I think the entire debate around the rhetoric has been skewed - both the people that are claiming the rhetoric caused him to do it (who knows, but most likely not) and the people that are crying foul at even bringing up the rhetoric.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to discuss the rhetoric as a result of the shooting for this reason: it demonstrates why the gunsight imagery and "2nd amendment solution" talk is so repugnant in the first place. This tragedy - a bullet through a congresswoman's brain, a dead 9 year old girl, and the rest - is what these people are so coyly hinting at with these ads and this talk.
I think there is plenty of value in shaming the perpetrators of such rhetoric not by implying any cause and effect, but by making them realize just how serious and disgusting these things they are hinting at are.
Bad Java code uses operators and tends to have major bugs due to object VS primitive issues.
For your own sanity I strongly suggest you don't venture into coding with groovy... the single-quote and double-quote operators take on completely new meanings (single-quote returns java.lang.String, double-quote returns GString) and the ability to create untyped variables using def along with the "convenience" of so-called duck-typing allow the result of someVar + someOtherVar to not be obvious until runtime...nightmarish.
We have many hands, on and offshore, furiously writing groovy code in a few grails applications and as a result I would say ~70% of our runtime issues are groovy type cast errors.
I've returned to school to study graduate computer science because I'm disheartened by what I see as over-reliance on quick and dirty frameworks and a departure from the fundamentals on teams that produce commercial software. I'm a lead at my job, but decided I can't really effect change on my team unless I am a master of those fundamentals.
I've only completed two classes so far, but both of them have really opened my eyes up to possibilities I've never considered. In addition to my original purpose I am discovering that learning these things is making me a *much* better developer. When you understand the history of a particular language feature or algorithm, and you can completely convince yourself that a particular approach is the optimal one it takes a ton of guesswork out of development and leads to better software.
I don't doubt that a person can learn these things without enrolling in a university, but have a professor and a TA as a resource, and being tested on your knowledge of the concepts I think really enhances the experience. It is infinitely easier to discipline yourself to study a topic when you have a test coming up and a grade on the line. As a bonus, my company has a pretty good education compensation program, so the debt question is moot. I plan on continuing until I get a master's degree.
In spite of the fact that I just wasted 45 minutes of my work day reading Wolf Shirt reviews (er, and slashdot:) ), I have to thank you for this post... these are waaay too funny to be complaining about. Some selections:
The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt gave me a +10 resistance to energy attacks, +8 Strength, and added 30 feet to my normal leap. I cannot list the specific effects involving the opposite sex as I am still discovering these. And they are many.
In Soviet Russia, I could afford two wolf on shirt for 4000 ruples ($25). Thanks to free market economy, I can have three wolf for $11.95. Its very good deal.
I admit it, I'm a ladies' man. And when you put this shirt on a ladies' man, it's like giving an AK-47 to a ninja.
I wonder if one prong of an organized DDoS attack on site X is posting a story about site X on slashdot. More likely all of the hubbub has the conspiracy center of my brain in overdrive...
Maybe they are able to quickly identify distinct groups of flowers on their first pass using their compound eyes, which by necessity would be tightly clustered. Then they just visit the groups in the most obvious order starting at the point they observe the last flower. They could compare 100 runs over the same flower bed and easily find groupings by overlaying the paths.
I can't tell any difference between the flickr images and what I imagine still shots of the video would look like - they both have an eerie unrealistic look to them, I just think the fact that the video is in motion causes it to look just a bit more weird. I actually think, although weirder, the video is more aesthetically pleasing than most of the flickr images in your link - the colors are too bright or something.
As far as the technical achievement represented by the photographs and the video I really have no basis for comparison.
Often times, particularly in boring java web apps, the actual product code is less exciting than the unit tests I write to test them. Example:
A product needed to limit the number of events that were fired given some maximum rate of events/minute. The events can be fired from many threads simultaneously, but all threads contribute to the same calculated rate that must be monitored. The "RateQueue" as I called it was actually kind of neat, very compact and uses java atomic variables for concurrency. But once it was written, what's a good way to test it?
I wrote a little junit harness that can spawn threads initiated with a string that encodes a sequence of event firings, and each character of the string represents some configurable number of seconds. So a thread with "---x---x---------xxx-------" only fires 5 events in the time frame given. Now testing is fun, because I can create a bunch of different event profiles, and by visually comparing them in a text editor I can predict where the code should throttle the events, and then test for these conditions based on combinations of profiles. Even cooler, I can make the event profiles fill arbitrarily large time spans by compounding them fractally, where each "-" above would be replaced with a full string of "-", and each "x" would be replaced with the original string, and so on. Fun!
I think it is interesting that one of the wheels is heavily worn, while the other is new looking, indicating it had been replaced - makes me wonder if his accident didn't involve a busted chariot wheel which was replaced after he died...presumably so Tut could use it in the afterlife.
Well, sure... but while you can simply download an emulated game how would you get access to the original overlays? If you got access I suppose you could scan them and then print them on clear overhead paper. Maybe somebody that has the originals should start a business doing this - talk about a niche market...
I have fond memories of playing the Vectrex console when I was a kid - I suppose there must be a few working units floating around out there but based on the way the graphics worked I wonder if you could ever truly emulate it on a PC.
Even if you could emulate the graphics you couldn't emulate the clear plastic templates you had to mount on the screen depending on the game:)
What is so bizarre? We manufacture plastic, make products out of it and carelessly throw the used products into the ocean where they disintegrate into little bits that accumulate over time. Sad and disgusting, but not bizarre.
I chose a celebrity query because it was similar to the query given as an example, but you make a good point. I don't think the Wolfram guys are too worried about this one...
The main point of my original post was that the first thing I could think of to ask about came back with an inappropriate answer. Weird too, if you just google Michael Jordan you get "right" Michael Jordan, odd that height would default to the "wrong" Jordan.
Brutal with respect to the topic at hand, of course. I wouldn't care to boast of my life's actual problems to a group of strangers online, anonymously or not.
Frameworks, like anything else, are fantastic when used properly but unruly beasts when they are used incorrectly. My current bane is legacy code that is a poorly thought out amalgamation of early version frameworks. I can hear my predecessors squealing with delight and saying things like "Spring and hibernate will magically handle all of my transaction boundaries and multi-threading? Neato!!" as I slog through 3-4 hundred line stacktraces (no joke) trying to debug a race condition. Brutal.
I am completely on board with this concept because if it is anything like what I imagine I could use it to replace the reams of worthless legal pads and loose note papers I have strewn all over my desk. I need to take notes on something the size of a pad of paper, preferably be able to use a pen/stylus to freehand, and now with the ability to easily catalog, date, and label the notes this is a dream come true.
As a bonus I imagine you could pop up a little virtual keyboard on it and use it to work on little side projects on a train/plane/etc. I would also not be completely honest if I didn't acknowledge the star trek TNG angle and the warm fuzzy feeling it gives me...life imitates art.
I completely agree - I don't see how this will result in anything but fewer hits on Murdoch's sites. When I use google news I rarely look for a particular news source in the results, though I do look to see where I am clicking. As far as I know/care I have never clicked on a Murdoch news source anyway.
This will only work if you re-use the same 4-5 passwords across all sites which is a bad idea for a few reasons:
Obviously if one is exposed multiple apps are compromised
Won't work for sites/applications that require new passwords ever X days
If you get paranoid that one of your passwords has been compromised it is a pain in the ass to go change all of the sites that use the same one
Don't know about you but I have to maintain passwords in the hundreds...it is waaay out of control. No way I can try to keep it all in my head. I use password safe installed on an encrypted USB key.
I have used Password Safe for a few years now and I have no complaints. It has a nice feature that lets you install it standalone on a USB key drive (no registry settings, etc.) so I can just carry the little drive around with me and plug it in where I need it.
The password DB is encrypted, the "safe" is password protected, the USB key is encrypted and password protected, so I feel pretty safe carrying around all 2-3 hundred (work and personal) passwords with me. I'm just not looking forward to the day that I inevitably lose the damned thing and have to reset all of my passwords...
If the folklore cited in the Art of Computer Programming Wikipedia page is true I'd say it qualifies Jobs as a geek:
Covers of the third edition of Volume 1 quote Bill Gates as saying, "If you think you're a really good programmer . . . read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming . . . You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing." (According to folklore, Steve Jobs made this claim.[5])
I was pretty pleased with the lineup I brought along last year on my flight to Hong Kong (15 hours):
Thinkpad P42 Work Laptop
80Gb Video iPod
Nintendo DS
Standard (non-noise cancellation) over-ear headhones
Never used the laptop - slept ~6 hours, watched/listened to iPod with no battery concerns for ~6 hours (Family Guy, Harvey Birdman, Original Star Trek, History Channel), played DS for ~2 hours (tetris) and did crosswords the rest of the time - had a great flight. Of course, I should mention that I was in business class - I've had 2 hour flights in coach that I wouldn't have traded for this 15 hour one.
For post-flight I'm not much help, I'm happy to concede cell-phone and mobile email when overseas.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the entire debate around the rhetoric has been skewed - both the people that are claiming the rhetoric caused him to do it (who knows, but most likely not) and the people that are crying foul at even bringing up the rhetoric.
I think it is perfectly reasonable to discuss the rhetoric as a result of the shooting for this reason: it demonstrates why the gunsight imagery and "2nd amendment solution" talk is so repugnant in the first place. This tragedy - a bullet through a congresswoman's brain, a dead 9 year old girl, and the rest - is what these people are so coyly hinting at with these ads and this talk.
I think there is plenty of value in shaming the perpetrators of such rhetoric not by implying any cause and effect, but by making them realize just how serious and disgusting these things they are hinting at are.
Bad Java code uses operators and tends to have major bugs due to object VS primitive issues.
For your own sanity I strongly suggest you don't venture into coding with groovy... the single-quote and double-quote operators take on completely new meanings (single-quote returns java.lang.String, double-quote returns GString) and the ability to create untyped variables using def along with the "convenience" of so-called duck-typing allow the result of someVar + someOtherVar to not be obvious until runtime...nightmarish.
We have many hands, on and offshore, furiously writing groovy code in a few grails applications and as a result I would say ~70% of our runtime issues are groovy type cast errors.
I've returned to school to study graduate computer science because I'm disheartened by what I see as over-reliance on quick and dirty frameworks and a departure from the fundamentals on teams that produce commercial software. I'm a lead at my job, but decided I can't really effect change on my team unless I am a master of those fundamentals.
I've only completed two classes so far, but both of them have really opened my eyes up to possibilities I've never considered. In addition to my original purpose I am discovering that learning these things is making me a *much* better developer. When you understand the history of a particular language feature or algorithm, and you can completely convince yourself that a particular approach is the optimal one it takes a ton of guesswork out of development and leads to better software.
I don't doubt that a person can learn these things without enrolling in a university, but have a professor and a TA as a resource, and being tested on your knowledge of the concepts I think really enhances the experience. It is infinitely easier to discipline yourself to study a topic when you have a test coming up and a grade on the line. As a bonus, my company has a pretty good education compensation program, so the debt question is moot. I plan on continuing until I get a master's degree.
I wonder if one prong of an organized DDoS attack on site X is posting a story about site X on slashdot. More likely all of the hubbub has the conspiracy center of my brain in overdrive...
Maybe they are able to quickly identify distinct groups of flowers on their first pass using their compound eyes, which by necessity would be tightly clustered. Then they just visit the groups in the most obvious order starting at the point they observe the last flower. They could compare 100 runs over the same flower bed and easily find groupings by overlaying the paths.
I can't tell any difference between the flickr images and what I imagine still shots of the video would look like - they both have an eerie unrealistic look to them, I just think the fact that the video is in motion causes it to look just a bit more weird. I actually think, although weirder, the video is more aesthetically pleasing than most of the flickr images in your link - the colors are too bright or something.
As far as the technical achievement represented by the photographs and the video I really have no basis for comparison.
Often times, particularly in boring java web apps, the actual product code is less exciting than the unit tests I write to test them. Example:
A product needed to limit the number of events that were fired given some maximum rate of events/minute. The events can be fired from many threads simultaneously, but all threads contribute to the same calculated rate that must be monitored. The "RateQueue" as I called it was actually kind of neat, very compact and uses java atomic variables for concurrency. But once it was written, what's a good way to test it?
I wrote a little junit harness that can spawn threads initiated with a string that encodes a sequence of event firings, and each character of the string represents some configurable number of seconds. So a thread with "---x---x---------xxx-------" only fires 5 events in the time frame given. Now testing is fun, because I can create a bunch of different event profiles, and by visually comparing them in a text editor I can predict where the code should throttle the events, and then test for these conditions based on combinations of profiles. Even cooler, I can make the event profiles fill arbitrarily large time spans by compounding them fractally, where each "-" above would be replaced with a full string of "-", and each "x" would be replaced with the original string, and so on. Fun!
I think it is interesting that one of the wheels is heavily worn, while the other is new looking, indicating it had been replaced - makes me wonder if his accident didn't involve a busted chariot wheel which was replaced after he died...presumably so Tut could use it in the afterlife.
Well, sure... but while you can simply download an emulated game how would you get access to the original overlays? If you got access I suppose you could scan them and then print them on clear overhead paper. Maybe somebody that has the originals should start a business doing this - talk about a niche market...
I have fond memories of playing the Vectrex console when I was a kid - I suppose there must be a few working units floating around out there but based on the way the graphics worked I wonder if you could ever truly emulate it on a PC.
:)
Even if you could emulate the graphics you couldn't emulate the clear plastic templates you had to mount on the screen depending on the game
What is so bizarre? We manufacture plastic, make products out of it and carelessly throw the used products into the ocean where they disintegrate into little bits that accumulate over time. Sad and disgusting, but not bizarre.
And don't get me started on "slip up"...
I chose a celebrity query because it was similar to the query given as an example, but you make a good point. I don't think the Wolfram guys are too worried about this one...
The main point of my original post was that the first thing I could think of to ask about came back with an inappropriate answer. Weird too, if you just google Michael Jordan you get "right" Michael Jordan, odd that height would default to the "wrong" Jordan.
Michael Jordan — Height: 6 FT 2 in (1.88 M)
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jordan_(footballer)
6'2"?? Footballer??? Google, that is weeeeak.
Brutal with respect to the topic at hand, of course. I wouldn't care to boast of my life's actual problems to a group of strangers online, anonymously or not.
Frameworks, like anything else, are fantastic when used properly but unruly beasts when they are used incorrectly. My current bane is legacy code that is a poorly thought out amalgamation of early version frameworks. I can hear my predecessors squealing with delight and saying things like "Spring and hibernate will magically handle all of my transaction boundaries and multi-threading? Neato!!" as I slog through 3-4 hundred line stacktraces (no joke) trying to debug a race condition. Brutal.
I am completely on board with this concept because if it is anything like what I imagine I could use it to replace the reams of worthless legal pads and loose note papers I have strewn all over my desk. I need to take notes on something the size of a pad of paper, preferably be able to use a pen/stylus to freehand, and now with the ability to easily catalog, date, and label the notes this is a dream come true.
As a bonus I imagine you could pop up a little virtual keyboard on it and use it to work on little side projects on a train/plane/etc. I would also not be completely honest if I didn't acknowledge the star trek TNG angle and the warm fuzzy feeling it gives me...life imitates art.
I completely agree - I don't see how this will result in anything but fewer hits on Murdoch's sites. When I use google news I rarely look for a particular news source in the results, though I do look to see where I am clicking. As far as I know/care I have never clicked on a Murdoch news source anyway.
Don't know about you but I have to maintain passwords in the hundreds...it is waaay out of control. No way I can try to keep it all in my head. I use password safe installed on an encrypted USB key.
I have used Password Safe for a few years now and I have no complaints. It has a nice feature that lets you install it standalone on a USB key drive (no registry settings, etc.) so I can just carry the little drive around with me and plug it in where I need it.
The password DB is encrypted, the "safe" is password protected, the USB key is encrypted and password protected, so I feel pretty safe carrying around all 2-3 hundred (work and personal) passwords with me. I'm just not looking forward to the day that I inevitably lose the damned thing and have to reset all of my passwords...
Covers of the third edition of Volume 1 quote Bill Gates as saying, "If you think you're a really good programmer . . . read (Knuth's) Art of Computer Programming . . . You should definitely send me a resume if you can read the whole thing." (According to folklore, Steve Jobs made this claim.[5])
Damn it. So what's my recourse for buying bogus ecstasy tablets?
Clichébot?
- Thinkpad P42 Work Laptop
- 80Gb Video iPod
- Nintendo DS
- Standard (non-noise cancellation) over-ear headhones
Never used the laptop - slept ~6 hours, watched/listened to iPod with no battery concerns for ~6 hours (Family Guy, Harvey Birdman, Original Star Trek, History Channel), played DS for ~2 hours (tetris) and did crosswords the rest of the time - had a great flight. Of course, I should mention that I was in business class - I've had 2 hour flights in coach that I wouldn't have traded for this 15 hour one.For post-flight I'm not much help, I'm happy to concede cell-phone and mobile email when overseas.
Jet airliner?