I had to give up this kind of concentration when it sent me into violent fits and an extended, 10-year bout of depression. I had to teach myself to work differently, more like the "norm", in order to stay sane.
That being said, my coding/hacking skills have decreased greatly since I've changed my thinking habits. All the knowledge is still there, but I can only use it in bouts of about 2-3 hours a day. Sometimes I miss that deep concentration, but I haven't yet learned to integrate it with mental health. My efficiency has gone to about 1/10 of what it was before.
Strangely enough, if I can work with another programmer of average skill, I can still bring about the benefits of this concentration by directing the coding. I've found a work situation in which others around me aren't afraid of this unusual technique. Programming in this style can last for multiple tens of hours.
Reminds me of the recent suggestion (Extreme Programming) that programmers pair up to work. Perhaps someday I will be able to find a happy medium, but for now this unusual arrangement allows preservation of efficiency and sanity.
Uhh, last time I checked, the government has guns enough and legal loopholes enough to do whatever it wants without justification. The law might say "no" to something, but the forty-two layers of agencies and regulations that are used to enforce these laws leave enough room for _anything_ to happen.
Many have been on the receiving end of these technically illegal actions by the government, and without millions of dollars up-front to pay a good lawyer, or a good media angle that can be exploited by groups such as the ACLU, they just can't be defended against effectively.
It isn't just linking that they manage to make illegal by their mind tricks. Whether or not they have legal ground to stand on is _almost_ beside the point, compared to the arguments they bring forth by implication.
What's the difference between a URL encoded as an anchor tag and a URL referenced by text? A URL serves to point to information, and could somehow point to the code they don't want us to see. So URLs are evil. Anathema. Ban them. They lead only to harm.
What's the difference between a URL and a short paragraph describing the location of data, without using the syntax of a URL anywhere therein? I might somehow be able to direct someone to the offending code with such a paragraph. So writing is evil. Anathema. Ban it. It leads only to harm.
Yet again, might it be possible that I strike up a conversation with someone on the street and mention the location of a sheet of paper that has a map describing the location of a stash of floppy disks containing the code? Speech, floppy disks, pencil and paper, all of these have been twisted to the purposes of the evil h4x0rz, and must be eliminated. Burn people. Burn all types of natural and human-fabricated materials. Destroy them.
Reference is evil, communication is evil, the community of computer-literate persons must be thrown to the void never to be seen again. Anathema.
If it's the USPS or UPS, why have so many people ended up with particular items not shipped, while others come through faster?
I had 5-6 business-related items shipped to me just fine within this time period, items purchased and shipped on Tuesday/Wednesday got here fine by THursday.
I also know several parties who ordered CDs/books more than a week ago, only to call back and find that they weren't actually in stock/shipped even though they were claimed to be.
I'd much rather be told the truth about shipping; while finding out that I have to wait 3 weeks might make me temporarily angry with a vendor, and cause me to go elsewhere, it doesn't stand to change my long-term attitude as much as an outright lie.
Seems to me an algorithmic description of the tax code from the source, in some kind of flowchart or well-defined, precise language, would be preferable to the tax code. It would force some real thought about what the code really means, to treat it as a function/system of functions with a specific set of inputs. This would make it more open to real mathematical analysis.
Of course, the exceptions/loopholes are all there for a purpose, and I suppose the ambiguous parts are as well, since it's not the legislature's goal to make this easy to understand and apply.
An algorithmic tax code could easily be downloaded and applied to personal data year by year, without a redevelopment of formulae.
The purpose won't fall within the realm of most users, but it would be to run Linux along with other legacy apps on the same machine. Lest anyone think this is an entirely stupid idea, the place I used to work had an S/390 mainframe running legacy apps that are unlikely to be changed anytime soon, and we wanted to make use of some of the OMVS features on the machine. OMVS is supposed to be a UNIX-compatible OS running on the S/390. The machine was perfectly capable, if incredibly overpowered and overpriced for the simple purpose of getting at the unused disk storage we had for it via UNIX-type software. But OMVS was a real pain. The reason? It just wasn't convenient to compile for. We could download software all day, but if we wanted to run something of our own design or just compile the latest version of some kind of freeware for it we were out of luck without an army of IBM technicians to help us out. I personally wasn't a real supporter of keeping the mainframe around, but Linux as a VM partition would have at least been infinitely preferable to the proprietary system they were using, in openness and plain convenience. There are lots of possibilities for a system like this running on the existing mainframes out there. It allows integration of UNIX software into a mainframe shop's army of old-school applications, and increased use of underutilized hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
That being said, my coding/hacking skills have decreased greatly since I've changed my thinking habits. All the knowledge is still there, but I can only use it in bouts of about 2-3 hours a day. Sometimes I miss that deep concentration, but I haven't yet learned to integrate it with mental health. My efficiency has gone to about 1/10 of what it was before.
Strangely enough, if I can work with another programmer of average skill, I can still bring about the benefits of this concentration by directing the coding. I've found a work situation in which others around me aren't afraid of this unusual technique. Programming in this style can last for multiple tens of hours.
Reminds me of the recent suggestion (Extreme Programming) that programmers pair up to work. Perhaps someday I will be able to find a happy medium, but for now this unusual arrangement allows preservation of efficiency and sanity.
"Generalizing is never good . . . " is a generalization.
Many have been on the receiving end of these technically illegal actions by the government, and without millions of dollars up-front to pay a good lawyer, or a good media angle that can be exploited by groups such as the ACLU, they just can't be defended against effectively.
What's the difference between a URL encoded as an anchor tag and a URL referenced by text? A URL serves to point to information, and could somehow point to the code they don't want us to see. So URLs are evil. Anathema. Ban them. They lead only to harm.
What's the difference between a URL and a short paragraph describing the location of data, without using the syntax of a URL anywhere therein? I might somehow be able to direct someone to the offending code with such a paragraph. So writing is evil. Anathema. Ban it. It leads only to harm.
Yet again, might it be possible that I strike up a conversation with someone on the street and mention the location of a sheet of paper that has a map describing the location of a stash of floppy disks containing the code? Speech, floppy disks, pencil and paper, all of these have been twisted to the purposes of the evil h4x0rz, and must be eliminated. Burn people. Burn all types of natural and human-fabricated materials. Destroy them.
Reference is evil, communication is evil, the community of computer-literate persons must be thrown to the void never to be seen again. Anathema.
1. Complete memory protection+realtime capabilities
2. No "protection", but some kind of enforced partition between application and data memory to minimize possibility of corruption
Guess I'm just a bit afraid of a stray pointer sending expensive hardware out of orbit.
I had 5-6 business-related items shipped to me just fine within this time period, items purchased and shipped on Tuesday/Wednesday got here fine by THursday.
I also know several parties who ordered CDs/books more than a week ago, only to call back and find that they weren't actually in stock/shipped even though they were claimed to be.
I'd much rather be told the truth about shipping; while finding out that I have to wait 3 weeks might make me temporarily angry with a vendor, and cause me to go elsewhere, it doesn't stand to change my long-term attitude as much as an outright lie.
Seems to me an algorithmic description of the tax code from the source, in some kind of flowchart or well-defined, precise language, would be preferable to the tax code. It would force some real thought about what the code really means, to treat it as a function/system of functions with a specific set of inputs. This would make it more open to real mathematical analysis.
Of course, the exceptions/loopholes are all there for a purpose, and I suppose the ambiguous parts are as well, since it's not the legislature's goal to make this easy to understand and apply.
An algorithmic tax code could easily be downloaded and applied to personal data year by year, without a redevelopment of formulae.
The purpose won't fall within the realm of most users, but it would be to run Linux along with other legacy apps on the same machine. Lest anyone think this is an entirely stupid idea, the place I used to work had an S/390 mainframe running legacy apps that are unlikely to be changed anytime soon, and we wanted to make use of some of the OMVS features on the machine. OMVS is supposed to be a UNIX-compatible OS running on the S/390. The machine was perfectly capable, if incredibly overpowered and overpriced for the simple purpose of getting at the unused disk storage we had for it via UNIX-type software. But OMVS was a real pain. The reason? It just wasn't convenient to compile for. We could download software all day, but if we wanted to run something of our own design or just compile the latest version of some kind of freeware for it we were out of luck without an army of IBM technicians to help us out. I personally wasn't a real supporter of keeping the mainframe around, but Linux as a VM partition would have at least been infinitely preferable to the proprietary system they were using, in openness and plain convenience. There are lots of possibilities for a system like this running on the existing mainframes out there. It allows integration of UNIX software into a mainframe shop's army of old-school applications, and increased use of underutilized hardware.