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Journal buffer-overflowed's Journal: Miscellany or Why I like the hope diamond. 14

Journal by buffer-overflowed

My favorite Museum exhibit is the Hope Diamond. Because it crushes expectations. You stand in line, you stand in line, you're expecting something the size of your fist, and you get up there and it's like a shiny piece of gravel. Oh sure, kinda pretty, but it leaves you with a "that's it!?" kind of sensation.

Oh or reconstructed pyramids, temples and castles over here. They're sacrilicious.

Did you know when Ethelred came in for his "thank god I don't live stateside anymore" experience, I tried to hunt down a copy of Mao's Red Book for him entirely because someone had called us "comrades" in an internet argument?

Saying commie pinko bastard makes baby Mao cry.

We're currently hoping Mekkab will be allowed out to another meetup after the last one. TWO AM MEKKA! TWO AM!

Captain Morgan's Tatoo SUCKS(take Jager and make it WORSE). Which isn't surprising, because all Captain Morgan rum sucks except Private Stock.

My sister has magical energy theories.

Whatever happened to the Judicial Nominee comprimise they struck last year which was ignored?

Java and .NET did not descend from the heavens, they were constructed in preexisting languages. And no way in hell is a VM faster than optimized C/ASM. Anyone else think we're getting to abstracted from the hardware?

G. Gordon Liddy doesn't like Deep Throat. I wonder why.

Neither does Robert Novak.

Oh and upon mentioning that I have gone for a very very long time w/o subscribing, someone went and got me a subscription. Thus ruining my street cred. :-P I'll let them out themselves if they wish.

Ok. I wrote I journal.

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Miscellany or Why I like the hope diamond. More

Miscellany or Why I like the hope diamond.

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  • Thanks, folks. That's right. I'll be here all week.

    I wish i'd met teh mekkab!!!!

    But i am not allowed to stay out till 2 AM.

    I have yet to see the hope diamond, but i am expecting, well, a piece of shiny gravel, really. We're not talking baseball diamond here (i brought the paper towels!) We're talking diamond, and diamonds are not enormous by nature. Now, amethysts, on the other hand, you see a giant geode full of amethysts the size of your fist, you don't forget that in a hurry. We used to sell them at n
  • Hardware comment. I claim if we don't abstract ourselves from the hardware and continuously build further levels of abstraction, we'll remain stuck in the 70's. Abstraction solves problems once and for all. No re-inventing the wheel. Sockets? Set up the object and call accept. No need to page through a W. Richard Stevens book if you hadn't done network programming in a few months.

    Now. If the abstractions prevent you from doing what you could do easily in C, I agree. However, see Java for a good e
    • I was more thinking about the consequences of teaching the OO method BEFORE procedural/lower level languages. Thereby creating a class of programmers that has never had to deal with some of the things you must deal with when you're two steps above machine code and occassionally dipping down to one step.

      I've been watching as compiler/OS design classes have stopped using C and have started using Java. I guess because pointers are incredibly hard or something. To me that's like driving a car with no unders
    • Find me a working, free, telnet in Java, and then come back and tell me about abstraction. I tried about a year ago to find one, and then write one, and I have to say, I had to muck about WAY too much, and yes, I had to refer to my Stevens book :-)
      • You mean all the available ones on a Google search [google.com] don't work? :) Hmmmmm.... [mudconnect.com]. I realize that out-of-band data was the tricky thing for telnet, but it does work. Furthermore, one example doesn't overwhelm the billions of other things it does many orders of magnitude more easily by abstracting than other languages. :)
        • The mud connect one in particular does not work for my purposes, no. It's a big effin mess too, coded by a million monkeys or something. All the other (decent looking) ones that came up in a google search were for money, and since I need to deploy this for an unknown number of users, I'm pretty stuck at how to license it. Not to mention not being authorized to spend money :-)

          As for the rest of it, hey I WORK for the java company, I'm just being snarky :-)

          So, just to clarify "my purposes": "modern" brows

  • Java and .NET did not descend from the heavens, they were constructed in preexisting languages. And no way in hell is a VM faster than optimized C/ASM. Anyone else think we're getting to abstracted from the hardware?

    I expect we'll get even more abstraction for the near future. Getting away form the hardware is a good thing in our current state of economics. Optimizing code takes developer time, both as an upfront cost and in maintenence. Hardware is currently cheap compared to developer talent, so it

  • .....we went so see the Hope Diamond and all that last summer, talk about a *yawn*...it was almost comical "thats it??"

    Even the guard seemed bored

  • I have seen it twice: once before they moved it, when it was in the crappy vault behind several feet of fogged glass, and once after it was in its nifty new 360 degree viewable super-duper-fantabulous case. Neither time did I have to wait to see it, but then again the museum wasn't super busy either time (one time was during stuperbowl sunday back when the redskins were playing; man that was awesome)
  • but my reply probably isn't worth reading.

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