a lot of firmware/software discussion. It would be interesting to hear if the hardware (speakers) have evolved to push the technology any, or if it's just the software that is the driving force in the industry. Seems like I remember directional speakers? Wave guides? I would imagine this all plays into "room correction", but I could imagine a situation where a speaker channel could broadcast holographic-type sound waves. Seems like that would change the signal definition and therefore the codec, right?
Do the speakers matter as much as they used to? Or is it all software anymore?
This is a follow-on to an article in Scientific American this month. Interestingly enough, the article concluded that cells stay viable just fine in very high or very low oxygen environments. It's the transition stage that causes all the damage.
Hence the reason for injecting saline -- it takes the oxygen-carrying blood out of the tisses almost immediately, which is what you want to do. The SA article authors said this seems a little extreme to use in humans, and I agree. They've had some success with mice using Hydrogen Sulfide, I think, mixed in with air. Also, surgery for animals that are "dead" brings in a whole new line of specialties that we haven't developed yet. This is going to be a fascinating area to watch, imo.
There's a difference between a "communications service" and a "data service"?
But wouldn't you have to communicate data in order for it to appear? And wouldn't communications be meaningless without data to communicate?
Sometimes I wonder if it's the court that doesn't understand technology, or maybe its us technology guys that don't understand the courts. This ruling doesn't make any sense to me.
Seems like everybody nowadays is throwing together GIS, satellite imagery, ecological information, etc onto a virtual world. Perhaps this is an area where we can start standardizing some XML? Put together a mastard standard for defining a world, then as we discovered new planets and sent expeditions to the ones in our solar system, we'd have a place to put all that information where all kinds of people and programs can interact with it.
I'm just glad that NASA is finally blowing something up. Enough of these silly robots and picutres, send in some TNT! (I think they call this "active science")
Blowing things up is always more interesting to the public than plain science missions. Perhaps next we can send some of those old ICMS to the moon. That would be a good show.
Seriously, NASA has been politicized so much over its entire history. Perhaps publicity impact should be a key factor in planning missions. It certainly couldn't hurt, and it could lead to a lot more funding for them
Slashdot Mirror
Seems by now we could have something a little more advanced -- holograms maybe, or at least all images as stereographs. If these robot missions are to take the place of manned exploration as some have indicated, then wouldn't it make sense to do the best you can so that people would feel they were actually there? Even the use of false color bothers me -- do people even know what the real planets look like anymore? Sky and Telescope magazine ran an article last month about how newcomers to astronomy are sometimes dissapointed when they see the real thing! It's because most of the pictures in the mass media have been "enhanced".
Certifications: Worth It Or Waste Of Time?
Seriously. Why are we still building giant fireworks? Couldn't a mass-driver work with new heat-resistant materials? Or those JP Aerospace guys with the blimps-to-orbit plan?
Even the Space Elevator doesn't have this problem. Surely there are better things to do with the money to lower cost-to-orbit than building giant bottle-rockets. As long as we remain under the paradigm of taking our fuel with us, it seems to me the cost and complexity goes through the roof. My two cents only.
NASA Budget Shows Shuttle Phase-Out
I read these every year but I wonder how useful they are. I've never heard of anybody going to their boss with survey results to ask for a raise, and I can't imagine getting your pay cut because others are making more. Perhaps the benefit is in planning for new hires? Telling people you pay better than market rates?
As a consultant, I don't use these to set my rates, and the information is usually historical rather than predictive -- what I'd like to know is what's going to be paying more next year, not last year. But I'm sure there are other uses. Makes for great gossip if nothing else.
Speak Up About Poor Software Quality!
It would take hours just to recite all of that. I wonder how many days or months it took to learn it? Unless they are able to memorize on sight, which is a rare talent, just repeating the digits several times could easily take up a few months.
I guess it's a claim to fame, but geesh, isn't there better ways to spend your time, like posting on slashdot or something?
Modern Software Is Wasting Our Time!
So if I'm somewhere else, say orbiting in the space station, do I have to now lookup every country, every state and province, to see whom I can email or not?
Hey. I love protecting the kids. Perhaps we should all get a law. I'd also like to grow hair and be taller. But until leglislators can change the fabric of reality, these things are not going to happen. Makes for nice press. Little else.
Just How Many Stooges were in the Three Stooges?
Although after "Zork" I didn't see the point. He is building his own MUD MMOG in C#, porting it from older sources. So there must be something about the genre that is enduring. Just guessing, I would imagine the audience averaging around 22. And I don't understand the way the area is evolving. Sharpen up the graphics, use ray-tracing, etc, but isn't the whole point to use your imagination?
At some point, this genre, movies, and cartoons all kind of become the same thing. Maybe that's a good thing? It's definitely a new world. It will be fun to be an old guy going "Back in the day, we had to use a joy stick to move our guy around! And we didn't have holograms, either!
Spank Me, Call Me a Fool -- Microsoft buying something else?
We just agree on a biometric standard? Then instead of worrying about whether somebody stole some silly precious number of yours, you could log in to your computer with a retinal scan or something and be done with it? (Yes. I know there are issues with biometrics, but certainly a triple-system from different vendors, locked into tamper-resistant hardware -- there has to be a solution available, right?) I was blogging about something like that this morning
New Biometric Device From Fujitsu
With all those millions and millions online in China swapping programs, songs and such, you'd think the RIAA would go after them, if the purpose was really to prevent damage to the intellectual property holder.
What's going to be extremely interesting is watching a closed society like China start talking one-on-one to the rest of the world. I'd give it twenty years before public opinion changes in China. I can't see them sharing information freely and being as nationalistic as they currently are. If you want to stop a future war with China, help them talk to each other all you can. My two cents.
Brains! Brains! Give me Brains!
But it had an annoying pop-up, so I left without RTFA.
This is an excellent article, and one that anybody with a brain could agree with. But it looks like the history behind this (the last 30 years or so) and the high-priced legal firms will do everything they can to keep the status quo.
I'm afraid that we will eventually have to push for a constitutional ammendment to fix this copyright issue -- there is simply too much inertia for the law to catch up with reality. Who knows how long this will take? If you thought the "war on drugs" was fun, just wait until we do about 40 years of the "war on pirates"
See "SarBox And The World of Tommorrow" before it hits the theatres!
Didn't slashdot run a story a while back about GPL being a price-fixing scheme? Aside from the inital buzz, I never heard any more about it. Is the GPL just kind of a social abstract to kick around, or is it really being enforced and used? I think FSF and the GPL are great ideas, but they're really more _ideas_ than anything else. The articles I found about GPL were mostly companies settling out of case before the case was heard.
How Much Is A Friend Worth?"
From CNN -- "US keeps control over internet computers"
From the Brits -- "US appears to affirm its authority on the internet"
From the Canadians -- "US to control internet traffic"
India -- "US won't cede monopoly on the internet"
Seems like the same story has several different headlines, and to the uniformed eye some of them in conflict (yes. I know you can make the case they're not all that different. But monopoly on the internet it isn't). It would be nice if the people writing the stories understood what a root server was. Might make for a more informed public, you know?
Check out "SarBox And The World Of Tomorrow"
I've just started up a new blog (Captain Picard is following me around!) and it's a hosted site with MySQL and PHP
I'm an old windows programmer, Oracle, SQL Server, Access, VB, C#, etc. I keep wondering: should I take the time to learn PHP for the new site? As an enterprise architect, I used to recommend the "big" solutions to most problems my clients brought me, but I can't help but wonder if in a lot of cases simpler isn't better. I've always understood the simplicity concept with code construction but to some degree it is true of the technology itself.
There has to be a crossover point: where scripting and non-pooled database connections stop being useful, but all I hear are absolute arguments on both sides (stay open source! Stick with the big boys, kid!)
It'd be nice to see an unbiased view of the spectrum from somebody. Anybody know where there's one out there?
Because RSS allows enclosures, and because enclosures contain songs, and because songs can be ill-formed to allow overflow attacks -- therefore there is a weakness in RSS?
Perhaps a weakness in the codec, sure. Or a weakness in who you decide to download files from. Or even a weakness in your firewall applicaiton allowing sneaky code to talk to outside IP addresses. But a bug in RSS itself?
I must be missing something, because that doesn't add up, unless the goal is to change RSS somehow, simply because Longhorn is going to implement it?
Perhaps the unwritten story is that Microsoft is going to allow auto-code distribution and execution, in which case, I would humbly suggest, Microsoft has a problem, not the standard.
My two cents only
Can Chickens Swim? Find Out Now!"
The guiness of Einstein was that he synthesized some more arcane work into some fairly simple equations, continuing to refine what we knew about the universe
But it's already common knowledge that we don't have a GUT yet, and everything we do have seems very complex and overdone, much the same as it was before E=mc2
I can't help but wonder if someone will come along in the next decade or so and synthesize these more complex equations into another step forward for mankind. Who knows? Maybe the answer is something like "42"
Was Worf A Programmer?
So picture this: two years from now you're surfing arond on IE when an ad pops up "Click here for a free vacation to Bermuda" suddenly another ad pops-up on top of that one "Pay no attention to the previous ad, the prevsious ad was not authorized by Microsoft. If you click right away, you can buy Steve Ballmer a new golf club"
Seriously. Does Microsoft have so much cash sitting around they need to buy things? It doesn't even make sense. You would think they had an acquisition strategy, but instead it looks like "Have money, will purchase"
Worf was right!
In the middle of the presentation there's a slide titled "Changing the Game in Candy Bars" with some cool phones in the background.
These are some really hot products. I wish I had these guys on-board last time I did a demo to a client! But I wonder if cell phones are the new candy bars for geeks?
Candy bars, I would guess, are a fairly stable commodity. A Mars bar last year is going to be the same as this year. Eye candy, sure, but not candy bars.
Will all that consumer production value, it makes you wonder how much these companies actually pay product designers to keep new stuff churning out. There's got to be a lot of money in that business. Everybody's getting into it.
Love Boat Meets Santa's Workshop?
Thanks. Excellent article. I would prefer to disagree, however. There is a natural affination, once one begins "thinking" in a certain language to solve problems certain ways. But all computers are Von Neumann machines, and the trick is just to line up the 1s an 0s so the solution appears.
Academically, perhaps this is an area worth further study. Pragmatically, however, it's the equivalent of saying fat people prefer bigger belts. True, but uninformative, imo. Plus. I never liked Whorf that much anyway. He was always trying to shoot something with his phaser.
Do Dinosaurs Taste Good?
I completely agree.
C++ is a high-wire act without a net, no doubt. But more "polished" lanugages, like Java and C# keep the sharp objects away from the developers. Some of those issues you mention are truly gnarly -- and you can get in a world of trouble with C++ code. You can still cut your foot off with Java, but you have to saw at it a little more. My two cents only.
Can chickesn swim? Find out now!
"..in the same class as Code Complete"
But do we really need a "programming good C#" book? Isn't good programming all about, well, good programming? If I remember Code Complete correctly, it used pascal and C, I think. It definitely was one of the best books I've read, but how many times can you say the same thing over and over again?
Languages come and go. But good coding techniques don't dependent on a certain vendor or technology.
Maybe this is a good book if you don't know much of any programming language and want to pick up C#. Speaking as a C# developer who does Java, C, C++, and VB, I just read some of the rags and jumped in. Then when I wanted to do something else, like create a custom web control, I got a book in C#. Presto/Bingo, I'm coding in C#. OOP as a concept is going to have similar constructs, no matter what the language, right?
Sorry for the rant. It's probably a great book. I just don't understand how good coding practice is dependent on the flavor-of-the-week. Perhaps in his comparisons the reviewer does a disservice to the intent of the work.
This was a good article, not too techie and not too high-level.
There was a lot of firmware/software discussion. It would be interesting to hear if the hardware (speakers) have evolved to push the technology any, or if it's just the software that is the driving force in the industry. Seems like I remember directional speakers? Wave guides? I would imagine this all plays into "room correction", but I could imagine a situation where a speaker channel could broadcast holographic-type sound waves. Seems like that would change the signal definition and therefore the codec, right?
Do the speakers matter as much as they used to? Or is it all software anymore?
This is a follow-on to an article in Scientific American this month. Interestingly enough, the article concluded that cells stay viable just fine in very high or very low oxygen environments. It's the transition stage that causes all the damage.
Hence the reason for injecting saline -- it takes the oxygen-carrying blood out of the tisses almost immediately, which is what you want to do. The SA article authors said this seems a little extreme to use in humans, and I agree. They've had some success with mice using Hydrogen Sulfide, I think, mixed in with air. Also, surgery for animals that are "dead" brings in a whole new line of specialties that we haven't developed yet. This is going to be a fascinating area to watch, imo.
There's a difference between a "communications service" and a "data service"?
But wouldn't you have to communicate data in order for it to appear? And wouldn't communications be meaningless without data to communicate?
Sometimes I wonder if it's the court that doesn't understand technology, or maybe its us technology guys that don't understand the courts. This ruling doesn't make any sense to me.
Seems like everybody nowadays is throwing together GIS, satellite imagery, ecological information, etc onto a virtual world. Perhaps this is an area where we can start standardizing some XML? Put together a mastard standard for defining a world, then as we discovered new planets and sent expeditions to the ones in our solar system, we'd have a place to put all that information where all kinds of people and programs can interact with it.
I'm just glad that NASA is finally blowing something up. Enough of these silly robots and picutres, send in some TNT! (I think they call this "active science")
Blowing things up is always more interesting to the public than plain science missions. Perhaps next we can send some of those old ICMS to the moon. That would be a good show.
Seriously, NASA has been politicized so much over its entire history. Perhaps publicity impact should be a key factor in planning missions. It certainly couldn't hurt, and it could lead to a lot more funding for them