Micropost

As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the world, the programming profession emerged, a slowness which is now hard to believe. But I am grateful for two vivid recollections from that period that establish that slowness beyond any doubt. After having programmed for some three years, I had a discussion with A. van Wijngaarden, who was then my boss at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam, a discussion for which I shall remain grateful to him as long as I live. The point was that I was supposed to study theoretical physics at the University of Leiden simultaneously, and as I found the two activities harder and harder to combine, I had to make up my mind, either to stop programming and become a real, respectable theoretical physicist, or to carry my study of physics to a formal completion only, with a minimum of effort, and to become….., yes what? A programmer? But was that a respectable profession? For after all, what was programming? Where was the sound body of knowledge that could support it as an intellectually respectable discipline? I remember quite vividly how I envied my hardware colleagues, who, when asked about their professional competence, could at least point out that they knew everything about vacuum tubes, amplifiers and the rest, whereas I felt that, when faced with that question, I would stand empty-handed. Full of misgivings I knocked on van Wijngaarden’s office door, asking him whether I could ”speak to him for a moment”; when I left his office a number of hours later, I was another person. For after having listened to my problems patiently, he agreed that up till that moment there was not much of a programming discipline, but then he went on to explain quietly that automatic computers were here to stay, that we were just at the beginning and could not I be one of the persons called to make programming a respectable discipline in the years to come? This was a turning point in my life and I completed my study of physics formally as quickly as I could. One moral of the above story is, of course, that we must be very careful when we give advice to younger people; sometimes they follow it! ...

System AdministratorAppreciation Dayhis website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage. » sysadminday.com

I regularly receive e-mail from people who want advice on how to learn more about computer security, either as a course of study in college or as an IT person considering it as a career choice. First, know that there are many subspecialties in computer security. You can be an expert in keeping systems from being hacked, or in creating unhackable software. You can be an expert in finding security problems in software, or in networks. You can be an expert in viruses, or policies, or cryptography. There are many, many opportunities for many different skill sets. You don’t have to be a coder to be a security expert. In general, though, I have three pieces of advice to anyone who wants to learn computer security. ...

Muchos de nosotros somos auténticos gamers en Android, y como buenos jugones, nos encantan los juegos de vieja escuela. Sí, ya sabéis, los clásicos: Mario Kart, Super Mario 64, cualquier juego de la Nes/Snes, etc¦ Y digo yo, con estos auténticas bestias de Android que tenemos, ¿no deberíamos poder jugar a todos ellos? Pues efectivamente, se puede. El único problema es que por razón X, a Google no le gusta mucho que hayan emuladores en el Play Store y por ello se encuentran tan pocos. Pero tranquilos que hoy os traemos una recopilación de todos los emuladores actuales a los que se puede jugar en Android ...

Ok, perhaps I jest. As a Python instructor, understanding decorators is a topic I find students consistently struggle with upon first exposure. That’s because decorators are hard to understand! Getting decorators requires understanding several functional programming concepts as well as feeling comfortable with some unique features of Python’s function definition and function calling syntax. _Using_ decorators is easy (see Section 10)! But writing them can be complicated. I can’t make decorators easy - but maybe by walking through each piece of the puzzle one step at a time I can help you feel more confident in understanding decorators[1]. Because decorators are complex this is going to be a long article - but stick with it! I promise to make each piece as simple as possible - and if you understand each piece, you’ll understand how decorators work! I’m trying to assume minimal Python knowledge but this will probably be most helpful to people who have at least a casual working exposure to Python. ...

Nick is building a universe on his computer. He’s already mapped out his first planet: an anvil-shaped world called Denthaim that is home to gnomes and gods, along with a three-gendered race known as kiman. As he tells me about his universe, Nick looks up at the ceiling, humming fragments of a melody over and over. ”I’m thinking of making magic a form of quantum physics, but I haven’t decided yet, actually,” he explains. The music of his speech is pitched high, alternately poetic and pedantic - as if the soul of an Oxford don has been awkwardly reincarnated in the body of a chubby, rosy-cheeked boy from Silicon Valley. Nick is 11 years old. Nick’s father is a software engineer, and his mother is a computer programmer. They’ve known that Nick was an unusual child for a long time. He’s infatuated with fantasy novels, but he has a hard time reading people. Clearly bright and imaginative, he has no friends his own age. His inability to pick up on hidden agendas makes him easy prey to certain cruelties, as when some kids paid him a few dollars to wear a ridiculous outfit to school. One therapist suggested that Nick was suffering from an anxiety disorder. Another said he had a speech impediment. Then his mother read a book called Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals. In it, psychologist Tony Attwood describes children who lack basic social and motor skills, seem unable to decode body language and sense the feelings of others, avoid eye contact, and frequently launch into monologues about narrowly defined - and often highly technical - interests. Even when very young, these children become obsessed with order, arranging their toys in a regimented fashion on the floor and flying into tantrums when their routines are disturbed. As teenagers, they’re prone to getting into trouble with teachers and other figures of authority, partly because the subtle cues that define societal hierarchies are invisible to them. ...

Autism may be associated with mathematical skills. Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen has published studies that autism is more prevalent in the familes of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians. Unusual mathematical skills are reported in a small percentage of cases of ”classic autism.” Movies, television, and popular culture such as Rainman (1988), Mercury Rising (1998), and many other works often play up this rare association by presenting autistic characters with extreme mathematical abilities. It has frequently been suggested that various scientists and mathematicians including the Nobel Prize winning physicist Paul Dirac, the Russian mathematician and Fields Medal refuser Grigori Perelman, and Fields Medal winner Richard Borcherds have had or have Asperger’s Syndrome, now included in the autism spectrum. Vernon L. Smith who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 has stated that he has Asperger’s Syndrome. Wired Magazine popularized the notion of an association of Asperger’s syndrome and autism with computer technology and math in the article The Geek Syndrome by Steve Silberman. ...

Lazy sysadmin is the best sysadmin –Anonymous System administrators job is not visible to other IT groups or end-users. Mostly they look at administrators and wonder why sysadmins don’t seem to have any work. If you see a sysadmin who is always running around, and trying to put down fire, and constantly dealing with production issues, you might think he is working very hard, and really doing his job. But in reality he is not really doing his job. If you see a sysadmin (UNIX/Linux sysadmin, or DBA, or Network Administrators), who doesn’t seem to be doing much around the office that you can see, he always seem to be relaxed, and he don’t seem to have any visible work, you can be assured that he is doing his job. ...

While you may have some idea about what bitrate is, the ”can audiophiles really tell the difference” argument has raged on for quite some time, and it’s hard to get people to drop their egos and actually explain what these things mean and whether they really matter. Here’s a bit of information on bitrate and how it applies to our practical music listening experience. » Whitson Gordon | lifehacker.com

In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing. And behold, then came a new web browser known as ”Mozilla”, being short for ”Mosaic Killer,” but Mosaic was not amused, so the public name was changed to Netscape, and Netscape called itself Mozilla/1.0 (Win3.1), and there was more rejoicing. And Netscape supported frames, and frames became popular among the people, but Mosaic did not support frames, and so came ”user agent sniffing” and to ”Mozilla” webmasters sent frames, but to other browsers they sent not frames. ...