Allocator2008

Each man has a right to his own property, including his intellectual property. Therefore it is wrong to "hack" if this means breaking into somebody's system without their permission, because it is a violation of the right to property. A copy of 'Atlas Shrugged' could drive this point home I think. But there are great jobs in computer security, in which people can get payed to "break into" systems to smell out the security flaws. This might be a positive way of channeling this individual's skill set.

Just because a study of college students showed that the wealthier ones were a bit more "stand-offish" does not mean that the way their parents generated wealth in the first place was by being rude. Yes, it makes sense if one has wealth one is going to be naturally protective of it, which can translate into being rude occasionally I suppose. But to generate wealth in the first place, I really think being rude would be counter-productive. So I would say: charm you way to the top, then, once there, if you want to be a drama queen that is your prerogative!

Who would pay the hosting costs in such a scenario? Costs have to be offset some way or other. Unless users want to do "donations" or something like that, as what wikipedia recently did.

While we are on the subject of philosophy, I find on something of a philosophical note, the interesting ways and manners in which truth can unveil itself. Of course "unveiling" has a distinct meaning in Heidegger, but I am using this more generally, just to mean how the "deep truths of life" come to us/emerge/unveil from unexpected sources. I am reminded, then, in this case of a 'Charmed' episode where Prue Halliwell (Shannen Doherty) is trying to save somebody from the Angel of Death. She ultimately is confronted by the Angel of Death who tells her that he is not good or evil, but simply inevitable. She has to let go of her hatred of Death and see him as simply part of the natural course of things. Thus death from the point of view of hairless apes like us or the point of view of galaxies or even the whole universe, is in fact neither good nor bad, it simply is. Fearing it does not make it not so. Thus, one way or another it must be accepted, it must be seen as an inevitable part of the "rerum naturum". I really think on this subject the only way to sort of deal with our own annihilation or the fear thereof is to say that as long as we are fearing it, we have not encountered it. To fear, we must be alive. Therefore we have not an object of fear to fear. What is it to fear without an object? Anxiety. Undirected fear is anxiety. It is the antithesis of rationality. As human beings we must seek to be rational. We must seek to free ourselves from irrational fear. It is not rational to fear that which by definition we can never experience. We cannot by definition "experience" annihilation. We cannot experience annihilation, anymore than we really "experience" falling asleep. One moment we are drifting off in bed. The next moment the alarm clock goes off. Death is the same thing, except without the alarm clock. Either way, there is no "experience", and therefore no object of fear. Death is not bad. Death is not good. Death is inevitable, as Prue Halliwell came to see. I take comfort in knowing though that as death is inevitable so is birth. And perhaps even out of the ashes of the current universe new big bangs could spring forth, as some theories hint at. And so life (and death) goes on, ad infinitum.

We are, as Gregory Corso wrote in one of his poems, 'Homer', "alive, as always, forever ignorant of that death you'll never know."

Fearing the inevitable which cannot be even experienced is just not rational. The only thing to do is enjoy our moment in the sun. We all die, but spending our time fearing this just means we are not ever really alive, and that is just sad. Myself, I will leave eternity to the multiverse, and enjoy my brief tenure as a gene-carrying robot for all it is worth! :-)

A colleague once pointed out to me that my preference for flat file systems over relational databases was likely why I tended to have trouble forming and maintaining relationships. This I could not dispute, but nor has the knowledge altered my preference for flat files.

U-Turn belongs there too.

Here is to whatever retards down voted this comment. If you do not happen to get a literary reference do not cause others to suffer from your ignorance. You parasites are not worthy to be on the same f*in planet as John Galt.

I have an idea. A public - private (government - investor) fund to buy toxic assets from banks was proposed as a way to get banks stable again. Why not have something like that but entirely private? No tax dollars involved. In a sense the investors buying into that would sort of be "taking one for the team". But it is like with high-risk jobs like fixing a telephone wire or something one can get hazard pay, incentives should be structured for those investors willing to take one for the team. Like FDIC insured "coupons" or something. So if I am an investor buying into the "toxic asset rescue fund" I can buy say a 1 million dollar "coupon", redeemable after some reasonable number of years at some reasonable but attractive interest rate (say 3%). And it is FDIC insured. So I am others like me buy a bunch of "coupons" in this toxic asset rescue fund. The money goes into the banks to help them stabilize. The assets bought are worthless and may not even be tangible, but the fund managers for this rescue fund can try and sell off or profit from the assets as best they can, but even so, they will probably be in the red still, but that doesn't matter so much. In 10 years when the coupons are redeemable, the banks will have money again, and the FDIC can insure the redeeming of the coupons. The fund can be managed basically by bank managers for the banks who are benefiting from it. All the government has to do is insure the coupons being bought to get enough investors to be confident enough to join the fund. But in 10 years hopefully the banks can pay back the coupons and the Feds won't have to pay any insurance out anyway. The toxic assets are the cancer eating the banks, which is eating the economy so it is imperative this be taken care of, in order to increase liquidity. The rescue fund proposed is a good idea. I'm saying why not make it all private. Keeps the burden off the tax payers, and still provides a way for banks to cover their asses.

I have an idea. A public - private (government - investor) fund to buy toxic assets from banks was proposed as a way to get banks stable again. Why not have something like that but entirely private? No tax dollars involved. In a sense the investors buying into that would sort of be "taking one for the team". But it is like with high-risk jobs like fixing a telephone wire or something one can get hazard pay, incentives should be structured for those investors willing to take one for the team. Like FDIC insured "coupons" or something. So if I am an investor buying into the "toxic asset rescue fund" I can buy say a 1 million dollar "coupon", redeemable after some reasonable number of years at some reasonable but attractive interest rate (say 3%). And it is FDIC insured. So I am others like me buy a bunch of "coupons" in this toxic asset rescue fund. The money goes into the banks to help them stabilize. The assets bought are worthless and may not even be tangible, but the fund managers for this rescue fund can try and sell off or profit from the assets as best they can, but even so, they will probably be in the red still, but that doesn't matter so much. In 10 years when the coupons are redeemable, the banks will have money again, and the FDIC can insure the redeeming of the coupons. The fund can be managed basically by bank managers for the banks who are benefiting from it. All the government has to do is insure the coupons being bought to get enough investors to be confident enough to join the fund. But in 10 years hopefully the banks can pay back the coupons and the Feds won't have to pay any insurance out anyway. The toxic assets are the cancer eating the banks, which is eating the economy so it is imperative this be taken care of, in order to increase liquidity. The rescue fund proposed is a good idea. I'm saying why not make it all private. Keeps the burden off the tax payers, and still provides a way for banks to cover their asses.

Christ, THANK YOU!!! Finally someone with the balls to say what needed to be said!! The object oriented emperor has no clothes. It creates problems and creates an industry to solve problems it created. Kind of like Christianity. It creates guilt so it can solve guilt by making people donate to the Church to relieve themselves of guilt the Church itself put on to them. Great scam, and so is OO. They will crucify you my friend, but you have spoken the TRUTH, and the history will adjudicate you accordingly!!

Princeps autum justice, ille in parce est.

A world without iPods is not a world in which I could permit myself live.

Funny that barristers cost just as much then as now! They had by far the highest wages in the careers listed in the article.

I venture to say careers and relationships have separate evolutionary roles. Relationships are for companionship, which increases survival potential (two can survive in a cave in the dead of winter better than one), which obviously increases potential for spreading one's own genes, or helping the genes of one's community to spread. The surviving genes will be more disposed to forming relationships. Careers (hunting/gathering) are obviously for survival, for obtaining basic necessities. Careers are the primary driver for survival. Relationships are more a tertiary, but still important, factor for survival. A career entails being a good hunter to bring meat, warm fur, and so forth, into my cave, for example. But having a relationship with somebody helps my emotional well-being, helps me get better sleep perhaps, which in turn makes me a better hunter. So I don't think in a relationship two people need the same careers or whatever. Careers and relationships simply play different, but mutually supportive roles for the benefit of the genes. Personally I tend to gravitate relationship-wise towards "artistic" type drag queens, who tend to not be too high-tech, but talented in other ways, like say karaoke. But that is fine, because it serves a different evolutionary purpose for the selfish gene than my own personal career interest in technology. In short, to be a good (read: successful) "gene-carrying robot", we need not have relationships that are in the same vein as our careers, rather, to serve the gene, we need only try to be happy, which increases our survival potential, which helps the gene. From an evolutionary point of view, the simple rule is to try to find someone that makes one happy. That is all the gene asks. Not a bad set of affairs, eh? :-)

First of all, Vice-President Gore invented the Web, not this doofus. (OK, just kidding there!)

Secondly though net neutrality is immoral by Objectivist standards because it regulates free enterprise and crushes healthy competition. If my DSL from ISP 1 doesn't give me the bandwidth that a DSL from ISP 2 could give me, I have the consumer choice to switch to ISP 2. Ayn Rand would roll over in her grave at this notion of net neutrality which is pretty much close to socialism, because it ruins consumer choice and competition. If ISP 1 and 2 are forced to provide the same bandwidth then my consumer choice goes out the window, and if I am a shareholder for ISP 1 or 2 then my opportunity as a shareholder to profit from different DSL packages gets reduced to. This hurts the consumer by destroying competition and thus choice, and this hurts the shareholder by hurting profit potential by undue regulation.

Think about it this way, as Sen. Stevens of Alaska mentioned, the internet is like a series of tubes, with finite carrying capacity. I don't want to have to wait until Monday to get a video emailed to me on Friday because the government has forced my ISP to adhere to some arbitrary standard of how my ISP can utilize the tubes of the internet. No, I want my video on Friday, the same day it was emailed. I want the choice, the freedom, to choose an Internet Service Provider who can pick the biggest tube out there to use to send me my video. I do not want my ISP to be forced by the government to send me my video via a smaller tube, where it has to wait in line behind a bunch of other videos in that same tube. (Note: I am using the loose terminology here for clarity, but I actually work in tech as a software qa engineer with a background in unit testing and gui automation, I am A+ and Network+ certified, so I do understand what I am talking about, just to be clear.) I want the consumer freedom to have an ISP that chooses the biggest tube out there to send me my video and I don't want the government telling my ISP what tube to use. Period. Net neutrality hurts me as the consumer, and it hurts the shareholder. An ISP should be allowed to operate however it likes to provide value and choice to the consumer and profit for its shareholders, and big brother should not get in the way. Ayn Rand would be ashamed of this conversation. I hope for the sake of Western civilization that net neutrality is rejected, or else we will all be singing the Internationale before long.

I realize this might not be a popular sentiment, and I also realize my "karma" may be affected by it, but Ms. Rand would not let fear of karma reductions keep her from speaking out on behalf of truth, justice, and the American Way, and neither should I. :-)

I don't understand the causation/design argument. Anything complicated enough to create the universe must be just as, if not more, complicated as the universe It creates. If God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster created our universe, then such Entity must be at least as complex as our universe, begging the infinite regress of who created said Entity and why is said Entity so complex? Causation itself is a red herring. The universe is, period, properly viewed in imaginary time, not real time. In imaginary time, it is neither created (caused) or destroyed. It just is. And if you don't understand that, I suggest you re-read 'A brief history of time'. Thus if the universe has no cause then structures within like ourselves should need no Designer, otherwise, who designed the Designer? Design in an un-caused universe ends up being an illusion given to us by natural selection. Within (real) time, natural selection works, creating things like human apes and elephants. Within imaginary time, nothing is created nor destroyed. Natural selection explains design. Imaginary time shows there is no beginning, no need for a cause. Clinging to the god delusion is going to require more than first cause and design arguments boys and girls. There is one sense in which God or The Flying Spaghetti Monster do exist, and that is, they exist as memes. They are viruses which hijack the human mind and in some cases cause the human it hijacks to hijack, say, airplanes. There is a great poster out there with the words, "Imagine no religion" superimposed over a picture of the twin towers. Without God, the meme of God, that is, those towers would still stand. I think its time this species grow up and get rid of the god delusion or else we bloody well deserve to go extinct.

There is always going to be a disconnect between the Catholic Church and science, simply because science is interested in the real world, the Church is interested in dualism, i.e., subjugating the physical (i.e. real) world to an imaginary spiritual/Platonic world. Maybe scientists and church people can get along on a personal level and that is great, I know a few myself, but there is always going to be a disagreement of approach. In science there is a desire to understand the actual material world, and make use of it, and not denigrate it or subjugate it to some kind of Platonic world. Why do you think the Catholics hate sex so much, to a point that they would rather have AIDS spread than for people to use protection? It is simply that that sex is an act purely of and for the material world, indeed, it is almost a celebration of the material world, and they hate sex because they hate the material world. I know a lot about Catholicism, in fact I am sorry to say I flirted with it myself when I was younger and still clinging to the fading meme of the god delusion in my mind. Again, I am not saying we can't have a beer with these people, they can be nice and good people and all that. I am saying there is a fundamental difference of approach, one approach that values the actual, real world, and the other that seeks to subjugate, and finally destroy it, just like their gnostic cult ancestors wanted. The material world is good or it is evil. Science says it is good, the Catholics say it is evil. Between these polarities there is little compromise. Simple as that.

Really it's like that bridge in 'Apocalypse Now'. The sergeant is telling Martin Sheen how the bridge is always bombed and they have to come in and re-build it, "just so the generals can say the bridge is open." Well, I have done a lot of unit testing (CPPUnit), and it is like that. We do unit testing so management can say the product has been unit tested. Coals to Newcastle, to be sure, but hey, it's a job!

You know, "The Road Ahead" I think I would rank up there with "The Selfish Gene" as being among the most influential books in my life. So I have huge respect for Mr. Gates. But I wonder if he might be going a little too far with this foundation thing. Releasing live mosquitos into an audience? Sort of up there with another talented person I could mention jumping on Oprah's couch. Sad, really.

I suppose if there is no market it does not matter how great the product is. Take the laser disc. It was pretty cool, but it just never really penetrated the market. So maybe one does not have to "begin marketing" before developing, but one at least needs to research the market enough to make sure there is a market for the product being developed.

I don't get what is wrong with that, other than in the try - catch block in the init() method the Exception e is stubbed, i.,e., a stack trace or whatever is not printed. I know that is bad. Is that the main problem? Other than that, it looked like perfectly valid code to me, though admittedly I know C better than I know Java. Don't get me wrong - I believe you that there are valid concerns, it's just that personally I don't see them, other than the issue with the try - catch block.

A point on terminology: unit testing is an upstream, in-development process, done usually either by development or CM. For example, a java build tool like maven can include running unit tests during the build process. Automated testing is usually a downstream process done by QA. Currently I do SilkTest automation, using the 4-Test language of Borland SilkTest. That is under the "umbrella" of QA. In the past though I have done unit testing (CPPUnit mostly, the C++ port of JUnit), which would have been under the "umbrella" of development. In my experience, it seems like people adopt automation (i.e. GUI automation) from the QA end of it, before they adopt unit testing from the development end of it, unless a test driven development mentality is there from the get-go. If a company starts without this, they are more likely to adopt automation in the QA end of things, and then maybe later adopt unit testing in development. Seems like a company needs to do unit testing from the very start, or otherwise it is very slow to adopt it. I think unit testing is a great idea, but really it is hard to put into place from a management point of view, unless it is there to begin with.

Awesome idea. I like the flat file based indexing management they mentioned. Gosh almost wish they had a link whereby one could send them one's C.V.! Keep up the good work.

If somebody works minimum wage, they can't save up enough by then. It is just basic math. Sure, some people can get rich off of stock options and so on, but that is not a universal principle. So yes, some people can retire by age 40 but it is an exception, not the rule. Really, to save social security we recently increased the retirement age from 65 to 67 and it will like increase again within the Gen X/Y working life time. I am 28 and do not expect 67 to still be the retirement age all those years down the road.

Seems the research fell into two camps:

1) Women desire emotional intimacy 2) Women desire to be desired on more of an instinctual level

Seems that these two forces, seemingly contradictory are just the ego vs. id. The ego desires intimacy, an emotional connection etc., and that leads to sexual desire. However the id, on the more narcissist side, wants to be wanted or "sought after" on more of a primal note. I don't think this is a contradiction at all. The id controls desire throughout much of our evolution, however, because long-term partnering has selective advantages by being better for the survival of the offspring, the ego side develops also which wants more of that emotional connection. This is not really that hard. The woman's ego wants emotional connection, the woman's id wants a primal connection of being desired. In short, the woman wants Richard Gere. :-) (Speaking as a gay man anyway so maybe I'm projecting my own psychology into it, lol!)

The fix for this is easy. In types.h change

typedef long time_t;

to

typedef long long time_t;

Thereby doubling the amount of space for time_t. Future applications written in c should have this fix or something like it.

Actually this could be a take off from "Nightmare Factory", a haunted house here in Austin that was around for a few years (Not here anymore - House of Torment and the Horror Haunted House are the two big ones now.) When I saw the name, "Capital Factory", I immediately thought of "Nightmare Factory" anyway, but maybe that's just me! :-)

Everyone in this forum is stupider for having read this. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

No. I have lots of audio books on my iPhone. Currently listening to "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. The ability to download audio books to the iPhone is one of the best things about it.

I'd have to recommend c++. I own an iPhone myself, so they are definitely fun, but c++ is more ubiquitous. Personally I know C far better than c++ (which is a superset of C). The main difference is c++ has classes and more "object oriented" concepts. For the long-haul c++ I think will have more staying power than the iPhone - who knows, maybe the iPhone will be not as popular in a few years, but c++ will still be here.

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I saw it during a company outing to the cinema when it first came out. Lots of fun. Not a hacker movie per ce, but very cool animation, set in the future,etc. Also my first introduction to "gaia theory" which was interesting though actually I am on the reductionist, "selfish gene" side of that debate myself.