- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
I do my best to delete all ad-hominem comments, whether directed at other members or yours-truly. That makes for a more enjoyable experience for everyone.
If you're really beyond humor and other tounge-in-cheek sarcasm, please use the contact form to flame me directly instead.
Admin
Please don't restrict us from accessing the forum by using ip address blockers. That is like impeding freedom of speech.
Admin
Haven't you heard? There's no freedom of speech on the internet.
-Bryan
Admin
Freedom is never absolute (and the social contract idea is founded upon a demonstrably false assumption, so arguments springing from it are doomed from the outset); it is subject to reasonable limitations in every society, including the online version of our world. There is no fundamental right to insult anyone, and there is certainly no fundamental right to assert your absolute freedom "in" someone else's "house".
Admin
And this is coming from a Socialist Canadian...
Admin
What does Socialism have to do with anything I said (and why assume I'm a Socialist)? Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau started with the assumption that the natural state of man is solitary, and that is demonstrably false. Society is the natural state of man, and in every society individual freedom is curtailed, either by a government or (in an anarchy) by the mob. Try excercising your absolute freedom in the city streets and see how far it gets you.
Admin
Canada is a socialist country. Look at its healthcare system. Just look at it!
Admin
How on earth is that "demonstrably false"?
People are not inherently social. I know too many people (programmers especially) who live in complete solitude and are completely and utterly anti-social.
Explain that.
Admin
Universal access to a publicly-funded service is the hallmark of socialism? Then the United States of America is also socialist (roads, schools, libraries, etc.). Every society has communal interests it considers important enough to fund collectively. We happen to think that health is sufficiently important to fund -- I'd rather people be cured of what ails them than to have them wandering the streets spreading TB, typhoid, and so forth. That's not socialism, bucko -- it's self-preservation, as is the instinct to gape in disbelief at the huge corporate interests who tell us that doing an end-run around their bottom line is somehow going to reduce our freedom.
Admin
Too easy -- humans, even programmers, evolve primarily by virtue of memetics (the transmission of ideas), with genetics taking a poor second place. The transmission of ideas cannot occur without society -- even if all of the information that ever existed was made universally available, the means to record and understand the information (language) also requires society, no matter how limited, to transmit.
There is also the little problem of long development to adulthood, requiring societal care and protection, and our relative helplessness in the face of predation (assuming, of course, that the memes for self-preservational tool use were never socially transmitted). If every human had to invent for himself/herself even a small fraction of the tools and behaviours we use every day that come to us as a result of social interaction, this species would have been eaten a long, long time ago by others with far superior physical attributes.
This is, of course, a severely foreshortened version of the argument.
Admin
Try http://apronyms.com/computers (if you don't mind them being meaningful)
Admin
Now, come on. This ad doesn't really deserve a WTF story.
On the whole, the expectations for this website are quite reasonable :
Even a (motivated) beginner could put such a website together. After all, since there will never be much traffic on the site nor many entries in the catalog, there's no need for powerful performance hacks. Plus it wasn't requested in the first place. No need to overdo things. Of course, even an experimented coder would need a few days to deliver a polished website implementing all those functions. And by "a few" I mean "many". And by "many" I mean "probably a bit more than that actually". Seeing as the budget for the whole website only covers the fee for a half day of work (I assume the hardware/hosting costs are excluded from this proposal), the demandor might have to lower his expectations.
So, this is yet another story about a poor soul completely unaware of the actual cost of IT. But there are far more demands out there that are way more craaaaazy. Like : "another WOW, but bigger, and better, and so awesome that you'll be willing to work for free !". Those really scream "WTF". This one is just cute. And a little sad.
Admin
Dang. I'm a bit late on this one, but nobody mentioned, in all seriousness, that there are almost certainly antenna factories out there with robots that were programmed in c? Cause I'm sure there are. So, how to make an antenna in c? Start by purchasing a robot...
Admin
You could build an antenna in C++ easily. The hard part would be building a universe in C++ to use it in.
Admin
The Antenna in C++ question reminds me of something asked about fifteen years ago on one of the computational chemistry mailing lists.
A person had posted a question asking about simulating the function of organs using a computational model. There were a few "joke" responses (I remember one FORTRAN program that basically read a list of input molecules on standard in and wrote "H2O + CO2" on standard out). But one person gave a detailed, well-thought-out answer suggesting some possible approaches, saying that you might, for certain specific reactions, be able to make some predictions based on empirical data (essentially, an ADME approach), but that any kind of real chemical modeling on that scale was essentially impossible.
The original poster, not sensing when to leave well enough alone, replied back with "What if I started with something small, like a virus? Would quantum mechanics be a bad idea?"
Cray Research used to show off their software and hardware with a 120-atom QM simulation they'd done over a period of several months of CPU time on, well, a Cray... and QM calculations mostly scale as the third or fourth power of the number of atoms.
The very smallest viruses weigh in at maybe 10,000 atoms.