Somethingawful event: See who can send the internet monitors screaming from the room the fastest.
Cryptographers event: See who can code the best covert channel that the monitors won't notice.
Piracy event: See who can distribute footage of the events without the Olympics Committee noticing.
Sports? We don't need no steenkin sports! (Except maybe for the piracy event.)
Fractions! Yes! They're patenting fractions! I want to patent the process by which you arrive at a legitimate sounding patent for patenting fractions! Now if they include a method of dealing with the jackass who takes all the cash, puts it on his credit card and leaves a 3% tip, we might be on to something. Oh wait, we already have a method for that, too, don't invite that fucker out to lunch anymore! I'm Google will be including a patented method of identifying that guy and excluding him from Google Calender invites in the future. If they can use their social profiling stuff to identify him in advance so he never gets invited to lunch in the first place, that might actually be worthwhile. I think I'd have to let that one slide.
That would sure be a lot nicer than having to admit to yourself that your harsh actions led directly to the death of someone who was still basically a child in your care, wouldn't it? Well, he's still dead, you're still an asshole and thousands of idealistic young kids like him still apply to your school every year, so I guess it all worked out for just about everyone, didn't it? Perhaps as part of the new student orientation you should give the Fight Club "God Hates You" speech to all the new students. Then at least they'll know what they're in for.
And I was just about to start testing my control system for my democrat-seeking missile system! Oh well, guess I'll just have to go be a male stripper now. If the money's good enough, I might just keep doing that once the government gets rolling again. I guess no one really wanted this democrat-seeking missile system anyway!
Yeah. A lot of you kids are probably too young to remember, but back in the '60s and '70s, a lot of US cities (New York and LA come to mind specifically) were legendary for their smog. Their delicious, lead-filled smog. Actually a lot of you kids are probably too young to remember rotary dials on phones, the AT&T break-up and watching the first Star Wars movie and ET on the big screen when they came out. And to you I say "Get off my lawn!"
I visited Romania on a contracting gig a while back. I swung by London and Austria, which had air quality comparable or better than what we do in the USA. Romania was more like Miami with no emissions controls. Outside the car exhaust would make your lungs hurt and inside all the people smoking would make your lungs hurt. By the end of the week I couldn't wait to get back on the plane and get a breath of fresh air, then they announce it's a smoking flight to London. Daaaaaymn! If you've lived somewhere the air is clean your whole life, you have no idea. And if you've lived somewhere the air is dirty your whole life, you also have no idea.
I hear Romania's cleaned up its act a bit in the last decade. I'm planning to visit again sometime in the next 4-5 years, because the food, wine and people are all awesome!
You could just improve security, but that's hard. Alternately, you could just have such a shitty IT infrastructure that nothing ever works! This has many advantages! Lower IT costs, for one, and servers that are broken are in fact VERY secure! Very, VERY secure! So if you're in IT, next time someone bitches at you about some resource being down, just say it's "security hardening"!
Why should the casino cheat? The odds are already in their favor. All they have to do is sit there and collect their money. I could see the dealers here having some incentive to consider it, as the non-tournament poker tables have a bad beat jackpot that accumulates and is paid out when an awesome hand loses to another awesome hand. It's usually something like a full house with aces over kings losing to another hand (And both player's hole cards must play.) It's usually around $100000 - $150000 with the losing hand getting 40%, the winning hand gettiing 30% and the rest of the table getting the rest. Typically the dealer will get a pretty fat tip off that, though I sat down at a table once and the dealer was complaining that another dealer had dealt one earlier that day and the guy stiffed him on a tip. So it's not even a sure thing for the dealer.
If it was polarity, that's an awfully big chance that another player will notice if they wear polarized sun glasses. I tend to forget mine are until I turn my head a certain away and can't read a gas station fuel readout or something. In a house game you're not so likely to wear them, though, and it sounds like they were playing a house game variant of poker.
The local casinos use card shuffling machines that could easily be capable of knowing what order the deck's in, for times when allegations of cheating and misdeals are raised. I don't see any evidence of CCTVs at card level for the times whey they're dealing manually, but they're a very heavily monitored environment and it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they did. The article's vague about how the casino knew the hand. It could be the guy was a jackass and showed his cards to show off what a "good" poker player he was. Or a casino employee could have just put him on the hand because if you're in a hand at a certain point there are really only a few hands you could have.
It wouldn't really be cheating on the part of the casino since they don't have any stake in the game other than to make sure it's played fairly. They get their rake off every hand but you're not playing the house in poker.
Now they're all eating Big Gay Al's Big Gay Spaghetti! You know that scene in Lady and the Tramp with the spaghetti? The photo on the box of Big Gay Al's Big Gay Spaghetti is two dudes french kissing over a plate of spaghetti.
I do and I'd argue that no matter what the substance, puritanical prohibition will always make the problem worse than allowing it and investing fewer resources into dealing with the problem users. Doesn't matter if it's alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, crack, meth or LSD. I'm pretty sure big Pharma could produce meth much more safely and with much less environmental consequence than someone setting up a lab in the back of a WalMart.
People use and abuse these substances and go on to lead productive lives. From what Obama admits in his book, I'm guessing if he'd been caught he wouldn't have gone on to be President.
And yeah, some people always die, but you're going to die sooner or later. If that's how you want to go, who am I to stop you? Don't tell me they weren't capable of assessing the risk, either. Nothing in life is without risk. Eventually you screw up in assessing it adequately and then you die. For some of us it happens sooner (Whooops, didn't adequately assess the risk of jumping off the roof with that batman suit) for some later (Whoops, didn't adequately assess the risk of living until 97 on nothing but social security.) In the end, everyone dies.
Because they're a government agency and government agencies waste time and money. The DEA in particular has been nothing but a waste of time and money since its inception, the functional equivalent of pouring gasoline on trillions of taxpayer dollars and burning them. Formed on the pretext that marijuana is "bad" for you with no studies done on the subject, their sole purpose has been to perpetuate the myth that their existence makes the country a better place. All it has, in fact, brought is is a slow erosion of the Constitution, the indentured servitude of a generation of young, mostly-black youth and a no apparent impact on the drug use in the country. If they were disbanded today, no one would notice a thing. They know they need to keep distracting us and flailing their arms about anything they can come up with, so that lawmakers under the influence of hysteria increase their budget next year.
Well the nice thing about Linux is you don't have to use their shit. I'm actually kind of happy the Gnome guys turned out to be huge assholes. Sure I could fork one of their earlier code bases, but eliminating a desktop environment from my window manager completely turned out to be a pretty nice move. All I really needed was a launcher for a couple of applications, which the window manager works great for. All that other extraneous fluff was just pointlessly bogging down my system and workflow.
I liked Ruby early on, until I actually had to support production code written in it. I'm currently in the process of stamping out out from the code base I have to support. I don't think you actually realize how bad it can be until you actually have to support it.
It's not that the language is inherently bad. No language is inherently bad. It's just that you need to use some very strict discipline when using it. If you write unit tests for everything and actually design your objects, it would be pretty good. The problem is nobody actually does that. In my situation, if I could even deploy the code a test environment and test it prior to deploy, it would be better. But the original guy coupled it so tightly to the database and all the objects so tightly to each other that there's really no way to do that. So I'm in the situation where I could try to fix this broke-ass design, I could rewrite it all in Ruby or I could rewrite it all in another language. I decided to go with C++ and wrote a bunch of libraries and a bunch of unit tests with cppunit for those libraries. So now when I deploy my code, I actually have a high degree of confidence that it's going to work when it gets to the systems it lives on.
I have about equally as much fun writing code in C++ as I do in Ruby. It's just easier to understand how the objects work in Ruby. I would argue that whimsy is not necessary to have fun in a programming language, but understanding how that language works is. Ruby seems sensible a lot faster than C++ does, and is easier to pick up and have fun in a lot faster. If you want to have fun in any language, experiment with it to see how it works. If I run across something where I'm not sure about how it works in C++, I'll stop and Google on it rather than avoiding something out of superstition.
That's funny. 25 years later, I still have a blast coding. I've never taken a job I though would be boring, though I have run across some companies that one should avoid like the plague. Oddly, I've found IBM to be among the most fun companies to work for. Also oddly, when I was contracting there, Sun was not a very fun company to work for -- I'm pretty sure the job of the guy one cube over from me was to talk on the cell phone all day about how he was a process blackbelt. They had a 12 page form you had to fill in to get them to unlock version control for changes. Despite this and code reviews for each change, code quality was some of the lowest I've ever seen. The programmers there told me that a few years earlier the place was much more fun to work for, but it seems to me the additional perks the company brought in at the height of the boom were not oriented to making the programming more fun. Then when the bottom line started to slip, they not only got rid of those but also added ISO to the mix, sucking all the fun out of the actual job. I was there for a few months just before Oracle took them over.
Echostar was the least-fun place I've ever worked. Despite the fact that they had fairly interesting problems to solve and interesting hardware to work on, their corporate culture leads me to believe that they despise having to have employees, and the quality of their work reflects that. So it is actually possible to make fun problems to solve not-fun. Next job after that was back at IBM working with an AWESOME team with room to improve code quality as time went on. We generally only put 40 hours a week in there, got all our stuff out on time and could have kept our pace up indefinitely. Amazing how much of a difference corporate culture makes.
If you're not having fun programming on your job, maybe you're working for the wrong company. If you're the kind of programmer who actually enjoys programming, it's not that hard to find a position with a company that's more fun to work for. All you really have to do is look.
You didn't really read my post, did you? I'm perfectly fine being presented a complete system written entirely in FORTRAN and being told to support it. If I'm doing NEW DEVELOPMENT, I prefer C++.
Thing about those old systems, they typically weren't written by dumbasses. Most of my career has been following along behind dumbasses cleaning up at them. It's lucrative work, and I'm never hurting for something to do. Every so often I happen upon a system that was actually written by engineers and it's usually delightful when I find one.
Given the ease with which you snap to a judgment, you must be a fucking amazing programmer, so let's see your open source repos. My home page is set to mine.
If I were doing new development, which I am, I would use C++ because like Java and Ruby I can develop code in it more quickly, make my libraries more user-friendly (Where the user in this case is another programmer or myself later on) and am more likely to be able to find other programmers who can use those libraries without requiring them to learn an ancient language that just barely qualifies as structured-programming-capable. And yes, I HAVE written fortran code. And assembly, back in the day.
Unlike Ruby (Which I can develop code in VERY quickly) my C++ is type-safe and I can catch a lot of smile programming errors at compile time. I appreciate not finding run-time bugs in my deep space probe when it's 80 million miles from earth. And yes, I also write unit tests for my libraries.
Unlike Java, my C++ code doesn't require a gigantic VM to run in, I know exactly when my resources are being freed, I don't have to worry about someone else on the team using RTTI bullshit (I've never seen an instance of RTTI that wasn't indicative of a terrible design. Would welcome good examples,) and I can revert to the C standard library for full control of the hardware. If the OS can do it, the C standard library probably has a function for it. Mostly I'm just more comfortable in the language, though. In a lot more java-using applications, the decision to use Java was the wrong one. I've had to support a few of those. It's left me with a permanent distaste for the language. A distaste which Oracle does not help with its shenanigans (Attempting to claim copyright on APIs and trying to install some fucking useless toolbar every time it patches my system.)
Note that a lot of this IS subjective opinion and not really a critique of one language or the other. I can program in anything, if I need to. I just happen to like C++. I've posted what I consider to be respectably nifty libraries to github and already have several more planned. It's not like someone can't look at my source code and decide for themselves if it's crap or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Somethingawful event: See who can send the internet monitors screaming from the room the fastest.
Cryptographers event: See who can code the best covert channel that the monitors won't notice.
Piracy event: See who can distribute footage of the events without the Olympics Committee noticing.
Sports? We don't need no steenkin sports! (Except maybe for the piracy event.)
I'd be on that social network. Wouldn't you?
Fractions! Yes! They're patenting fractions! I want to patent the process by which you arrive at a legitimate sounding patent for patenting fractions! Now if they include a method of dealing with the jackass who takes all the cash, puts it on his credit card and leaves a 3% tip, we might be on to something. Oh wait, we already have a method for that, too, don't invite that fucker out to lunch anymore! I'm Google will be including a patented method of identifying that guy and excluding him from Google Calender invites in the future. If they can use their social profiling stuff to identify him in advance so he never gets invited to lunch in the first place, that might actually be worthwhile. I think I'd have to let that one slide.
I dunno. My horse is pretty amazing...
Maybe he should make his own damn social network. Seems like he has a better idea about what people want from one.
I've yet to meet anyone under 30 who isn't still basically a child. Now get off my lawn y'damn kids!
That would sure be a lot nicer than having to admit to yourself that your harsh actions led directly to the death of someone who was still basically a child in your care, wouldn't it? Well, he's still dead, you're still an asshole and thousands of idealistic young kids like him still apply to your school every year, so I guess it all worked out for just about everyone, didn't it? Perhaps as part of the new student orientation you should give the Fight Club "God Hates You" speech to all the new students. Then at least they'll know what they're in for.
And I was just about to start testing my control system for my democrat-seeking missile system! Oh well, guess I'll just have to go be a male stripper now. If the money's good enough, I might just keep doing that once the government gets rolling again. I guess no one really wanted this democrat-seeking missile system anyway!
I visited Romania on a contracting gig a while back. I swung by London and Austria, which had air quality comparable or better than what we do in the USA. Romania was more like Miami with no emissions controls. Outside the car exhaust would make your lungs hurt and inside all the people smoking would make your lungs hurt. By the end of the week I couldn't wait to get back on the plane and get a breath of fresh air, then they announce it's a smoking flight to London. Daaaaaymn! If you've lived somewhere the air is clean your whole life, you have no idea. And if you've lived somewhere the air is dirty your whole life, you also have no idea.
I hear Romania's cleaned up its act a bit in the last decade. I'm planning to visit again sometime in the next 4-5 years, because the food, wine and people are all awesome!
You could just improve security, but that's hard. Alternately, you could just have such a shitty IT infrastructure that nothing ever works! This has many advantages! Lower IT costs, for one, and servers that are broken are in fact VERY secure! Very, VERY secure! So if you're in IT, next time someone bitches at you about some resource being down, just say it's "security hardening"!
Congress still gets paid!
Why should the casino cheat? The odds are already in their favor. All they have to do is sit there and collect their money. I could see the dealers here having some incentive to consider it, as the non-tournament poker tables have a bad beat jackpot that accumulates and is paid out when an awesome hand loses to another awesome hand. It's usually something like a full house with aces over kings losing to another hand (And both player's hole cards must play.) It's usually around $100000 - $150000 with the losing hand getting 40%, the winning hand gettiing 30% and the rest of the table getting the rest. Typically the dealer will get a pretty fat tip off that, though I sat down at a table once and the dealer was complaining that another dealer had dealt one earlier that day and the guy stiffed him on a tip. So it's not even a sure thing for the dealer.
If it was polarity, that's an awfully big chance that another player will notice if they wear polarized sun glasses. I tend to forget mine are until I turn my head a certain away and can't read a gas station fuel readout or something. In a house game you're not so likely to wear them, though, and it sounds like they were playing a house game variant of poker.
It wouldn't really be cheating on the part of the casino since they don't have any stake in the game other than to make sure it's played fairly. They get their rake off every hand but you're not playing the house in poker.
Now they're all eating Big Gay Al's Big Gay Spaghetti! You know that scene in Lady and the Tramp with the spaghetti? The photo on the box of Big Gay Al's Big Gay Spaghetti is two dudes french kissing over a plate of spaghetti.
People use and abuse these substances and go on to lead productive lives. From what Obama admits in his book, I'm guessing if he'd been caught he wouldn't have gone on to be President.
And yeah, some people always die, but you're going to die sooner or later. If that's how you want to go, who am I to stop you? Don't tell me they weren't capable of assessing the risk, either. Nothing in life is without risk. Eventually you screw up in assessing it adequately and then you die. For some of us it happens sooner (Whooops, didn't adequately assess the risk of jumping off the roof with that batman suit) for some later (Whoops, didn't adequately assess the risk of living until 97 on nothing but social security.) In the end, everyone dies.
Ask a silly question...
I don't even trust those guys with a browser cookie, much less a credit card.
Well the nice thing about Linux is you don't have to use their shit. I'm actually kind of happy the Gnome guys turned out to be huge assholes. Sure I could fork one of their earlier code bases, but eliminating a desktop environment from my window manager completely turned out to be a pretty nice move. All I really needed was a launcher for a couple of applications, which the window manager works great for. All that other extraneous fluff was just pointlessly bogging down my system and workflow.
Hm. Maybe you're just doing it wrong.
It's not that the language is inherently bad. No language is inherently bad. It's just that you need to use some very strict discipline when using it. If you write unit tests for everything and actually design your objects, it would be pretty good. The problem is nobody actually does that. In my situation, if I could even deploy the code a test environment and test it prior to deploy, it would be better. But the original guy coupled it so tightly to the database and all the objects so tightly to each other that there's really no way to do that. So I'm in the situation where I could try to fix this broke-ass design, I could rewrite it all in Ruby or I could rewrite it all in another language. I decided to go with C++ and wrote a bunch of libraries and a bunch of unit tests with cppunit for those libraries. So now when I deploy my code, I actually have a high degree of confidence that it's going to work when it gets to the systems it lives on.
I have about equally as much fun writing code in C++ as I do in Ruby. It's just easier to understand how the objects work in Ruby. I would argue that whimsy is not necessary to have fun in a programming language, but understanding how that language works is. Ruby seems sensible a lot faster than C++ does, and is easier to pick up and have fun in a lot faster. If you want to have fun in any language, experiment with it to see how it works. If I run across something where I'm not sure about how it works in C++, I'll stop and Google on it rather than avoiding something out of superstition.
Echostar was the least-fun place I've ever worked. Despite the fact that they had fairly interesting problems to solve and interesting hardware to work on, their corporate culture leads me to believe that they despise having to have employees, and the quality of their work reflects that. So it is actually possible to make fun problems to solve not-fun. Next job after that was back at IBM working with an AWESOME team with room to improve code quality as time went on. We generally only put 40 hours a week in there, got all our stuff out on time and could have kept our pace up indefinitely. Amazing how much of a difference corporate culture makes.
If you're not having fun programming on your job, maybe you're working for the wrong company. If you're the kind of programmer who actually enjoys programming, it's not that hard to find a position with a company that's more fun to work for. All you really have to do is look.
I'd shoot them a resume but I hear Wally from Dilbert already got the job.
Thing about those old systems, they typically weren't written by dumbasses. Most of my career has been following along behind dumbasses cleaning up at them. It's lucrative work, and I'm never hurting for something to do. Every so often I happen upon a system that was actually written by engineers and it's usually delightful when I find one.
Given the ease with which you snap to a judgment, you must be a fucking amazing programmer, so let's see your open source repos. My home page is set to mine.
Unlike Ruby (Which I can develop code in VERY quickly) my C++ is type-safe and I can catch a lot of smile programming errors at compile time. I appreciate not finding run-time bugs in my deep space probe when it's 80 million miles from earth. And yes, I also write unit tests for my libraries.
Unlike Java, my C++ code doesn't require a gigantic VM to run in, I know exactly when my resources are being freed, I don't have to worry about someone else on the team using RTTI bullshit (I've never seen an instance of RTTI that wasn't indicative of a terrible design. Would welcome good examples,) and I can revert to the C standard library for full control of the hardware. If the OS can do it, the C standard library probably has a function for it. Mostly I'm just more comfortable in the language, though. In a lot more java-using applications, the decision to use Java was the wrong one. I've had to support a few of those. It's left me with a permanent distaste for the language. A distaste which Oracle does not help with its shenanigans (Attempting to claim copyright on APIs and trying to install some fucking useless toolbar every time it patches my system.)
Note that a lot of this IS subjective opinion and not really a critique of one language or the other. I can program in anything, if I need to. I just happen to like C++. I've posted what I consider to be respectably nifty libraries to github and already have several more planned. It's not like someone can't look at my source code and decide for themselves if it's crap or not.