But for the whole implausibility factor. I mean, I can only suspend my disbelief so far:
"the Lebanese army guys measured the angle of the holes at the bottom of the impact craters made by the fuse assemblies being blown into the ground"
Yeah. Granted if your calculations are thrown off my five degrees by something irregular -- say, I don't know, an explosion -- you get garbage data which broadens your "X marks the spot" to a few square miles, which is about what you could have guessed given that the shells appear to be coming from thataway and you presumably have a rough idea of how far they could travel. But don't worry, Horatio Caine is on the case, and can infer from the fact that the pollen grain of a deusexis machinus was on one of the spent shell casings that the adversary must have been shooting from next to the greenhouse, on a Thursday, when the gardener was taking his lunch outside.
I have no clue why. Dell/HP/Logitech mice, meh, they're essentially disposable -- I get a new one with every new computer because they're generally on their last legs by then. Persistent gunk issues, laser malfunctioning when running over certain colors, total hardware failure, button responsiveness drops, what have you.
I got a Microsoft laser mouse for ~$50 back in, crikey, must have been about 2000. It isn't a gamer anything -- just two buttons and a wheel -- but that thing is an absolute tank. If its reliability continues like it has through the last near decade of heavy, heavy use it might very well be the last mouse I ever buy.
I expected them to be at least as competent at Microsoft at NOT giving out my details to anybody who asked.
This would explain why my personal and small business Gmail accounts (the second is technically Google apps, and paid for) have suddenly started to see a bunch of spam including my name, which is not guessable from the email address. And, bugger me further, I have emails with my name in them whitelisted.
It isn't an either/or choice, but programs with verbose variable names (which is typically one of the first targets of javascript compression: "replace timeSinceLastUpdate with r") compress disgustingly well. You may find that the gzip compression is effective enough that the obfuscation isn't worth the various attendant headaches (maintaining two versions of the code, etc).
In Soviet Russia... well, good thing there is no longer a Soviet Russia, because otherwise this grue being in it would mean the end of the world no matter who gets eaten.
If you see a girl between the ages of, oh, twelve and twenty-five in any of his shows, and she is looking harmless and is coming towards you, just save everybody some needless exertion and kill yourself.
There is no "mistake" to be made in choosing between two essentially arbitrary definitions which have no basis in external reality. Nothing has changed about Pluto. Nothing of substance has changed of our understanding of Pluto. (It is not like our understanding of biology, where new DNA evidence comes to light and two organisms we had previously assumed to be related becaused they looked similar turn out to have no recent common ancestry.)
The only thing which has changed is our arbitrary definitions.
There is a great hue and cry that one way to arbitrarily define things is not merely customary but that it is Correct and that all other forms are Unscientific. That, my friend, is dogma in its purest form.
The number of rocks in the solar system doesn't change, no matter what the scientists call them. (Well, I suppose some little rocks are flying in an out on a frequent basis, and sometimes they congeal into bigger rocks or fall into the sun, but those are mostly rocks we don't care about. As opposed to, well, rocks that we care about because they're traditionally the rocks we have cared about.)
Personally, I don't much care what they call them. At least when they're debating about what to call them they can't simultaneously spend half a billion dollars to go examine their rockness up close. (Hint: the sum toto of the results to every NASA mission ever made to another rock is "Yep, its a rock, alright. A bit different than that wet rock we spend most of our time on, but still quite rocky. We need another $500 million to probe its rockness further.")
Although to be honest when you're as heavily merchandised as the Turtles were it is hard to tell where the game WASN'T an ad. (Sorry, I know, it was my childhood too.)
Neither source nor output is available, sadly, but one of my senior theses was a program to write Japanese haiku. Its disgustingly easy because human brains love to play "fill in the gaps", and in haiku if you have two verbal images which are rather disparate but share a common bond (easy to guarantee by use of a seasonal dictionary, which is exactly how human writers do it), that is considered part of the charm. (I was also really helped by selection bias, in that I was allowed to present samplings of output that showed the program at its best, and readers would invariably only remember the haiku that they thought was quirkily amazing rather than the ones which were merely nonsense.)
The best one, and we're working across a few years of my deteriorating memory and a language gap here, came out something like:
Late spring morning, Flower petals sprinkling from sakura, A flock of pink cranes.
People who read that go "Wow! The computer knew that sakura blossoms and crane both fly, and that using the cranes as a metaphor for the sakura would combine gracefulness with aesthetic sensibilities!" The computer knew no such thing -- it picked 3 nouns from a list of "approved words for traditional haiku which deal with $RANDOM_SEASON", then did a bit of sentence-pattern plug-and-chug to stitch them together. Its the human reading the poem who paints the mental picture that makes it all work.
Abstract art is similar: given that art critics will write stories about the deep meaning in pain dribbled onto a piece of paper from a cheese grater, it is not difficult to make the CheezeGratezor2009. All the hard work gets done by the art critic, not the painter.
1) Japan is the world's second largest economy (going to be 3rd eventually after China gets big) 2) Japan is America's #2 trading partner, probably #1 in software (no time to look it up) 3) Most Japanese people don't speak business-level English (engineers are worse than almost any college-educated profession at this) 4)... almost NO Americans speak business level Japanese 5)... this gets in the way of multi-million dollar deals every day of the week
Bonus points: its so much harder to learn Japanese (and Japanese business culture & etc) than it is to learn Java that you become essentially outsourcing-proof. Trust me: my Japanese employer is trying like crazy to find Indians who speak Japanese and can program, and its needle in a haystack even when multiplied by a population of a billion. So we get English speaking Indians instead. Somebody needs to be able to talk with the Indians on a level deeper than "Hello, nice to meet you. This is a pen", so I get promoted. (Our other bilinguals are the CEO and two department heads, and their time is too valuable to use doing low-level management on one programming team.)
Particle Physicist: There is either a black sheep in Scotland or there is a stationary black sheep somewhere but I cannot say with certainty that there is a stationary black sheep in Scotland and, for that matter, I'm not really sure Scotland exists.
Biologist: A sheep in Scotland is expressing the "black" phenotype.
Geneticist: Color? Boring, solved problem. Ask me why he is antisocial.
Evolutionary Geneticist: I know why there are black sheep.
Creationist: No he doesn't!
Philosopher: They're both right.
Computer Scientist: black_sheep++
C Programmer: q++
Perl Programmer: $_[$&]++
PHP Programmer: I'm busy looking for how to increase count of variable by one, but haven't found the answer on Google, and will eventually use a system call to execute the Perl guy's solution*
Liberal Arts Major: Its a sheep of color, people.
* You would laugh less at this if *you* were the guy trying to read through and analyze 125 pages of outsourced PHP which uses this "solution" 30 times, invariably calling code that has already been used for Perl golf practice, with sparse comments written only in Japanese.
It costs about a buck a gig these days for reliable transfer from my hosting company. Seventeen cents if you use an ounce of planning and get an account with Amazon S3.
A hit song is what, 4 MB? So 1 GB supports 250 users. One *million* users is, cranks the math, $680. If a million people are listening to your music, you laugh in the general direction of $680 worth of hosting bills. (Which is, in any case, far cheaper than your gear, recording studio time, software, and PC for uploading the stuff was.)
BitTorrent solves two problems really well: flash crowds (not something you have to worry about as a niche artist, and getting less of a problem by the day thanks to utility computing -- what is your flash crowd gonig to do, crash Amazon?) and continuous, sustained transfer of enormous binary files. In practice, that means either Linux distributions or pirated things. And the pirated things are far and away more popular than the Linux distributions.
The emission could just as well be playing a Britney Spears song -- its just that the programmers at Kl'agnorf Multidimensional Muzzak borked their encoding routine.
(Unborking their encoding routine would probably cause an interstellar war, though, as the Intergalactic Association Of Recording Artists claims that Spears was clearly pirating Pu'oluk's Fuzzion album. And doing a poor job of it, which they privately concede they wouldn't have thought possible.)
If a Slashdotter is moving from their computer cocoon within 72 hours of Starcraft II being released, THEN I would send in the paramedics. Clearly he has either suffered from seizures or is perhaps being kidnapped, probably by Koreans upset that he forgot to gg them after a match.
1) Please don't teamkill the brainstem. Its sort of important, at least among those members of the species who have one. 2) I don't care that you just scored a +10,000 Helper-T bonus, that does not mean you can release dilatory hormones to make the patient's scrotum turn red. 3) Yes, yes, we understand -- its a breast cancer. You're in her breast. Get over it.
a) Proving negatives is hard. b) Ambiguity on whether there is life on Mars or not justifies many, many more $500 million trips to the red planet. c) "Its a barren rock, but it could be a barren rock with a few kilograms of lichen on it if you give us a few years" does not justify a series of $500 million missions.
(I'm perpetually amused that folks whine how we can't replace an old-growth forest or rainforest but terraforming a planet, hey, no problem there. All you need to do is sprinkle a little spores and fairy dust and boom you have Earth II, except without all the people mucking it up...)
>> Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters. >>
The day job could buy an awful lot of books with the $X0 million worth of Big Freaking Enterprise Apps we have written in (mostly) Java. Its like any other tool: there are some places where it makes excellent sense, some where it does not, and I have my own personal tastes for when I would use it or not. (Cards on the table: I do proprietary desktop Java development in my spare time and BFEwebA at the day job, but have been mixing in a bit of Rails programming lately.)
At the end of the day, what matters is "Does Java help us make our customers happy?" It does. Despite how skull-crushingly boring writing CRUD apps can be, for our customers having the things available and working means the difference kissing their kids at 6 PM or being stuck at the office at 2 AM wondering if they will still have a job in 5 hours.
So how does opening Java matter? Well, even in an extraordinarily mature platform, you'll sometimes find weird, off the wall, how the heck did that happen issues with particular combinations of software. Enterprise Computing = combinitorially explosive numbers of possible adverse reactions. We've got at least 150 packages in the system, many of which have to interoperate with code which has not seen the light of day since the mid-90s.
You'd think the odds of actually having to touch stuff deep in the bowels of the infrastructure are pretty low, but believe it or not we have our own little fork of, e.g, Tomcat 4.1 in production use *to this day* to get around a particular classloader issue that got fixed in later releases. (We can't upgrade that particular customer at the moment. Its a long story and if you've ever worked in industry you've heard the basic gist before.) Java being open means there is one less place for issues to be totally inaccessible should we need to work around them.
If you take a $20 a month VPS (or for that matter a $5 a month GoDaddy shared hosting account) serving static CSS/HTML with a few images, on Apache, then you can take a Slashdotting straight to the head without any issue whatsoever. Apache will put your 200 kb of content into memory, it gets served out as fast as the connections come in, you win.
Then point the same Slashdotting at, e.g., a page which requires a minor.1 second hop to the database to render and BAM Slashdotting. Similarly, if you've got a heavy media object (e.g. videos hosted locally), you'll probably saturate your bandwidth.
Ironically Slashdot is probably more capable of taking out sites these days than it was previously not because servers are slower (they're much, much faster) or server code is worse (its much, much better) but bceause the average complexity of the typical website is growing.
Compare a default Wordpress install (which doesn't cache anything because, hey, who needs to cache operations that inexpensive? Its not like you were expecting to get popular...) to a static HTML page written in notepad, which was the standard I-can't-believe-its-not-blog format in 1996. If you fire a slashdotting at the Wordpress install, PHP will cause your RAM utilization to go to "lots" and you will likely either get killed by your host or see the majority of visitors get timed out. If you fire it at the static HTML page, no worries.
Support: "Now, double blink with your left eye" User: "Your left, or my left?"
(I'm also allowing for the possibility that the user knows the word "eye", which is dubious at best. Because, you see, whereas many people would say "those two round vision organs on your head are your eyes", this particular user has called those his "orbs" for the last 40 years whippersnapper, and the rest of the world should conform to his nomenclature.)
Slashdot Mirror
... I have no doubt, whatsoever, that it empirically does not.
Release a CC song as good as any one by Britney Spears.
But for the whole implausibility factor. I mean, I can only suspend my disbelief so far:
"the Lebanese army guys measured the angle of the holes at the bottom of the impact craters made by the fuse assemblies being blown into the ground"
Yeah. Granted if your calculations are thrown off my five degrees by something irregular -- say, I don't know, an explosion -- you get garbage data which broadens your "X marks the spot" to a few square miles, which is about what you could have guessed given that the shells appear to be coming from thataway and you presumably have a rough idea of how far they could travel. But don't worry, Horatio Caine is on the case, and can infer from the fact that the pollen grain of a deusexis machinus was on one of the spent shell casings that the adversary must have been shooting from next to the greenhouse, on a Thursday, when the gardener was taking his lunch outside.
I have no clue why. Dell/HP/Logitech mice, meh, they're essentially disposable -- I get a new one with every new computer because they're generally on their last legs by then. Persistent gunk issues, laser malfunctioning when running over certain colors, total hardware failure, button responsiveness drops, what have you.
I got a Microsoft laser mouse for ~$50 back in, crikey, must have been about 2000. It isn't a gamer anything -- just two buttons and a wheel -- but that thing is an absolute tank. If its reliability continues like it has through the last near decade of heavy, heavy use it might very well be the last mouse I ever buy.
"Changing his mind."
47,300 weapons
2,100,000 possible denizens from Hell to fight you
136,000 rooms rendered in glorious 3D
And every single monster still pops up right behind you after you move through the door.
I expected them to be at least as competent at Microsoft at NOT giving out my details to anybody who asked.
This would explain why my personal and small business Gmail accounts (the second is technically Google apps, and paid for) have suddenly started to see a bunch of spam including my name, which is not guessable from the email address. And, bugger me further, I have emails with my name in them whitelisted.
It isn't an either/or choice, but programs with verbose variable names (which is typically one of the first targets of javascript compression: "replace timeSinceLastUpdate with r") compress disgustingly well. You may find that the gzip compression is effective enough that the obfuscation isn't worth the various attendant headaches (maintaining two versions of the code, etc).
In Soviet Russia... well, good thing there is no longer a Soviet Russia, because otherwise this grue being in it would mean the end of the world no matter who gets eaten.
If you see a girl between the ages of, oh, twelve and twenty-five in any of his shows, and she is looking harmless and is coming towards you, just save everybody some needless exertion and kill yourself.
There is no "mistake" to be made in choosing between two essentially arbitrary definitions which have no basis in external reality. Nothing has changed about Pluto. Nothing of substance has changed of our understanding of Pluto. (It is not like our understanding of biology, where new DNA evidence comes to light and two organisms we had previously assumed to be related becaused they looked similar turn out to have no recent common ancestry.)
The only thing which has changed is our arbitrary definitions.
There is a great hue and cry that one way to arbitrarily define things is not merely customary but that it is Correct and that all other forms are Unscientific. That, my friend, is dogma in its purest form.
The number of rocks in the solar system doesn't change, no matter what the scientists call them. (Well, I suppose some little rocks are flying in an out on a frequent basis, and sometimes they congeal into bigger rocks or fall into the sun, but those are mostly rocks we don't care about. As opposed to, well, rocks that we care about because they're traditionally the rocks we have cared about.)
Personally, I don't much care what they call them. At least when they're debating about what to call them they can't simultaneously spend half a billion dollars to go examine their rockness up close. (Hint: the sum toto of the results to every NASA mission ever made to another rock is "Yep, its a rock, alright. A bit different than that wet rock we spend most of our time on, but still quite rocky. We need another $500 million to probe its rockness further.")
Pizza Hut in the Ninja Turtles games.
Although to be honest when you're as heavily merchandised as the Turtles were it is hard to tell where the game WASN'T an ad. (Sorry, I know, it was my childhood too.)
Neither source nor output is available, sadly, but one of my senior theses was a program to write Japanese haiku. Its disgustingly easy because human brains love to play "fill in the gaps", and in haiku if you have two verbal images which are rather disparate but share a common bond (easy to guarantee by use of a seasonal dictionary, which is exactly how human writers do it), that is considered part of the charm. (I was also really helped by selection bias, in that I was allowed to present samplings of output that showed the program at its best, and readers would invariably only remember the haiku that they thought was quirkily amazing rather than the ones which were merely nonsense.)
The best one, and we're working across a few years of my deteriorating memory and a language gap here, came out something like:
Late spring morning,
Flower petals sprinkling from sakura,
A flock of pink cranes.
People who read that go "Wow! The computer knew that sakura blossoms and crane both fly, and that using the cranes as a metaphor for the sakura would combine gracefulness with aesthetic sensibilities!" The computer knew no such thing -- it picked 3 nouns from a list of "approved words for traditional haiku which deal with $RANDOM_SEASON", then did a bit of sentence-pattern plug-and-chug to stitch them together. Its the human reading the poem who paints the mental picture that makes it all work.
Abstract art is similar: given that art critics will write stories about the deep meaning in pain dribbled onto a piece of paper from a cheese grater, it is not difficult to make the CheezeGratezor2009. All the hard work gets done by the art critic, not the painter.
1) Japan is the world's second largest economy (going to be 3rd eventually after China gets big) ... almost NO Americans speak business level Japanese ... this gets in the way of multi-million dollar deals every day of the week
2) Japan is America's #2 trading partner, probably #1 in software (no time to look it up)
3) Most Japanese people don't speak business-level English (engineers are worse than almost any college-educated profession at this)
4)
5)
Bonus points: its so much harder to learn Japanese (and Japanese business culture & etc) than it is to learn Java that you become essentially outsourcing-proof. Trust me: my Japanese employer is trying like crazy to find Indians who speak Japanese and can program, and its needle in a haystack even when multiplied by a population of a billion. So we get English speaking Indians instead. Somebody needs to be able to talk with the Indians on a level deeper than "Hello, nice to meet you. This is a pen", so I get promoted. (Our other bilinguals are the CEO and two department heads, and their time is too valuable to use doing low-level management on one programming team.)
Before? :)
Particle Physicist: There is either a black sheep in Scotland or there is a stationary black sheep somewhere but I cannot say with certainty that there is a stationary black sheep in Scotland and, for that matter, I'm not really sure Scotland exists.
Biologist: A sheep in Scotland is expressing the "black" phenotype.
Geneticist: Color? Boring, solved problem. Ask me why he is antisocial.
Evolutionary Geneticist: I know why there are black sheep.
Creationist: No he doesn't!
Philosopher: They're both right.
Computer Scientist: black_sheep++
C Programmer: q++
Perl Programmer: $_[$&]++
PHP Programmer: I'm busy looking for how to increase count of variable by one, but haven't found the answer on Google, and will eventually use a system call to execute the Perl guy's solution*
Liberal Arts Major: Its a sheep of color, people.
* You would laugh less at this if *you* were the guy trying to read through and analyze 125 pages of outsourced PHP which uses this "solution" 30 times, invariably calling code that has already been used for Perl golf practice, with sparse comments written only in Japanese.
It costs about a buck a gig these days for reliable transfer from my hosting company. Seventeen cents if you use an ounce of planning and get an account with Amazon S3.
A hit song is what, 4 MB? So 1 GB supports 250 users. One *million* users is, cranks the math, $680. If a million people are listening to your music, you laugh in the general direction of $680 worth of hosting bills. (Which is, in any case, far cheaper than your gear, recording studio time, software, and PC for uploading the stuff was.)
BitTorrent solves two problems really well: flash crowds (not something you have to worry about as a niche artist, and getting less of a problem by the day thanks to utility computing -- what is your flash crowd gonig to do, crash Amazon?) and continuous, sustained transfer of enormous binary files. In practice, that means either Linux distributions or pirated things. And the pirated things are far and away more popular than the Linux distributions.
The emission could just as well be playing a Britney Spears song -- its just that the programmers at Kl'agnorf Multidimensional Muzzak borked their encoding routine.
(Unborking their encoding routine would probably cause an interstellar war, though, as the Intergalactic Association Of Recording Artists claims that Spears was clearly pirating Pu'oluk's Fuzzion album. And doing a poor job of it, which they privately concede they wouldn't have thought possible.)
If a Slashdotter is moving from their computer cocoon within 72 hours of Starcraft II being released, THEN I would send in the paramedics. Clearly he has either suffered from seizures or is perhaps being kidnapped, probably by Koreans upset that he forgot to gg them after a match.
keke
1) Please don't teamkill the brainstem. Its sort of important, at least among those members of the species who have one.
2) I don't care that you just scored a +10,000 Helper-T bonus, that does not mean you can release dilatory hormones to make the patient's scrotum turn red.
3) Yes, yes, we understand -- its a breast cancer. You're in her breast. Get over it.
a) Proving negatives is hard.
b) Ambiguity on whether there is life on Mars or not justifies many, many more $500 million trips to the red planet.
c) "Its a barren rock, but it could be a barren rock with a few kilograms of lichen on it if you give us a few years" does not justify a series of $500 million missions.
(I'm perpetually amused that folks whine how we can't replace an old-growth forest or rainforest but terraforming a planet, hey, no problem there. All you need to do is sprinkle a little spores and fairy dust and boom you have Earth II, except without all the people mucking it up...)
>>
Since Java itself never mattered except to sell books, I still don't see why opening it matters.
>>
The day job could buy an awful lot of books with the $X0 million worth of Big Freaking Enterprise Apps we have written in (mostly) Java. Its like any other tool: there are some places where it makes excellent sense, some where it does not, and I have my own personal tastes for when I would use it or not. (Cards on the table: I do proprietary desktop Java development in my spare time and BFEwebA at the day job, but have been mixing in a bit of Rails programming lately.)
At the end of the day, what matters is "Does Java help us make our customers happy?" It does. Despite how skull-crushingly boring writing CRUD apps can be, for our customers having the things available and working means the difference kissing their kids at 6 PM or being stuck at the office at 2 AM wondering if they will still have a job in 5 hours.
So how does opening Java matter? Well, even in an extraordinarily mature platform, you'll sometimes find weird, off the wall, how the heck did that happen issues with particular combinations of software. Enterprise Computing = combinitorially explosive numbers of possible adverse reactions. We've got at least 150 packages in the system, many of which have to interoperate with code which has not seen the light of day since the mid-90s.
You'd think the odds of actually having to touch stuff deep in the bowels of the infrastructure are pretty low, but believe it or not we have our own little fork of, e.g, Tomcat 4.1 in production use *to this day* to get around a particular classloader issue that got fixed in later releases. (We can't upgrade that particular customer at the moment. Its a long story and if you've ever worked in industry you've heard the basic gist before.) Java being open means there is one less place for issues to be totally inaccessible should we need to work around them.
If you take a $20 a month VPS (or for that matter a $5 a month GoDaddy shared hosting account) serving static CSS/HTML with a few images, on Apache, then you can take a Slashdotting straight to the head without any issue whatsoever. Apache will put your 200 kb of content into memory, it gets served out as fast as the connections come in, you win.
Then point the same Slashdotting at, e.g., a page which requires a minor .1 second hop to the database to render and BAM Slashdotting. Similarly, if you've got a heavy media object (e.g. videos hosted locally), you'll probably saturate your bandwidth.
Ironically Slashdot is probably more capable of taking out sites these days than it was previously not because servers are slower (they're much, much faster) or server code is worse (its much, much better) but bceause the average complexity of the typical website is growing.
Compare a default Wordpress install (which doesn't cache anything because, hey, who needs to cache operations that inexpensive? Its not like you were expecting to get popular...) to a static HTML page written in notepad, which was the standard I-can't-believe-its-not-blog format in 1996. If you fire a slashdotting at the Wordpress install, PHP will cause your RAM utilization to go to "lots" and you will likely either get killed by your host or see the majority of visitors get timed out. If you fire it at the static HTML page, no worries.
Support: "Now, double blink with your left eye"
User: "Your left, or my left?"
(I'm also allowing for the possibility that the user knows the word "eye", which is dubious at best. Because, you see, whereas many people would say "those two round vision organs on your head are your eyes", this particular user has called those his "orbs" for the last 40 years whippersnapper, and the rest of the world should conform to his nomenclature.)