This article reads like pure garbage. Procedural programming simply refers to any form of programming in which procedure calls are made... ie. any mainstream imperative programming language. Does anybody really believe that games fill up multiple DVDs because there are too many IF statements? Editors, wake up please.
To me, the site http://googlenasa.com/ seems extremely suspect. It looks like a targeted phishing scam to get the personal details of Google and NASA employees. Slashdot, you owe us better.
What consumers don't seem to realise is that PC's don't get slower as they age. If it's fine for using Word and surfing the web now, it will be fine in two years' time. Unless the consumer anticipates their needs changing, they are wating their money by 'planning ahead'.
Probably about to start a 'reverse penis size' thread here, but I can get by very nicely with my 466 MHz G4 tower which I use mainly for web, email, terminal sessions and occasionally Word/Excel. It's every bit as fast as the day I got it.
You wouldn't by any chance be using the md5sum command line utility and typing a newline after the word? I just tried my own name, which turned out to be in the database. Could you give just a few examples of the hash values you submitted, and the word you expected it to return?
Oops, right you are, that's exactly what I was doing... tried the same words with echo -n and they were in fact in the database.
Apart from the fact that this site is somewhat morally questionable, it doesn't seem to work very well. I inserted a number of hashes for common first names and dictionary words, and none of them returned a hit. If the database doesn't even cover common stuff such as this, what is it really good for? Really, 12 million hashes out of a space of 2^128 is truly miniscule.
Writing for Computer Science by Justin Zobel is also a very good book in this area. It focuses on academic writing but has a lot of detail on how to create good figures, graphs, tables and so on.
A Windows 'Lite' (as in low resource usage, not crippled) would be perfect for many corporate environments where most users do not need or want the feature bloat present in normal versions of Windows. If this product helps companies get another couple of years out of their current workstations then I imagine this could be pretty popular.
I don't see that this would go down very well with hardware companies though. I had always thought that there was some sort of conspiracy/cartel in place whereby the big software companies constantly bloated their products in order to drive sales of hardware. This could shake things up a bit...
The idea of paying for publication in journals is ethically questionable. But then, so is accepting money in return for advertising. And, in computer science at least, most publications first appear in peer-reviewed conferences in which attendance at the conference (generally very expensive) is a condition of publication. Which basically amounts to paying to have your work published.
The basic problem is, of course, that mixing money with the lofty ideals of purely merit-based peer-reviewed scientific publication will always lead to adulteration of the principle. Money is, after all, rarely given away without some sort of agenda (legitimate or otherwise).
But, until a better solution is implemented (I'm not holding my breath) I don't see paying to get your work published as being any more pernicious that the other models currently in place. Ultimately, the scientific community will judge these journals by the quality of the work they publish. Given this, it is in their interests to keep the quality high. Nobody wants to be published in some two-bit, poorly regarded journal.
I thought the name David Hackerman was a bit too good to be true, and it turns out it was. Following the link shows that his name is David Heckerman. Note to/. eds: please proofread your posts. It's not like they're very long...
If a program is really good enough to mark an essay, then reversing the function should allow it to create an essay that is perceived by human assessors to be of good quality. And I suspect we are a long was away from that.
Has this guy even assessed the correlation between the marks the program gives and the marks he would give?
I can't see this working unless Sony allow people to burn their movies to DVD. After all, people still want to watch this stuff in their loungeroom. Penetration of media boxes is still low. If the only thing most people (ie not geeks) can do with their DRMed Sony movie is watch it on their PC or their PSP I imagine they will stick with DVDs.
How else will anyone find them excpept through google.
AFP are a newswire service. That means they make ther money by selling copy to other news organizations. Professional journalists hardly need to use Google news to be aware of the existence of (despite all the/. snideness) one of the worlds premier news agencies.
AFP make their money by selling their stories to other media organizations. If they allow their news to be disseminated without the appropriate fee being paid (as Google News is doing), they will be cutting off their main source of revenue.
All AFP is doing is using legitimate means to protect a legitimate business model.
Slashdot Mirror
This article reads like pure garbage. Procedural programming simply refers to any form of programming in which procedure calls are made... ie. any mainstream imperative programming language. Does anybody really believe that games fill up multiple DVDs because there are too many IF statements? Editors, wake up please.
...will it be called CrapTube?
Grandparent post. HTH.
To me, the site http://googlenasa.com/ seems extremely suspect. It looks like a targeted phishing scam to get the personal details of Google and NASA employees. Slashdot, you owe us better.
Stops the article being slashdotted. Also, it means they get in before digg for once.
And the /. fortune at the bottom of my screen says:
Life is like an analogy
Freaky.
"yeah that was horrible... but that's the PAST!! It'll never happen again! It can't happen again! We're smarter now!!"
You're talking about the deprivation of personal liberties by propaganda-wielding governments, right?
What consumers don't seem to realise is that PC's don't get slower as they age. If it's fine for using Word and surfing the web now, it will be fine in two years' time. Unless the consumer anticipates their needs changing, they are wating their money by 'planning ahead'.
Probably about to start a 'reverse penis size' thread here, but I can get by very nicely with my 466 MHz G4 tower which I use mainly for web, email, terminal sessions and occasionally Word/Excel. It's every bit as fast as the day I got it.
Our record in Gorilla warfare hasn't been so stellar.
Just fight them in space... their record in stellar warfare makes them look like gorillas.
You wouldn't by any chance be using the md5sum command line utility and typing a newline after the word? I just tried my own name, which turned out to be in the database. Could you give just a few examples of the hash values you submitted, and the word you expected it to return?
Oops, right you are, that's exactly what I was doing... tried the same words with echo -n and they were in fact in the database.
/me wipes egg off face
Apart from the fact that this site is somewhat morally questionable, it doesn't seem to work very well. I inserted a number of hashes for common first names and dictionary words, and none of them returned a hit. If the database doesn't even cover common stuff such as this, what is it really good for? Really, 12 million hashes out of a space of 2^128 is truly miniscule.
Writing for Computer Science by Justin Zobel is also a very good book in this area. It focuses on academic writing but has a lot of detail on how to create good figures, graphs, tables and so on.
Servers that survive /.ing...
Modded Insightful? The mind boggles...
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
A Windows 'Lite' (as in low resource usage, not crippled) would be perfect for many corporate environments where most users do not need or want the feature bloat present in normal versions of Windows. If this product helps companies get another couple of years out of their current workstations then I imagine this could be pretty popular.
I don't see that this would go down very well with hardware companies though. I had always thought that there was some sort of conspiracy/cartel in place whereby the big software companies constantly bloated their products in order to drive sales of hardware. This could shake things up a bit...
The idea of paying for publication in journals is ethically questionable. But then, so is accepting money in return for advertising. And, in computer science at least, most publications first appear in peer-reviewed conferences in which attendance at the conference (generally very expensive) is a condition of publication. Which basically amounts to paying to have your work published.
The basic problem is, of course, that mixing money with the lofty ideals of purely merit-based peer-reviewed scientific publication will always lead to adulteration of the principle. Money is, after all, rarely given away without some sort of agenda (legitimate or otherwise).
But, until a better solution is implemented (I'm not holding my breath) I don't see paying to get your work published as being any more pernicious that the other models currently in place. Ultimately, the scientific community will judge these journals by the quality of the work they publish. Given this, it is in their interests to keep the quality high. Nobody wants to be published in some two-bit, poorly regarded journal.
I thought the name David Hackerman was a bit too good to be true, and it turns out it was. Following the link shows that his name is David Heckerman . Note to /. eds: please proofread your posts. It's not like they're very long...
From TFA:
The computer-generated scores count for about a third to a quarter of students' final grade for Brent's class.
There you go! Make sure you RTFA very carefully before accusing others of being reading and comprehension impaired.
If a program is really good enough to mark an essay, then reversing the function should allow it to create an essay that is perceived by human assessors to be of good quality. And I suspect we are a long was away from that.
Has this guy even assessed the correlation between the marks the program gives and the marks he would give?
Brent said he plans to donate 1 percent of profits generated through the sale of the program to the World Wildlife Fund.
I don't think one percent really puts this guy in the big-league of philanthropy.
I can't see this working unless Sony allow people to burn their movies to DVD. After all, people still want to watch this stuff in their loungeroom. Penetration of media boxes is still low. If the only thing most people (ie not geeks) can do with their DRMed Sony movie is watch it on their PC or their PSP I imagine they will stick with DVDs.
Holy crap! Did somebody say a swarm of genetically engineered nuclear clones is coming to get us? Quick, tell Slahsdot!
How else will anyone find them excpept through google.
AFP are a newswire service. That means they make ther money by selling copy to other news organizations. Professional journalists hardly need to use Google news to be aware of the existence of (despite all the /. snideness) one of the worlds premier news agencies.
AFP make their money by selling their stories to other media organizations. If they allow their news to be disseminated without the appropriate fee being paid (as Google News is doing), they will be cutting off their main source of revenue.
All AFP is doing is using legitimate means to protect a legitimate business model.