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Obligatory

And that is what is so sad about science...nothing is magical.

http://xkcd.com/877/

Correction:

You (and everybody else) = 3 Mbps
The CIA in Langley = 2000000000 Mbps

The way you wrote it is technically accurate, but violates xkcd's 1000 times rule.
All that said, you make an excellent point.

I can't count the number of times I've seen companies with scripts or apps that perform some simple operation, but it only saves a few minutes each day. Yet at some point something with the automation breaks or needs to be changed, but the original developers are long gone, and now some other developer has to investigate.

This poor developer will end up needing hours, days, weeks, or even months in some cases in order to find out where the fuck the script or app is running, where the hell the most recent version of the source code is, how to get it running on a development system, and how it works, all before being able to make the fix or the change. Then it takes time to fix it or make the change, plus some time for testing, and then it needs to be redeployed, and finally it needs to be monitored for some time.

So the automation saved maybe a few dollars a day. Yet just a single fix or change to the automation can end up costing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars once all is said and done. Merely one small fix or change can literally wipe out any cost savings that the automation has ever brought in the past, and then wipe it out for the next few years!

If it's only saving a few minutes per day then when/if it breaks then you scrap it. Why would you spend "days, weeks, or even months" fixing a script
that is only saving you a few minutes per day?

This xkcd comic tells you when to automate: http://xkcd.com/1205/ but it applies equally to how long you can afford to spend fixing a script that breaks.
This is across 5 years so IMHO you should probably cut the number in half so that 1) you are actually coming out ahead and 2) you have some room
for updating/repairing the script when it breaks.

Relevant XKCD http://xkcd.com/1205/

We actually use that chart to represent time gain efficiencies to automation.

As so often XKCD says this much shorter:

http://xkcd.com/1319/

I've ended up creating a few solutions where I think I'd rather spend three hours doing something creative than one hour doing it mindnumbingly dumb and repetitive. Often the maintenance of tweaking it eats up the savings.

Relevant XKCDs:
Automation
Is it worth the time?

I've ended up creating a few solutions where I think I'd rather spend three hours doing something creative than one hour doing it mindnumbingly dumb and repetitive. Often the maintenance of tweaking it eats up the savings.

Relevant XKCDs:
Automation
Is it worth the time?

In my opinion, you can't just say "this is obviously wrong."

Yes you can: it's obviously wrong. Read the paper from the inventors on how the engine is supposed to work. It's a series of novice-level mistakes about physical principles and mechanisms. The entire idea is completely fucking batshit from the very beginning. The very fact that somebody actually got funding to build one of these absurd snake-oil devices indicates very little except that something is very, very wrong with the funding process. NASA is infamous for this kind of loony bullshit, and they really need to stop. It makes them look like morons.

I agree that the theory (or, at least, that theory) is obviously wrong. Cool, but from experimentalist standpoint, irrelevant. This paper, and the chinese paper, do not appear to the written by charlatans, they claim positive results, and so this will have to confirmed or denied by experiment. I have seen some very bad experimental NASA studies of new physics (*cough*warp drive*cough*), but this one doesn't appear to be so. If you see an obvious flaw in the full paper, please post it and I will publicize it.

I would advise in general that you don't hyperventilate so much. This process will work out just as it should; I have no doubt that in a year there will be a dozen tests of this and we will likely know for sure one way or the other; in the meantime, I would take a $ 200 bet that the standard model will still prevail when this is over.

Nonsense, real CS people should have a year studying butterflies.

Oblig. ref : http://xkcd.com/378/

Harpoons in space

Don't worry, the space craft has been programmed to think it's trying to kill the comet.

This.

String Theory

Who are you and what did you do to the real roman_mir?

The real roman_mir would absolutely defend and worship the likes of eBay and PayPal, for they are the modern robber barons.

With the Internet being their railroad, these modern barons created products and services that people wanted, grew the economy, and created thousands of real productive jobs.

The real roman_mir would tell you that your own story is meaningless. The only thing that matters is that government is not involved here. The mighty free market has spoken and eBay and PayPal's level of service (or lack thereof) is good enough, the most efficient solution for now (if you think you can offer better, start your own business and compete with them). It's your own damn fault for not knowing what you're getting into when you signed up with eBay, with PayPal, or with the dude trying to sell you stuff. Caveat emptor. Give her a A minus minus review and let the free market sort itself out.

Unscientific

Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1343/

Frankly, Dwarf Fortress has better documentation than Linux. And at least catchy music to listen to while pondering the latest self-crafted disaster.

I do have one particular nit to pick. There is a difference between a precise technical specification and a user manual. Even man separates them. User manuals go in section 1. If you want to write a technical specification, file formats and conventions are in 4.

The sudoers(1) manpage is a perfect example of failure at either by trying to be both. And sadly, the sudoers(1) manpage is above average F/OSS documentation.

http://xkcd.com/1211/ This is a good world....

http://xkcd.com/378/

Right, that or they're just working on a faster way to send letters to their mothers.

And there are many people like you who have difficulty reading text that's not annotated, explained or highlighted by something else.

I used to program using butterflies, but of late that doesn't seem manly enough. Now I'm programming by arranging cocoons such that weeks hence when the butterflies fly away, the desired atmospheric disturbance will result in the code on my HDD. Took years to get to where I could intuit the changing weather well enough, but now I feel like a real programmer again - let's see em make an Emacs macro for that.

Mandatory xkcd response - http://xkcd.com/378/

http://xkcd.com/327/

I wonder if little bobby tables applied for a passport while this was going on?

Don't make me link this here.

Only if you use it just right. http://xkcd.com/323/

relevant XKCD http://xkcd.com/1357/

Right to free speech doesn't mean you can go around saying what you want without repercussions. It means the government can't stop you or hold it against you. Corporations can mostly do what they want minus some fairly flexible laws around eavesdropping and discrimination and a few other choice things.

Constitutional rights don't translate in to private corporation -> employee/customer rights
http://www.npr.org/templates/s...

"What most Americans generally don't know is that the Constitution doesn't apply to private corporations at all."

http://xkcd.com/978/

Obligatory XKCD

(Now it's not attached to his post, it's attached to yours!)

(Actually, somebody attached it to his post anyway. Now it's here twice, because of you. Hope you're happy!)

Which vulnerability would that be? this one?

Keep in mind the possibility of this, though: http://xkcd.com/978/ (oblig xkcd, etc.)

first dong!

That doesn't help if you're one of today's lucky 10 000.

I'll leave this one to Randall Munroe: xkcd.

Is it better to try 2 things and make decisions based on the results, or consider 2 things, and make the decision based on a guess? I don't see how screwing with people based on your own guesses is better than doing exactly the same based on a comparison of how the options perform. Its not like hiding profile images is "unethical". In fact, given the context, it sounds like showing them might have been a bad idea in the first place.

I thought Slashdot was the best place to ask. Many times I've seen pieces of news about Amigas and usually they're warmly received (are they not outdated?).

That's nostalga kicking in. The Amiga was an amazing piece of technology back in the day; a powerful, multimedia capable, grown-up computer for those who cut their teeth on the Commodore 64 and Vic-20 computers. A last generation, PalmOS 5 based PDA is not going to tug at the nostalga heartstrings. Furthermore, the warmly received stories are about people who have accomplished something with the old hardware, who have gotten their machines to do something above and beyond what people thought they were capable of; not stories about noobs who dug their dad's old computer out of the attic and are trying to get it going again.

I'm wondering why so many people are saying stuff like "let it go", "it's useless", "learn a language." Other people are linking me to LMGTFY as if I haven't spent hours looking for working links.

I think there is a parallel phenomenon to XKCD's Today's Ten Thousand. It is a lot easier to say "You're doing it the wrong way", than to try to understand what you might be trying to actually do, and provide guidance accordingly. Sadly, when people do that, both you and they miss out on a little piece of life.

Consider why you are doing what you want to do. I know it can be exciting to get a free whatever, and spend lots of time trying to get that whatever running. It can seem like a golden opportunity, but it can be a really easy way to waste a boatload of time. If you are not locked in to getting the Tungsten E2 going; if it is just an excuse to get into programming something, perhaps you should consider something like the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino, or the BASIC Stamp. These systems are meant for hacking, have active user and developer communities, boast loads of open source software, and are relatively cheap, as opposed to the closed source, unhackable Tungsten E2.

Having said that, I don't have any concrete advice to give you. I have never done any programming for portable devices, although I used a Handspring Visor regularly up until a few years ago when the case fell apart. PalmOS was already considered dead before that point. Perhaps you could try the Wayback Machine for some leads.

Just imagine a world where you had no libraries

you'd have a vast library of libraries

"More, smaller libraries" != "no libraries"

Your solution presents two problems. Either developers will get lost in the myriad of options or someone decides to combine a few of your "well documented libraries" into a single library to "simplify" things.
Oblig xkcd

When I've had no android, I've thought that too. But as I've purchased an android phone, I was quite impressed about the efficient and tight rights separation system of android. Don't misunderstand me: I didn't "activate" the play store app, as I needed to couple it with a google account. If you could install the free apps without an account I'd have tried it, but that way google had lost a customer. The next thing I was annoyed of was the samsung bloat, and the possible lock-in the case I really started to like one of those apps. I solved these two problems when I've installed CM and F-Droid. Of course, I can't install the fanciest whatsapp and so on, but at least I know my phone is truly mine (except for the baseband part), and that lock-ins are very hard. I was fascinated when I found out that every installed app has its own UNIX user assigned.

The rights separation in android is far more better than anything on the linux desktop. In X, every application can keylog me. In android, that's not possible. On the linux desktop, every application has access to all my files, including my .ssh directory.. In android, fs access is far more developed and limited. In linux desktop, every app has access to the webcam. In android, you can see which app has access. Of course, android could do better, perhaps by adding a "revoke right" option and an "always ask" option (osmand for example has a nice recorder feature, but most time I use it I don't need it so why does it have the right *all time*, rather let android ask for that permission the few times I need it), but right now it does best.

The most annoying features of the android ecosystem radiate from GAPPS, but almost none from AOSP.

http://xkcd.com/435/

What happened to Slashdot lately?

There's a xkcd for that: http://xkcd.com/1104/

Mrs E. Kapelsen of Boston, Massachusetts was an elderly lady, indeed, she felt her life was nearly at an end. She had seen a lot of it, been puzzled by some, but, she was a little uneasy to feel at this late stage, bored by too much. It had all been very pleasant, but perhaps a little too explicable, a little too routine.

With a sigh she flipped up the little plastic window shutter and looked out over the wing.

At first she thought she ought to call the stewardess, but then she thought no, damn it, definitely not, this was for her, and her alone.

By the time her two inexplicable people finally slipped back off the wing and tumbled into the slipstream she had cheered up an awful lot.

She was mostly immensely relieved to think that virtually everything that anybody had ever told her was wrong.

Or the obligatory: http://xkcd.com/1104/

Like Lynx and Caracals.

obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1056/

I'm not convinced people in mud huts were numerous enough or destructive enough to manage the megafauna extinctions. A lot of this hysterical screaming about how we're destroying the planet seems a lot like hubris.

On certain level, the idea that we have that much power pleases the egos of some people.

It may seem like hubris, but the fact is, it's not. Look at this: http://xkcd.com/1338/

The preponderant majority of land mammals in the world, by weight, are either humans or food for humans. For vegetation, the picture is not much more encouraging: all of the world's wild forests weight less and cover way less land than our agriculture does.

There was a whole special report in the economist about the idea that we are now in a different, man-made geological era, the "anthropocene": http://www.economist.com/node/...

When I read the summary, I couldn't believe that Amazon had lost over six times its revenue. Then I saw that the revenue was in billions and the net loss was in millions. Fine, $19,000 million dollars looks awkward (despite what Randall Munroe thinks), but there has to be a less confusing way to convey that information.

Please, for the love of your own mental health, do not click the story's hyperlink to the poems.
They are just bad. I might not have been able to do better if I was in kindergarten. By third grade, yes, I could have. If I just spent five or ten minutes trying.

If you want something to lighten your mood today, check out Despair.com or spend some time reading XKCD. And if you don't get XXKCD, there is ExplainXKCD which can help.

But, please, please, please, don't read those poems that the story's hyperlink points to. They're worse than awful.

Oddly obligatory XKCD. To rebut your snark, with a minimal breeding pool and sufficient preservation, we could live on eating each other for millions of years. Might as well be forever with those time frames.

No, It was What If and you are misremembering it.

Right, because human consumption is the only thing that matters - once we wipe out all other life on the planet we'll be free to eat each other forever!

Oddly obligatory XKCD. To rebut your snark, with a minimal breeding pool and sufficient preservation, we could live on eating each other for millions of years. Might as well be forever with those time frames.

http://xkcd.com/1150/

I'm betting it had more than one vulnerability...

http://xkcd.com/1102/

Obligatory xkycd

Yeah, so something like this:
http://xkcd.com/938/

The ultimate trolling (obligatory xkcd) http://xkcd.com/351/