I'd go much further than just giving the kid the code, docs and offering to answer questions. First off, the firm is not crazy at all to want multiple people, at least one in-house, who know the system; If and when you move on, even a junior dev with familiarity is better than a fresh contractor, the source, and the stack of docs quickly printed.
I'd take this as an opportunity to keep the system alive after I go off to other things - I'd do what the firm and new bloke are hoping, and try to explain: The design decisions, the calls which paid off, the decisions which might need to be revisited later, and the parts where we are stuck with the decision, as it is not likely going to be worth changing, but the irritation will still be there whenever the area needs a poke.
I'd try to spend a fair number of hours per day pairing with the bloke - having him type in the simple stuff, whether a bugfix, or some grindy code. Depending on the actual current work - different amounts of time will need to be set aside to design, mull, research, debug, etc... alone. Progressively more interesting changes can be handed off as familiarity grows.
The win would be the opportunity to spend a lot of time working closely with someone on a system I know and like. I love being able to pass on design decisions verbally when coding with someone, being able to express actual doubt about stuff which grew hair, to answer questions on fine grained issues that couldn't be in the external docs, and didn't fit into a place in the source and detailed design docs. To complain about daft requirements that came late and made a mess of things... all with the code in front of us.
Afterwards - I am free to move on without shafting the client, but I have two sweet connections : the dev who I now know how to work with, and the firm for whom I am still someone who knows the system, and that can work either independently or with their current dev.
The fiddly part is that the question is what is the minimal number of flips required to sort the stack. Finding some number of flips that will sort the stack is fairly straightforward.
Privacy is more than a luxury, it is a way for societies of culturally distinct folks to get along. The previous presumptions that the system could work if there were some way to prevent abuses of power by an elite - maybe by some method of transparency and accountability towards how much time those in authority spend in the bathroom together - these presumptions are in turn neglecting a horrible and common other source of injustice, that of the majority will.
A dominant large group could easily force cultural, spiritual or philosophical conformity - even while maintaining nigh complete transparency itself.
"We know you went into the bedroom with Jim on Fasting Day!" "You have been taking tainted literature in the bathroom with you." (Not even pr0n, it might be a bible, or worse - a biology text.) "You are not wearing acceptable undergarments" (maybe only a few are O.K., or only a few are proscribed,... meh) "You have been talking with Jim - you know he is currently 'muted'. " "You have not spoken to an adviser in 6 months"
These forces are not muted by transparency. Such an environment has little or no defense against massive social pressure, whether by cults, fitness regimes, monster high-school cliques, fads, fashions or any other transgression of a cultural more held by the majority community.
I'm just addressing this one point - the myriad issues that others have raised are theirs to enjoy.
So, if you want to make a vast collection of statements without supporting them individually, or arranging them together into a coherent position, that's fine. It's your buckshot. Besides, for folks who agree with enough of your statements, you sound reasonable.
To folks who disagree, there are a mess of little things to poke at. In a verbal conversation, since there is no thesis, you can use the 'yer all nitpicking and not talking about what I meant.' defense. Luckily, this is not a verbal conversation - it is a moderated forum.
To folks who attempt to look at what your are saying and understand your point - just a few lame cliches will break their trust of you, so if you don't spell out your thesis clearly, they will not even have the option of understanding what you meant.
I feel that you are only intending to reach the people who agree or who disagree with you - but are making no attempts to actually support your case to those undecided.
Normally, this would either be an effective trolling technique, or something a politician might ramble.
Sure, if you want to be crazy certain that you are asking the exact right questions, then yes: faith is the only place to find such certainty. The rest of us science folks will just have to make do with testing and questioning our questions, our formalisms, our criteria for evaluating questions, our values,... just like everything else.:)
Not certain what you intend by 'dead organisms', but all what is needed is biomass, e.g. swampy areas. As plates shift, some are driven under others resulting in carbon deposits easily being buried as deeply as we see. At one point it was likely very close to, if not on the surface. Bogs can be very large, and very deep... consider, well, the wetlands that are currently threatened, for example.
I'm not partial to the theories that there is arbitrary oil and coal to be found, provided we dig deep enough. If you are centrally located on a plate, and have deep enough to hit the granite or basalt, respectively - it would be shocking to hit anything else while digging until it is too hot to support the structures in oil and coal. Please contradict me, there are some oddball cases in the middle of plates and I would love to hear about more of them, and about them.
Quite frankly, a non-biological origin for deep oil is the only one folks bother argue, if I remember correctly. I suspect this is because coal contains lots of fossils, thus it is pretty hard to argue samples are non-biological.
Meh, not my specialty, feel free to enlighten me, etc...
Off-topic-ish:
So if you like a decent hop, there are a few from Ontario you might like should the opportunity arise to taste them. In particular, when I was doing some school in Guelph (Sigh - poor Sleeman's, got bought by Molsen, transitively via Upper Canada Breweries..., both destroyed as tasty beer-companies these days) - but the Wellington County brewery, also near Guelph, is still an indy micro. They make a Wellington County Ale, which yer more moderate hop-loving friends might like - and fer you, there's the Wellington Best Bitter. Certain pubs will even serve it at the warmer, British temp, though I like it any way at all: very cold is fine by me.
Now, these are still classic recipes, so no extracts, but they're still tasty imho.
As far as stronger stuff, the Unibroue brewery out of Quebec makes a bunch of utterly awesome beers, available at 9% (and 12%, when you can find them). (La Fin de Monde, and Maudite come to mind.) They make decent stuff in the 5-7% range too - a nice Belgian-style, some fruity things and wheats fer the summer.
Anyway, hope you have a chance to try some of them, and mebbe even like them. Google is yer friend here, and um - I have no idea where you are (except in NA) and thus how irritating it might be to get a hold of samples of these things.
No!
It's never too late, in my not so bloody humble opinion.
If the kid liked playing with Lego, Mechano, (K-Nex these days?), making wooden stuff or even sand and snow - when younger, then there's a good chance that the spark is there. There are scads of other possible indicators that the talent might be there, too.
I think one needs a bit of logic - but not as much as people pretend - to be a decent coder. A lot more different talents to be a great geek, but there are stacks of different sorts of geek, so even which skills one is best at is just character.
What makes a person have potential as a geek - and I think there is just one thing:
You have to like to fuck with shit .
Games got me into coding - I liked to play them, and I wanted to make them. Turns out, I enjoyed coding as much as playing games. I discovered I loved debugging, optimizing, and just writing regular code.
Some kids these days are just getting into coding. Go check out the forums - it's bizarre, they chat like lolcats on meth, but some of them ask real questions and are seriously banging their heads on shit. Answer their questions. I see kids trying to make USB video game controllers using common microcontrollers (AVRs and PICs) to bit-bang the low speed interface - they want to know why their out-of-spec stuff works on the right USB port, but not the left on their laptops (yup - Apple).;] They need help with problems. Sometimes daft, and sometimes not. Sometimes you remember the class of bug that they are hitting and how long it took you to crack it the first time...
Maybe if we knew what sort of gamer the subject was we might make a claim as to what sort of coding they might enjoy. Ultimately, the way to find out if someone likes to code - is to try out coding with them.
Personally, I love pairing, so taking a newb for a ride can be a lot of fun - they can get to see a program develop a lot faster than if they had to crack every problem themselves, but if they are still typing in the whole deal, it will feel much more like you showed them how, but that they actually did it.
And - you know what? A friend of the family was a coder - he noticed that I liked video games and showed me how one can write them. First via typing things in from Compute! (and perhaps BYTE, is blurry memory)... then via coding in basic - ultimately someone gave me some books on C, and I got a compiler off of a friend in class ('this thing is five disks, and it's not even a game - yer nuts!')... thing came with a shell, micro-emacs (shudder), and a debugger. Debugger meant I could see what my code compiled into, and thus I fell into the hypnotizing pool that is assembly on the 68K...
So:
I call BS on there not being fresh kids getting into it. Look at robotics, the maker scene, Ubuntu, the modding and addon gaming scenes - find folks who have questions that you know how to answer - and bloody well help them.
dfj
PS: The era of 8-bit pixels was the 90s - for consumer-level hardware, if you recall. The 80s were all that irritating bit-planes, monochrome, four, 16 - even 12 colour modes. Don' even think of telling me to get off yer lawn.;]
Not to worry about 'infinite' or 'frictionless' - these characterizations are not the intent of the device so we can just evaluate it as a normal continuous transmission being controlled by the ratio of speeds between a control shaft and the drive shaft. Efficiency for low-torque cases can be quite decent as eccentric bearings, gear-qualities and diameters can be controlled well with current techniques.
So... with a real torque, there will definitely be significant forces between the two shafts. Clearly, the full torque will be on the central, driving shaft, while some smaller fraction will be on the upper shaft. As we bring the distance between them down, then the torque between them can decrease, but then there will be more stress on the smaller pinions' teeth. Planetary gears are great for this class of problem and he's throwing decent diameter eccentric bearings in where he can too. The bloke seems honest, and has clearly thrown a fair amount of time and energy into the problem.
There are other approaches to controlling gear ratio via the speed differences between two shafts - he's not trying to do something impossible, he's just trying to do something difficult, successfully. Whether the cost of the bearings and gearing will be favourable when compared to the other approaches is the question. I think his system will work - and decent sealed bearings, high strength pinions, planetary systems - these already exist and are stable tech in current transmissions, even in relatively dirty industrial environments where the transmissions aren't as protected as in cars. In particular, the cost of electronic control for motors has fallen massively over the last years, so if nothing else, the general class of solutions using differential speeds of low-torque motors to control a high-torque transmission is more appealing now.
So, 'genius', no. Hard-working, self-taught engineer? Yes.
I feared there was a critical period - there is so much reason to suspect so. So many folks I've met seem frozen, whether in life, in mindset, or in the development methods that they learned during their larval phase.
I still fear that there is a critical period for scepticism, but I'm at least reassured that folks can learn significantly new perspectives and, in particular, to even go larval again later in life and pick up major new skills, whether new programming approaches or the entire suite of new models and mindsets needed to deal with a new field entirely. I've seen folks jump successfully between different engineering fields, coding styles, industries, etc....
I haven't seen, personally, folks successfully make the jump between the engineering/technical mindset and the serious liberal arts' points of view. Perhaps there is a more qualitatively different wall there than merely a larger conceptual distance - I don't have a decent theory. The people I see who seem to be centred in-between major disciplines like art, science or engineering tend to appear strongest at that very point, in the interdisciplinary space, rather than having two masteries with an intersection where they choose to play. While some can be extremely proficient and have a broad expertise, they have always appeared to get weaker as they traveled from their personal centre. This is a small set for me, though, thus even more anecdotal than the rest of my ramble.
Sadly, as far as a minimal exposure notion goes this might be extremely hard to dispute by experience. I read an article in Byte 25 years ago on LISP or Prolog, or even did a few weeks of them in a survey course during uni; do these give one enough of a 'seed' such that if one is able to properly discover them later in life it was only because that opening was created so many years earlier? Who can say reliably that they have had no exposure to an idea within a field once entering it. Clearly folks who only got into tech in some year can reliably state they didn't encounter certain concepts before that point - but a single person rambling drunk at a party, something one had forgotten, if that is enough to be a your seed for a future successful exploration of that concept then I can't really claim any significant idea I ever came to understand well later in life hadn't been exposed to me years earlier.
Bah, just download that mod that clears that warning - then dig to yer brave little dwarf heart's content.
Any experienced miner can outrun magma. Selective pressure ensures it.
If only one of the drives is encrypted, then remove it and recover it to a non-encrypted drive. Clearly this is not what you are talking about.
With several drives, all encrypted, you should be good, bugs in the _implementation_ notwithstanding.
Whether the drives have the same keys or not doesn't matter - a drive has to be block encrypted since it's random access and thus 5 drives with the same key aren't much different than 1 drive 5 times as large.
Any info that can leak out of five drives striped could just as easily leak out of a single appropriately arranged file on one drive.
If AES is implemented properly that would mean no significant info in both cases.
Since the application is closed source, in 'hardware' (firmware/fpga? who knows) we'll just hope it's secure. For a corp, it means that they are less likely to be successfully sued for being security idiots, though - which is likely what would drive such purchases.
Fat lot of good that does for the rest of the world. It's not like the US refrains from archiving every bit they can afford to that passes through a US pipe, passes through a satellite who's footprint comes too close to the US - or just might have passed _outside_ the US at some point...
Your fourth doesn't apply to the other 5.8 billion people. As your gitmo makes pretty clear, we have _no_ rights.
Consider that in this year's list, they flagged the cow misadventure as possibly too common.
Now, I live in a city, so I find cow accidents to be hilarious, not the 'serious community problem' that some municipalities face. Of course, mishaps with autoerotic strangulation are common, and tragic - not funny at all!
Besides, at 51 and a pastor, there is no reason to assume that he has been celibate.
This is about our civil rights because these laws are only seem to be used to prosecute those who paint police helicopters. This is selective enforcement of the law.
An interesting question: did any of those helicopters even have their lights on? The article mentions several other similar cases - so similar that they were all police surveillance helicopters flying at night. Maybe everyone waving a laser around at night knew they were pointing at police helicopters - maybe none of them did.
Mostly they were green lasers - so the police officers involved could easily have seen them in the air even if their vehicles were not actually struck. I am a little uncertain how you show that a vehicle was actually struck by a laser without a picture. Officers often get kinda paranoid, and will get pretty pissed if they see someone shining a laser _near_ them. So pissed that they would press charges, I couldn't say. Most of the courts in question take an officer's word as 'extra special' reliable, so there doesn't need to be any further evidence for these cases to go forward. Sadly, there is almost no way to prove that a person who was shining a laser at night _didn't_ shine it on a helicopter.
Don't get me wrong - I agree that it is violently criminal to shine lasers into the eyes of pilots, police or otherwise. I just don't see how you can prosecute these cases fairly. I'm guessing that one of the problems with civilian pilots getting lasered is that they don't have 'extra special' witness powers, so any trials against laser boobs would need to show actual evidence.
TFA describes non-stop group activities, no privacy and sleep deprivation. Sounds like standard reprogramming to me. In addition, they were not spending time with the local folks trying to understand their lives and culture - instead they were doing a whirlwind tour of a bunch of seriously different places than the US. This kind of experience is more likely to build group-think and reinforce the idea that outsiders are totally alien than build any sort of real inter-culture understanding or empathy in the participants.
Parent was mod'd troll at the time of this posting, a little erroneous given that more than a few folks consider using indoctrination techniques to be abhorrent - evil, even. As described in the article the world-tour sounds like a standard 'retreat' that so many cults use to strengthen the training of their members.
Most high-indoctrination businesses have a very hard time retaining creative and engineering types without destroying their abilities to be creative and think critically, respectively. If google has found a way to do so, we have reason to be very afraid. It might be that they are only seriously indoctrinating the management, but trying to keep them technically literate so that they can be used to liase between the developers and the senior management. By hiring only very social young tech graduates they can at least ensure that their management layer will be able to speak the same language as their developers - something most companies have a serious problem with.
I kinda hope this is true, as I don't particularly like the idea that they can do much more than get their folks to work insane hours every day of the week. The net bubble of a few years ago certainly showed at least that much was possible to get out of developers without breaking them too immediately.
Re:Good luck with positional evaluation
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
This is very key: it is not at all clear how to evaluate a large portion of the positions algorithmically. TFA assumes that it is going to be viable in the near future to do this operation in constant time, and that both alpha-beta pruning and null-move pruning will deliver root-n improvements in the search. The chess heuristic was corny, but it worked. There isn't always a 'corny, but effective' heuristic that works. As our clever friend once claimed: 'for every problem there is a clean, neat solution - that is also wrong.'
In addition TFAuthor asserts that improvements will be found by taking advantage of the assumption that the 10-20 interesting situations on the board during the mid-game can be analyzed independently. This is pure bluster - a significant element of the game is ensuring that the interactions between those situations will be to your liking. One is often not able to rule out an area's contribution to it's neighbour's state until late in the game.
I also seriously doubt null-move will be anywhere near as helpful as root-n. This is arguing that it will be possible to recognize the best move on the board half the time - and that it is at least as much better than the next best by a factor of two (the opponent's moves, two of em), hence it need not consider subsequent alternatives. Threats are often created that are of this magnitude, but they are simply not that dense in the early to mid-game.
I guess I would argue that since most of the moves on the board in the early to mid-game are tricky calls, ie: a good player must choose between several similar-value moves, that human players are playing in a space of somewhere between (3-7) taken to a game length of around 200. So humans are actually playing in a quite large space - surprisingly close to the 2^(19x19) that you get as a rough estimate of the possible ending boards.
TFA in a sense is arguing that humans can't really be playing in such a huge space - and there must be large chains of forced moves in our game space.
On a semi-related note:
I am intrigued by the idea of taking a dataset of endgame images and attempting to find how much compression can found against it - any compression we find can be associated with an upper bound on the actual complexity of the game as played, considering how many compressed bits per board were necessary to create a self-extracting archive. This could be used to rebut my conviction that we are playing in a much larger space than 2^90 - I'm thinking closer to 2^300.
So yeah, even if the dude is totally whiz-bang with his alpha-beta and his null-move kung-fu, then he still needs to look at 2^90 ~ 10^27 boards if he wants to see towards end-game. If he only wants to get 15ply or whatever, then he 'just' needs to figure out how to evaluate mid-game positions with some sort of amusing heuristic and then cram it onto some FPGAs.
Good luck to him.
Hegg, a married father of two who said he formerly raced snowmobiles, said he has never been on the internet. He said his wife is an administrator at a local hospital and an "internet guru." How did they find him? Why did both the RIAA and the defense decide that they wanted jurors they found under under some wet rocks? Bizarre.
What do the Australians know that we don't? No comment.
Nothing - there is no 'secret' here at all.
This has nothing to do with penguins.
It is absolutely not their fault.
No, we've never heard of salps.
Penguins do not eat salps.
Salps are perfectly safe.
They aren't even representative of the average/. posters, and certainly not that of the average moderator given how low their posts get rated after just a short time.
Which of those groups of people the first posters represent most closely is kind of moot, given that one of the most significant aspects of/. is its relatively successful (compared to the alternatives) moderation.
After this article has settled for a day; it is pretty clear that the posts that got under your skin weren't considered particularly insightful by most moderators, and thus presumably didn't agree well with their feelings, views and reasonings.
While a collection of folks have replied to your post with possible explanations for why some folks feel the same way the first posters did, I really don't think I agree with the premise of your question - I don't think most/. folks hate all successful companies.
I suspect most/. folks (readers, posters and moderators all) actually play and enjoy WoW, but are occasionally extremely frustrated with the way particular aspects are managed by Blizzard. Perhaps it is similar to how most of us enjoy living in North America even though there are many aspects of the way it is managed (largely by the US government) that we are profoundly dissatisfied with.
Yup - and on platforms where it is viable to allocate simultaneously writable and executable pages large application vendors (ie: big-code apps) are going to want to get permission to do so even where it involves getting admins to change default system-wide settings.
Windows apps that want to write on code are so common that it is never going to be too hard to set up a legacy app to run with writable code - nevermind forcing the app to request the pages specially. On some platforms (OS-390?) it is never even going to be possible.
DEP is not a panacea - it helps, but it is surprising how many apps want to do more than generate code only before or after they run it.;} You can still exploit stack-based buffer-overuns on such platforms (yes, it is much, much harder)
Personally, I like stacks that grow towards high memory - overruns hit locals, but not the frame... on the downside overruns can instead be used to *read* the contents of the stack and sometimes send them back to a remote attacker - revealing where the app's code got loaded into memory. If you know the app's current address, suddenly the attack that TFA describes gets very useful as you can use relatively common wild object de-references to point back into executable-land, at whatever pre-existing parts of the system you can find that will do something useful for you - and who's exact addresses you now know even though the system tried to be clever by loading both code and data at somewhat random offsets.;}
Definitely an implementation choice for Pascal - but it (according to legend) was not a *rare* one - especially on x86 era implementations. 'Trampolines' I heard they called those stubs... didn't recheck this, so feel free to enlighten me.
BPVs... I had thought Pascal still used something similar, but double checking, it seems those were just a VMS-iness. Pascal's scoping certainly enabled some profound hells in my life... it is truly amazing what an incompetent developer can do with what was at first glance merely an 'interesting' language feature...
As for Java - in the context of wild jumps and security vulnerabilities, the crazy VM implementations floating around are _surely_ interesting.;}
Slashdot Mirror
I'd go much further than just giving the kid the code, docs and offering to answer questions. First off, the firm is not crazy at all to want multiple people, at least one in-house, who know the system; If and when you move on, even a junior dev with familiarity is better than a fresh contractor, the source, and the stack of docs quickly printed.
I'd take this as an opportunity to keep the system alive after I go off to other things - I'd do what the firm and new bloke are hoping, and try to explain: The design decisions, the calls which paid off, the decisions which might need to be revisited later, and the parts where we are stuck with the decision, as it is not likely going to be worth changing, but the irritation will still be there whenever the area needs a poke.
I'd try to spend a fair number of hours per day pairing with the bloke - having him type in the simple stuff, whether a bugfix, or some grindy code. Depending on the actual current work - different amounts of time will need to be set aside to design, mull, research, debug, etc... alone. Progressively more interesting changes can be handed off as familiarity grows.
The win would be the opportunity to spend a lot of time working closely with someone on a system I know and like. I love being able to pass on design decisions verbally when coding with someone, being able to express actual doubt about stuff which grew hair, to answer questions on fine grained issues that couldn't be in the external docs, and didn't fit into a place in the source and detailed design docs. To complain about daft requirements that came late and made a mess of things... all with the code in front of us.
Afterwards - I am free to move on without shafting the client, but I have two sweet connections : the dev who I now know how to work with, and the firm for whom I am still someone who knows the system, and that can work either independently or with their current dev.
Both were valuable for me in the past.
The fiddly part is that the question is what is the minimal number of flips required to sort the stack. Finding some number of flips that will sort the stack is fairly straightforward.
Privacy is more than a luxury, it is a way for societies of culturally distinct folks to get along. The previous presumptions that the system could work if there were some way to prevent abuses of power by an elite - maybe by some method of transparency and accountability towards how much time those in authority spend in the bathroom together - these presumptions are in turn neglecting a horrible and common other source of injustice, that of the majority will.
A dominant large group could easily force cultural, spiritual or philosophical conformity - even while maintaining nigh complete transparency itself.
"We know you went into the bedroom with Jim on Fasting Day!" ... meh)
"You have been taking tainted literature in the bathroom with you." (Not even pr0n, it might be a bible, or worse - a biology text.)
"You are not wearing acceptable undergarments" (maybe only a few are O.K., or only a few are proscribed,
"You have been talking with Jim - you know he is currently 'muted'. "
"You have not spoken to an adviser in 6 months"
These forces are not muted by transparency. Such an environment has little or no defense against massive social pressure, whether by cults, fitness regimes, monster high-school cliques, fads, fashions or any other transgression of a cultural more held by the majority community.
I'm just addressing this one point - the myriad issues that others have raised are theirs to enjoy.
So, if you want to make a vast collection of statements without supporting them individually, or arranging them together into a coherent position, that's fine. It's your buckshot. Besides, for folks who agree with enough of your statements, you sound reasonable.
To folks who disagree, there are a mess of little things to poke at. In a verbal conversation, since there is no thesis, you can use the 'yer all nitpicking and not talking about what I meant.' defense. Luckily, this is not a verbal conversation - it is a moderated forum.
To folks who attempt to look at what your are saying and understand your point - just a few lame cliches will break their trust of you, so if you don't spell out your thesis clearly, they will not even have the option of understanding what you meant.
I feel that you are only intending to reach the people who agree or who disagree with you - but are making no attempts to actually support your case to those undecided.
Normally, this would either be an effective trolling technique, or something a politician might ramble.
These are the reasons I think you are a tool.
OK, I'll bite:
Sure, if you want to be crazy certain that you are asking the exact right questions, then yes: faith is the only place to find such certainty. The rest of us science folks will just have to make do with testing and questioning our questions, our formalisms, our criteria for evaluating questions, our values, ... just like everything else. :)
Not certain what you intend by 'dead organisms', but all what is needed is biomass, e.g. swampy areas. As plates shift, some are driven under others resulting in carbon deposits easily being buried as deeply as we see. At one point it was likely very close to, if not on the surface. Bogs can be very large, and very deep... consider, well, the wetlands that are currently threatened, for example.
I'm not partial to the theories that there is arbitrary oil and coal to be found, provided we dig deep enough. If you are centrally located on a plate, and have deep enough to hit the granite or basalt, respectively - it would be shocking to hit anything else while digging until it is too hot to support the structures in oil and coal. Please contradict me, there are some oddball cases in the middle of plates and I would love to hear about more of them, and about them.
Quite frankly, a non-biological origin for deep oil is the only one folks bother argue, if I remember correctly. I suspect this is because coal contains lots of fossils, thus it is pretty hard to argue samples are non-biological.
Meh, not my specialty, feel free to enlighten me, etc...
Off-topic-ish:
So if you like a decent hop, there are a few from Ontario you might like should the opportunity arise to taste them. In particular, when I was doing some school in Guelph (Sigh - poor Sleeman's, got bought by Molsen, transitively via Upper Canada Breweries..., both destroyed as tasty beer-companies these days) - but the Wellington County brewery, also near Guelph, is still an indy micro. They make a Wellington County Ale, which yer more moderate hop-loving friends might like - and fer you, there's the Wellington Best Bitter. Certain pubs will even serve it at the warmer, British temp, though I like it any way at all: very cold is fine by me.
Now, these are still classic recipes, so no extracts, but they're still tasty imho.
As far as stronger stuff, the Unibroue brewery out of Quebec makes a bunch of utterly awesome beers, available at 9% (and 12%, when you can find them). (La Fin de Monde, and Maudite come to mind.) They make decent stuff in the 5-7% range too - a nice Belgian-style, some fruity things and wheats fer the summer.
Anyway, hope you have a chance to try some of them, and mebbe even like them. Google is yer friend here, and um - I have no idea where you are (except in NA) and thus how irritating it might be to get a hold of samples of these things.
dfj
No!
It's never too late, in my not so bloody humble opinion.
If the kid liked playing with Lego, Mechano, (K-Nex these days?), making wooden stuff or even sand and snow - when younger, then there's a good chance that the spark is there. There are scads of other possible indicators that the talent might be there, too.
I think one needs a bit of logic - but not as much as people pretend - to be a decent coder. A lot more different talents to be a great geek, but there are stacks of different sorts of geek, so even which skills one is best at is just character.
What makes a person have potential as a geek - and I think there is just one thing:
You have to like to fuck with shit .
Games got me into coding - I liked to play them, and I wanted to make them. Turns out, I enjoyed coding as much as playing games. I discovered I loved debugging, optimizing, and just writing regular code.
Some kids these days are just getting into coding. Go check out the forums - it's bizarre, they chat like lolcats on meth, but some of them ask real questions and are seriously banging their heads on shit. Answer their questions. I see kids trying to make USB video game controllers using common microcontrollers (AVRs and PICs) to bit-bang the low speed interface - they want to know why their out-of-spec stuff works on the right USB port, but not the left on their laptops (yup - Apple). ;] They need help with problems. Sometimes daft, and sometimes not. Sometimes you remember the class of bug that they are hitting and how long it took you to crack it the first time...
Maybe if we knew what sort of gamer the subject was we might make a claim as to what sort of coding they might enjoy. Ultimately, the way to find out if someone likes to code - is to try out coding with them.
Personally, I love pairing, so taking a newb for a ride can be a lot of fun - they can get to see a program develop a lot faster than if they had to crack every problem themselves, but if they are still typing in the whole deal, it will feel much more like you showed them how, but that they actually did it.
And - you know what? A friend of the family was a coder - he noticed that I liked video games and showed me how one can write them. First via typing things in from Compute! (and perhaps BYTE, is blurry memory)... then via coding in basic - ultimately someone gave me some books on C, and I got a compiler off of a friend in class ('this thing is five disks, and it's not even a game - yer nuts!')... thing came with a shell, micro-emacs (shudder), and a debugger. Debugger meant I could see what my code compiled into, and thus I fell into the hypnotizing pool that is assembly on the 68K...
So:
I call BS on there not being fresh kids getting into it. Look at robotics, the maker scene, Ubuntu, the modding and addon gaming scenes - find folks who have questions that you know how to answer - and bloody well help them.
dfj
PS: The era of 8-bit pixels was the 90s - for consumer-level hardware, if you recall. The 80s were all that irritating bit-planes, monochrome, four, 16 - even 12 colour modes. Don' even think of telling me to get off yer lawn. ;]
Not to worry about 'infinite' or 'frictionless' - these characterizations are not the intent of the device so we can just evaluate it as a normal continuous transmission being controlled by the ratio of speeds between a control shaft and the drive shaft. Efficiency for low-torque cases can be quite decent as eccentric bearings, gear-qualities and diameters can be controlled well with current techniques.
So... with a real torque, there will definitely be significant forces between the two shafts. Clearly, the full torque will be on the central, driving shaft, while some smaller fraction will be on the upper shaft. As we bring the distance between them down, then the torque between them can decrease, but then there will be more stress on the smaller pinions' teeth. Planetary gears are great for this class of problem and he's throwing decent diameter eccentric bearings in where he can too. The bloke seems honest, and has clearly thrown a fair amount of time and energy into the problem.
There are other approaches to controlling gear ratio via the speed differences between two shafts - he's not trying to do something impossible, he's just trying to do something difficult, successfully. Whether the cost of the bearings and gearing will be favourable when compared to the other approaches is the question. I think his system will work - and decent sealed bearings, high strength pinions, planetary systems - these already exist and are stable tech in current transmissions, even in relatively dirty industrial environments where the transmissions aren't as protected as in cars. In particular, the cost of electronic control for motors has fallen massively over the last years, so if nothing else, the general class of solutions using differential speeds of low-torque motors to control a high-torque transmission is more appealing now.
So, 'genius', no. Hard-working, self-taught engineer? Yes.
I feared there was a critical period - there is so much reason to suspect so. So many folks I've met seem frozen, whether in life, in mindset, or in the development methods that they learned during their larval phase.
I still fear that there is a critical period for scepticism, but I'm at least reassured that folks can learn significantly new perspectives and, in particular, to even go larval again later in life and pick up major new skills, whether new programming approaches or the entire suite of new models and mindsets needed to deal with a new field entirely. I've seen folks jump successfully between different engineering fields, coding styles, industries, etc. ...
I haven't seen, personally, folks successfully make the jump between the engineering/technical mindset and the serious liberal arts' points of view. Perhaps there is a more qualitatively different wall there than merely a larger conceptual distance - I don't have a decent theory. The people I see who seem to be centred in-between major disciplines like art, science or engineering tend to appear strongest at that very point, in the interdisciplinary space, rather than having two masteries with an intersection where they choose to play. While some can be extremely proficient and have a broad expertise, they have always appeared to get weaker as they traveled from their personal centre. This is a small set for me, though, thus even more anecdotal than the rest of my ramble.
Sadly, as far as a minimal exposure notion goes this might be extremely hard to dispute by experience. I read an article in Byte 25 years ago on LISP or Prolog, or even did a few weeks of them in a survey course during uni; do these give one enough of a 'seed' such that if one is able to properly discover them later in life it was only because that opening was created so many years earlier? Who can say reliably that they have had no exposure to an idea within a field once entering it. Clearly folks who only got into tech in some year can reliably state they didn't encounter certain concepts before that point - but a single person rambling drunk at a party, something one had forgotten, if that is enough to be a your seed for a future successful exploration of that concept then I can't really claim any significant idea I ever came to understand well later in life hadn't been exposed to me years earlier.
Even reading /. might ...
Bah.
Bah, just download that mod that clears that warning - then dig to yer brave little dwarf heart's content.
Any experienced miner can outrun magma. Selective pressure ensures it.
Yeah, see, that's what is apparently interesting about this magma - it *is* felsic, in Hawaii, the middle of the bloody Pacific.
If only one of the drives is encrypted, then remove it and recover it to a non-encrypted drive. Clearly this is not what you are talking about.
With several drives, all encrypted, you should be good, bugs in the _implementation_ notwithstanding.
Whether the drives have the same keys or not doesn't matter - a drive has to be block encrypted since it's random access and thus 5 drives with the same key aren't much different than 1 drive 5 times as large.
Any info that can leak out of five drives striped could just as easily leak out of a single appropriately arranged file on one drive.
If AES is implemented properly that would mean no significant info in both cases.
Since the application is closed source, in 'hardware' (firmware/fpga? who knows) we'll just hope it's secure. For a corp, it means that they are less likely to be successfully sued for being security idiots, though - which is likely what would drive such purchases.
Right, left - bah I miss the Byzantines. They were divided for centuries along blue/red lines - the colours of the two main chariot racing teams.
Fat lot of good that does for the rest of the world. It's not like the US refrains from archiving every bit they can afford to that passes through a US pipe, passes through a satellite who's footprint comes too close to the US - or just might have passed _outside_ the US at some point...
Your fourth doesn't apply to the other 5.8 billion people. As your gitmo makes pretty clear, we have _no_ rights.
Consider that in this year's list, they flagged the cow misadventure as possibly too common.
Now, I live in a city, so I find cow accidents to be hilarious, not the 'serious community problem' that some municipalities face. Of course, mishaps with autoerotic strangulation are common, and tragic - not funny at all!
Besides, at 51 and a pastor, there is no reason to assume that he has been celibate.
This is about our civil rights because these laws are only seem to be used to prosecute those who paint police helicopters. This is selective enforcement of the law.
An interesting question: did any of those helicopters even have their lights on? The article mentions several other similar cases - so similar that they were all police surveillance helicopters flying at night. Maybe everyone waving a laser around at night knew they were pointing at police helicopters - maybe none of them did.
Mostly they were green lasers - so the police officers involved could easily have seen them in the air even if their vehicles were not actually struck. I am a little uncertain how you show that a vehicle was actually struck by a laser without a picture. Officers often get kinda paranoid, and will get pretty pissed if they see someone shining a laser _near_ them. So pissed that they would press charges, I couldn't say. Most of the courts in question take an officer's word as 'extra special' reliable, so there doesn't need to be any further evidence for these cases to go forward. Sadly, there is almost no way to prove that a person who was shining a laser at night _didn't_ shine it on a helicopter.
Don't get me wrong - I agree that it is violently criminal to shine lasers into the eyes of pilots, police or otherwise. I just don't see how you can prosecute these cases fairly. I'm guessing that one of the problems with civilian pilots getting lasered is that they don't have 'extra special' witness powers, so any trials against laser boobs would need to show actual evidence.
Another amusing difference between Joe Public and Bob Corporate.
Parent was mod'd troll at the time of this posting, a little erroneous given that more than a few folks consider using indoctrination techniques to be abhorrent - evil, even. As described in the article the world-tour sounds like a standard 'retreat' that so many cults use to strengthen the training of their members.
Most high-indoctrination businesses have a very hard time retaining creative and engineering types without destroying their abilities to be creative and think critically, respectively. If google has found a way to do so, we have reason to be very afraid. It might be that they are only seriously indoctrinating the management, but trying to keep them technically literate so that they can be used to liase between the developers and the senior management. By hiring only very social young tech graduates they can at least ensure that their management layer will be able to speak the same language as their developers - something most companies have a serious problem with.
I kinda hope this is true, as I don't particularly like the idea that they can do much more than get their folks to work insane hours every day of the week. The net bubble of a few years ago certainly showed at least that much was possible to get out of developers without breaking them too immediately.
This is very key: it is not at all clear how to evaluate a large portion of the positions algorithmically. TFA assumes that it is going to be viable in the near future to do this operation in constant time, and that both alpha-beta pruning and null-move pruning will deliver root-n improvements in the search. The chess heuristic was corny, but it worked. There isn't always a 'corny, but effective' heuristic that works. As our clever friend once claimed: 'for every problem there is a clean, neat solution - that is also wrong.'
In addition TFAuthor asserts that improvements will be found by taking advantage of the assumption that the 10-20 interesting situations on the board during the mid-game can be analyzed independently. This is pure bluster - a significant element of the game is ensuring that the interactions between those situations will be to your liking. One is often not able to rule out an area's contribution to it's neighbour's state until late in the game.
I also seriously doubt null-move will be anywhere near as helpful as root-n. This is arguing that it will be possible to recognize the best move on the board half the time - and that it is at least as much better than the next best by a factor of two (the opponent's moves, two of em), hence it need not consider subsequent alternatives. Threats are often created that are of this magnitude, but they are simply not that dense in the early to mid-game.
I guess I would argue that since most of the moves on the board in the early to mid-game are tricky calls, ie: a good player must choose between several similar-value moves, that human players are playing in a space of somewhere between (3-7) taken to a game length of around 200. So humans are actually playing in a quite large space - surprisingly close to the 2^(19x19) that you get as a rough estimate of the possible ending boards.
TFA in a sense is arguing that humans can't really be playing in such a huge space - and there must be large chains of forced moves in our game space.
On a semi-related note:
I am intrigued by the idea of taking a dataset of endgame images and attempting to find how much compression can found against it - any compression we find can be associated with an upper bound on the actual complexity of the game as played, considering how many compressed bits per board were necessary to create a self-extracting archive. This could be used to rebut my conviction that we are playing in a much larger space than 2^90 - I'm thinking closer to 2^300.
So yeah, even if the dude is totally whiz-bang with his alpha-beta and his null-move kung-fu, then he still needs to look at 2^90 ~ 10^27 boards if he wants to see towards end-game. If he only wants to get 15ply or whatever, then he 'just' needs to figure out how to evaluate mid-game positions with some sort of amusing heuristic and then cram it onto some FPGAs.
Good luck to him.
Nothing - there is no 'secret' here at all.
This has nothing to do with penguins.
It is absolutely not their fault.
No, we've never heard of salps.
Penguins do not eat salps.
Salps are perfectly safe.
They aren't even representative of the average /. posters, and certainly not that of the average moderator given how low their posts get rated after just a short time. /. is its relatively successful (compared to the alternatives) moderation. /. folks hate all successful companies. /. folks (readers, posters and moderators all) actually play and enjoy WoW, but are occasionally extremely frustrated with the way particular aspects are managed by Blizzard. Perhaps it is similar to how most of us enjoy living in North America even though there are many aspects of the way it is managed (largely by the US government) that we are profoundly dissatisfied with.
Which of those groups of people the first posters represent most closely is kind of moot, given that one of the most significant aspects of
After this article has settled for a day; it is pretty clear that the posts that got under your skin weren't considered particularly insightful by most moderators, and thus presumably didn't agree well with their feelings, views and reasonings.
While a collection of folks have replied to your post with possible explanations for why some folks feel the same way the first posters did, I really don't think I agree with the premise of your question - I don't think most
I suspect most
Yup - and on platforms where it is viable to allocate simultaneously writable and executable pages large application vendors (ie: big-code apps) are going to want to get permission to do so even where it involves getting admins to change default system-wide settings.
;} You can still exploit stack-based buffer-overuns on such platforms (yes, it is much, much harder)
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Windows apps that want to write on code are so common that it is never going to be too hard to set up a legacy app to run with writable code - nevermind forcing the app to request the pages specially. On some platforms (OS-390?) it is never even going to be possible.
DEP is not a panacea - it helps, but it is surprising how many apps want to do more than generate code only before or after they run it.
Personally, I like stacks that grow towards high memory - overruns hit locals, but not the frame... on the downside overruns can instead be used to *read* the contents of the stack and sometimes send them back to a remote attacker - revealing where the app's code got loaded into memory. If you know the app's current address, suddenly the attack that TFA describes gets very useful as you can use relatively common wild object de-references to point back into executable-land, at whatever pre-existing parts of the system you can find that will do something useful for you - and who's exact addresses you now know even though the system tried to be clever by loading both code and data at somewhat random offsets.
Definitely an implementation choice for Pascal - but it (according to legend) was not a *rare* one - especially on x86 era implementations. 'Trampolines' I heard they called those stubs... didn't recheck this, so feel free to enlighten me.
... it is truly amazing what an incompetent developer can do with what was at first glance merely an 'interesting' language feature...
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BPVs... I had thought Pascal still used something similar, but double checking, it seems those were just a VMS-iness. Pascal's scoping certainly enabled some profound hells in my life
As for Java - in the context of wild jumps and security vulnerabilities, the crazy VM implementations floating around are _surely_ interesting.