26 Oct 2005
Remote-controlled humans? Bloggers say, yikes!

This goes into the 'Politics' category for what should be an obvious reason: what happens when we develop the technology to electrically simulate psychoactive drugs? Will the devices and schematics be banned, treated like schedule 1 controlled substances? How will that interface with niggling details like the First Amendment, which allows publication of such things as atom bomb plans? This is going to get interesting, perhaps faster than any of us can anticipate.

Bloggers are perhaps rightfully freaked out by an Associated Press story that introduces the concept of remote-controlled humans.

(link) [CNET News.com]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Does Visual Studio Rot the Brain?

In a word: yes. Which is why I prefer Borland tools. C++ Builder and Delphi give you the option of going for true RAD, but both have facilities that make it easy to get down and dirty with the code, including inlining assembly.

The last decent UI for dev tools that M$ released was the [in]famous "Quick" series: QuickBASIC, QuickC and QuickPascal. The compilers in that series weren't bad, either, although Borland's tools of the time (Turbo C and Turbo Pascal) still managed to build tighter executables. I truly despised the Borland editing environment with those compilers, though, and would often code and test using the M$ tools, and then manually make the production version with the Borland compilers.

As a UNIX guy dragged kicking and screaming into the Windows world, I've never really been able to enjoy Windows programming. Charles Petzold, who is a long-time developer for DOS & Windows really laid out the reasons for me at the NYC .NET Dev group. Visual Studio and Microsoft tools force you to adopt programming techniques designed around implementation speed, not understanding or quality.

(link) [Slashdot]

00:00 /Technology | 2 comments | permanent link

Take this 8th grade math quiz

OK, I took it:

You Passed 8th Grade Math
Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

And the one I missed is still a puzzler. The quiz doesn't give you the right answers, or tell you which one you missed, so I went back and retook it until I found it. If you take it, the one I missed was the sequence 2,2,3,4,5 question .. I'd be interested to know how the correct answer was obtained (a coin flip doesn't count, nor does "well, it had to be, because the others were obviously incorrect...").

It's such a common nightmare that it's become a cliche: Taking an exam that you forgot to study for. Now you can experience it...

(link) [CNET News.com]

00:00 /Home | 2 comments | permanent link