The press rightly continues to use the word 'piracy' for illicit copying and distribution of original materials. Some think it's a new phenomenon, and hard to square with the traditional image of the Jolly Roger and swashbuckling robbers-at-sea. The use of the word 'piracy' as signifying an unauthorized copy of a manuscript is hundreds of years old, long before modern Copyright doctrine was developed. From http://www.ninch.org/forum/price.report.html:
There was very little trust in the print medium when it was first developed--it was seen as unstable and subject to piracy and fraudulent copying. Authenticity was hard to guarantee: indeed, the term "piracy" was first used by John Fell, Bishop of Oxford, to describe certain pernicious practices of early printers and booksellers. A "pirate" was someone who participated in the "unauthorized reprinting of a title recognized to belong to someone else." "Stationers" eventually emerged as the trusted practitioners who were placed in charge of various aspects of publishing--practices we would now recognize as printing, publishing, editing, and bookselling. Stationers worked out the conventional practices of making books, and thus made printing a viable economic enterprise with the elaborate complexity of producing a book eventually invisible to all but the practitioners in the trade.
That's Dr. John Fell (1625-86), who was given the title of Bishop of Oxford in 1675.
Maybe the OS-dependent malware is on Windows but not MacOSX, but there are still some serious computer-delivered attacks that don't depend on the operating system. Social exploits like phishing and pay-forward scams still attack the gullible on any platform. Cross-site scripting exploits can still put web services such as PayPal and Amazon at risk. This has little to do with the platform, and I think many MacOSX fans are falsely smug over the whole thing.
Should have known that the HTML and the C would have butted heads...
Regular expressions like: (<<|>>)\s*(8|16|32)
Also, run your code through more than one make of compiler if you can: each compiler has its own set of warnings, and if you can pass them all cleanly, you can get closer to a "best in breed" codebase.
You should run whatever LINT-like tools you can find. Developers should agree as a group on what warnings are spurrious and what warnings are legitimate, and adjust any lint policy configurations to suit.
You can also find far more than simple bugs, but you can decide on best practices and consistency standards which should be adhered also. These can vary in importance, but it really helps for a clean and searchable codebase. For a trivial example, if coding in C, decide as a group whether to use *p = '\0' or *p = 0 when writing into a char string. For a more involved example, regularly scan the codebase for regular expressions like (>)\s*(8|16|24) to find possible Intel/PPC endian issues lurking where you don't expect it.
The adage goes, if you find you're doing something more than once, see if you can automate it, so you can pay more attention to the things which can't be automated. This goes for coding and debugging too.
Hey, kids, let's do a little experiment together, shall we? Don't forget your shop glasses. Let's get started.
You're going to need a few household items.
some ordinary cellophane tape
an ordinary low-voltage lantern cell or battery
some ordinary low-gauge solid Bell wire
a small sample of 24 carat gold
a molecular sump to achieve 10^-10 torr
a helix-shaped 5 kilowatt tungsten heating filament
a hypobarometric chamber reinforced against 10^-10 torr
Have your mom or dad, or favorite grad student uncle, to assist you in using the equipment to achieve an even mono-molecular deposition of gold onto your cellophane tape...
Sorry, but in 2006, anything with only 64MB of flash storage space will not, contrary to the website's hype, revolutionize the way we use computers. Unless you're talking about a rising desire for austere minimalism.
I first heard of Goonhilly from a hardly-noticed story I once read. Not being a European, I had to look it up at the time to see what the hell it was.
The planet beneath them was almost perfectly oblivious of their presence, which was just how they wanted it for the moment. The huge yellow somethings went unnoticed at Goonhilly, they passed over Cape Canaveral without a blip, Woomera and Jodrell Bank looked straight through them -- which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they'd been looking for all these years.
No real relevance, I just like the name Goonhilly.
I don't give a rat's ass about HD-DVD or BluRay or any new format... until a player comes out (third-party hacked or not) which overcomes the MPAA's nefarious ideas about region encoding or forced chapters. If you want some market share, grow some balls and deliver a machine that plays the media *I* purchased anytime that *I* want to, without sending a colorectal scan to the governments and corporations of the world. And while you're at it, make false advertising phrases like "Own it on HD-DVD today!" completely off limits.
They took more than 30 million gold out of the economy from every server? I have news for you, there's right around 170 servers worldwide. That means around 175,000 gold per server. That is a incredibly miniscule part of each server's economy, that is it laughable.
Let's see, a high-profile USA corporate executive makes 400x the salary of the front-line employee. By dividing out the total payroll and equalizing across all employees, it dilutes down that peak and the figure looks like an average semi-professional salary. Yet why are so many people griping about the excess corporate executive payscale? Oh, that's right. Concentration of wealth and disproportionate influence wielded by the powerful few.
Statistics is worse than useless in the hands (or ears) of those who don't understand statistics.
As opposed to creating whole outsourcing companies to manage contractors during an outsourcing push. Or an executive personally subcontracting a building project at a bid below the rest of the local builders. Or the usual everyday case of standardizing on vendors that appear heavily in the executive's personal stock portfolio.
Funny, Apple charges extra for a black iPod or a black MacBook. Now Nintendo is claiming that black DS Lite units will be more rare, and thus the market will probably inflate their value. I'm not saying the companies are gonna merge, or anything.
I was raised Baptist but am not religious these days. Many many scientists have a deep spirituality or faith and feel that science just gets you closer to the creation. I've never had a problem with science versus faith: to put it into religious terms, I presume that science is our attempt at explaining "how," and spirituality is our attempt at explaining "why." There's no disconnect here.
The bible doesn't explain how the universe was created, and explicitly says that God's timeline is nothing like man's timeline, so there's no point in parsing "six days" as meaning anything in particular to us. If I feel like parsing it at all, I'd say the seventh day of rest aligns quite nicely with the future era of calmness mentioned in Revelations, so maybe we're still in the sixth day as far as God is concerned. I've subsequently heard some Israeli theologians have put forth the same conjecture. But I don't parse the bible that much, as I already figured out what I want to figure out with regards to my own spirituality: do less harm than good, and the world will be alright.
Major organized religions (aka, Church Inc.) just don't want any explaining of either, as it impacts the bottom line. Come in, drop off your tithe, pat a homeless man on the head, and go watch your kids' soccer game. Questions come pretty close to questioning authority, and they like being the unquestioned authority. I mean, really, condoms in Africa...
Speaking of crowding out the low-power FM stations, all of the short-range iPod and Satellite FM transmitters are REALLY getting on my nerves. I have a two-hour-each-way drive each week, and it's hard enough listening to my chosen stations over that range of highway without the increasingly common 5-30 second interruptions by some pop music crap that happens to be driving along near my car.
Pretty soon, the usefulness of broadcast radio will be gone, and everyone will *have* to subscribe to some DRM'ed digital channel, or plan and download their own content of choice for long drives.
I wioll haven heard that Dr. Dan Streetmentioner willan on-sell some four-dimensional stickers for 4D Rubik toys. A presooning shipment mayan arrivan on-when last Thursday, if I haventa recallen.
Games that are more complicated than Solitaire require a bit of effort to produce. Any other risks in testing just make it harder and harder to publish something that has a short shelf life, as most games do.
The range of Apple hardware specs and Mac OS variations are at their highest right now. There are still OS9-ready titles on the Apple store shelves, and now you have to worry about the difference between Panther, Tiger, as well as PowerPC and Intel.
Sure, I want to go into the store and see a pile of Universal Binary games that can run on my living room's Panther eMac and my wife's Core Duo Macbook Pro, with a nice frame rate and snappy audio feedback, but how many game developers really have the room for that level of publishing complexity, when the TOTAL of all said platforms still pales to the Wintel empire?
The captcha concept breaks down if the user can't see the image, either through the limitations of their browser (links) or the limitations of their eyes. A US government site would have a hard time justifying captcha in light of their legal and moral responsibilities to the disabled citizenry.
I once worked for a game company who was trying to get the rights to implement a 007 James Bond project. At the time, separate from the concept they were pitching, I offered an idea for a different "treatment."
In *my* idea of a cool James Bond game, you would be faced with all the same sorts of adventure-game intrigue and scenarios that you would expect. However, as the player, you had a choice of solutions to each problem, and you would select from different famous portrayals of James Bond to use them. You could pick any Bond actor you wanted for any problem, but the methods used would be quite different depending on that choice.
Wine and dine and charm the lady? Of course, everyone would pick Sean Connery's Bond for that one. But maybe you could detonate the truck as you jumped over it with a motorcycle, so switch to the action/adventure Timothy Dalton. If you could just gain computer access through the use of a one-liner retort that's crisper than a tux and dryer than a martini, well, Pierce Brosnan seems more adept at that sort of thing. And if you want to see how clumsy buffoonery and cheap cable-crane stunts can serve Her Magesty's international showdowns, we all know that's the only way Roger Moore won't disappoint.
What kind of news is this? It's an elevator. The only thing "innovative" is the use of transparent materials for the fashion components. The rest of it is plain old off-the-shelf engineering in a plain old retail store. If a two-story CompUSA outlet has elevator trouble in its first month, it's not a major Slashdot story, it's not even a Joe "Windows 4ever" Sixpack blog story.
Sure, there are seriously important things to learn in data structures, algorithms, and methodologies, but the fastest way to learn programming (the fastest way to learn ANYTHING) is to try to solve your own problems, not the stock rote example problems you'll find in books.
If you want to learn how to skate, take a tennis ball and chase it around a parking lot while having skates strapped to your feet. Don't spend more than a few minutes trying to consciously learn how to stand, roll forward, brake, or fall. Chase the ball. Do something OTHER than learn how to skate, but do something that requires skating. Your medulla oblongata will do the job far faster if it's allowed to do it without micromanagement from your conscious mind.
Same goes for programming. You won't learn how recursion works by typing in a fibonacci example. You'll learn how recursion works when you want to make a gallery thingy and find yourself needing to catalogue all *.jpg files below a certain directory. You won't learn how object oriented programming works by re-reading the wikipedia article on polymorphism, you'll learn more valuable lessons when you decide it's insane to be writing almost identical code in so many places and realize that's what a parent class is for.
Solve YOUR problems, not the book's, and you will develop a passion for problem solving. Almost all of the "programmers" out there who succeed have one thing in common: they wanted something implemented so they got it working on their own.
To make your point more clearly, consider your conclusion with a tiny change:
The danger of writing in passive voice is that the writer eliminates the actor. In this case, I was specifying not only what needed to be done, but who does it. When I wrote in passive voice, I was only specifying what needed to be.
Slashdot Mirror
[stock rant]
The press rightly continues to use the word 'piracy' for illicit copying and distribution of original materials. Some think it's a new phenomenon, and hard to square with the traditional image of the Jolly Roger and swashbuckling robbers-at-sea. The use of the word 'piracy' as signifying an unauthorized copy of a manuscript is hundreds of years old, long before modern Copyright doctrine was developed. From http://www.ninch.org/forum/price.report.html:
That's Dr. John Fell (1625-86), who was given the title of Bishop of Oxford in 1675.
[/stock rant]
Maybe the OS-dependent malware is on Windows but not MacOSX, but there are still some serious computer-delivered attacks that don't depend on the operating system. Social exploits like phishing and pay-forward scams still attack the gullible on any platform. Cross-site scripting exploits can still put web services such as PayPal and Amazon at risk. This has little to do with the platform, and I think many MacOSX fans are falsely smug over the whole thing.
iUgh, an e-New iContender for the worst eBuzz.com i-Product iName, turbo gold deluxe II.
Should have known that the HTML and the C would have butted heads...
Regular expressions like: (<<|>>)\s*(8|16|32)
Also, run your code through more than one make of compiler if you can: each compiler has its own set of warnings, and if you can pass them all cleanly, you can get closer to a "best in breed" codebase.
You should run whatever LINT-like tools you can find. Developers should agree as a group on what warnings are spurrious and what warnings are legitimate, and adjust any lint policy configurations to suit.
You can also find far more than simple bugs, but you can decide on best practices and consistency standards which should be adhered also. These can vary in importance, but it really helps for a clean and searchable codebase. For a trivial example, if coding in C, decide as a group whether to use *p = '\0' or *p = 0 when writing into a char string. For a more involved example, regularly scan the codebase for regular expressions like (>)\s*(8|16|24) to find possible Intel/PPC endian issues lurking where you don't expect it.
The adage goes, if you find you're doing something more than once, see if you can automate it, so you can pay more attention to the things which can't be automated. This goes for coding and debugging too.
Hey, kids, let's do a little experiment together, shall we? Don't forget your shop glasses. Let's get started.
You're going to need a few household items.
Have your mom or dad, or favorite grad student uncle, to assist you in using the equipment to achieve an even mono-molecular deposition of gold onto your cellophane tape...
Sorry, but in 2006, anything with only 64MB of flash storage space will not, contrary to the website's hype, revolutionize the way we use computers. Unless you're talking about a rising desire for austere minimalism.
I first heard of Goonhilly from a hardly-noticed story I once read. Not being a European, I had to look it up at the time to see what the hell it was.
No real relevance, I just like the name Goonhilly.
I don't give a rat's ass about HD-DVD or BluRay or any new format... until a player comes out (third-party hacked or not) which overcomes the MPAA's nefarious ideas about region encoding or forced chapters. If you want some market share, grow some balls and deliver a machine that plays the media *I* purchased anytime that *I* want to, without sending a colorectal scan to the governments and corporations of the world. And while you're at it, make false advertising phrases like "Own it on HD-DVD today!" completely off limits.
It just seems a little far-fetched.
No pun intended, I'm sure.
They took more than 30 million gold out of the economy from every server? I have news for you, there's right around 170 servers worldwide. That means around 175,000 gold per server. That is a incredibly miniscule part of each server's economy, that is it laughable.
Let's see, a high-profile USA corporate executive makes 400x the salary of the front-line employee. By dividing out the total payroll and equalizing across all employees, it dilutes down that peak and the figure looks like an average semi-professional salary. Yet why are so many people griping about the excess corporate executive payscale? Oh, that's right. Concentration of wealth and disproportionate influence wielded by the powerful few.
Statistics is worse than useless in the hands (or ears) of those who don't understand statistics.
As opposed to creating whole outsourcing companies to manage contractors during an outsourcing push. Or an executive personally subcontracting a building project at a bid below the rest of the local builders. Or the usual everyday case of standardizing on vendors that appear heavily in the executive's personal stock portfolio.
Funny, Apple charges extra for a black iPod or a black MacBook. Now Nintendo is claiming that black DS Lite units will be more rare, and thus the market will probably inflate their value. I'm not saying the companies are gonna merge, or anything.
I was raised Baptist but am not religious these days. Many many scientists have a deep spirituality or faith and feel that science just gets you closer to the creation. I've never had a problem with science versus faith: to put it into religious terms, I presume that science is our attempt at explaining "how," and spirituality is our attempt at explaining "why." There's no disconnect here.
The bible doesn't explain how the universe was created, and explicitly says that God's timeline is nothing like man's timeline, so there's no point in parsing "six days" as meaning anything in particular to us. If I feel like parsing it at all, I'd say the seventh day of rest aligns quite nicely with the future era of calmness mentioned in Revelations, so maybe we're still in the sixth day as far as God is concerned. I've subsequently heard some Israeli theologians have put forth the same conjecture. But I don't parse the bible that much, as I already figured out what I want to figure out with regards to my own spirituality: do less harm than good, and the world will be alright.
Major organized religions (aka, Church Inc.) just don't want any explaining of either, as it impacts the bottom line. Come in, drop off your tithe, pat a homeless man on the head, and go watch your kids' soccer game. Questions come pretty close to questioning authority, and they like being the unquestioned authority. I mean, really, condoms in Africa...
Did a subscriber get a look at the page [before it disappeared]?
That website was running on the stolen Sidekick, you insensitive clod!
Pretty soon, the usefulness of broadcast radio will be gone, and everyone will *have* to subscribe to some DRM'ed digital channel, or plan and download their own content of choice for long drives.
I like to think of this comic as a sort of sequel to Calvin & Hobbes.
Last week, there was this strip: http://www.comics.com/comics/frazz/archive/frazz-2 0060603.html
For the benefit of those reading past the 30-day limit:
I wioll haven heard that Dr. Dan Streetmentioner willan on-sell some four-dimensional stickers for 4D Rubik toys. A presooning shipment mayan arrivan on-when last Thursday, if I haventa recallen.
The range of Apple hardware specs and Mac OS variations are at their highest right now. There are still OS9-ready titles on the Apple store shelves, and now you have to worry about the difference between Panther, Tiger, as well as PowerPC and Intel.
Sure, I want to go into the store and see a pile of Universal Binary games that can run on my living room's Panther eMac and my wife's Core Duo Macbook Pro, with a nice frame rate and snappy audio feedback, but how many game developers really have the room for that level of publishing complexity, when the TOTAL of all said platforms still pales to the Wintel empire?
The captcha concept breaks down if the user can't see the image, either through the limitations of their browser (links) or the limitations of their eyes. A US government site would have a hard time justifying captcha in light of their legal and moral responsibilities to the disabled citizenry.
In *my* idea of a cool James Bond game, you would be faced with all the same sorts of adventure-game intrigue and scenarios that you would expect. However, as the player, you had a choice of solutions to each problem, and you would select from different famous portrayals of James Bond to use them. You could pick any Bond actor you wanted for any problem, but the methods used would be quite different depending on that choice.
Wine and dine and charm the lady? Of course, everyone would pick Sean Connery's Bond for that one. But maybe you could detonate the truck as you jumped over it with a motorcycle, so switch to the action/adventure Timothy Dalton. If you could just gain computer access through the use of a one-liner retort that's crisper than a tux and dryer than a martini, well, Pierce Brosnan seems more adept at that sort of thing. And if you want to see how clumsy buffoonery and cheap cable-crane stunts can serve Her Magesty's international showdowns, we all know that's the only way Roger Moore won't disappoint.
What kind of news is this? It's an elevator. The only thing "innovative" is the use of transparent materials for the fashion components. The rest of it is plain old off-the-shelf engineering in a plain old retail store. If a two-story CompUSA outlet has elevator trouble in its first month, it's not a major Slashdot story, it's not even a Joe "Windows 4ever" Sixpack blog story.
If you want to learn how to skate, take a tennis ball and chase it around a parking lot while having skates strapped to your feet. Don't spend more than a few minutes trying to consciously learn how to stand, roll forward, brake, or fall. Chase the ball. Do something OTHER than learn how to skate, but do something that requires skating. Your medulla oblongata will do the job far faster if it's allowed to do it without micromanagement from your conscious mind.
Same goes for programming. You won't learn how recursion works by typing in a fibonacci example. You'll learn how recursion works when you want to make a gallery thingy and find yourself needing to catalogue all *.jpg files below a certain directory. You won't learn how object oriented programming works by re-reading the wikipedia article on polymorphism, you'll learn more valuable lessons when you decide it's insane to be writing almost identical code in so many places and realize that's what a parent class is for.
Solve YOUR problems, not the book's, and you will develop a passion for problem solving. Almost all of the "programmers" out there who succeed have one thing in common: they wanted something implemented so they got it working on their own.
Here's a little "political-cartoon-style" diagram I put together a week ago on this topic: http://halley.cc/2006-05-16.hidden.agenda.jpg
To make your point more clearly, consider your conclusion with a tiny change:
The danger of writing in passive voice is that the writer eliminates the actor. In this case, I was specifying not only what needed to be done, but who does it. When I wrote in passive voice, I was only specifying what needed to be.