How else will the heathen space aliens hear the Good News concerning Jesus Christ?
Sad, but true. "Say, brother, put away your forehead tentacle and your disintegration beam, and oscillate closer, because I have some great news for you!"
In spite of how embarrassing it would be to see my species try to evangelize the stars, I'd almost settle for anything that got us off our duff and out there. It's really depressing that there's almost zero chance of me seeing this in my lifetime. I've gone from all the hope and optimism of the moon landings to seeing the space shuttle fly for real (pre-romanticized by Moon Raker) to... What? Basically everybody arguing world hunger is more important than space exploration, and we should just send robots from now on.
Unless we meet the Vulcans or something and they show us the way (assuming we don't nuke them, which we almost certainly would) I think our species is probably doomed to eventual extinction right here on this big blue rock where we started.
The customers are people whose annual income is less than most/. readers make in a day.
Random data point: I had a protracted conversation with a car load (five or six, jammed into a Toyota Corolla or thereabouts) of Indian students the other day. I asked them if they knew of anyone hiring C++ developers, and they all broke out into hearty peals of laughter.
Apparently they're all over here in the US getting electrical engineering degrees so they can go home and earn $10,000 USD a year and live like kings. I make twice that at a crappy subsistence job I took because it paid more than unemployment. It's pretty sobering.
That's exactly what I was thinking. If, as the OP says, "Most of the TVs in the town have digital tuners," then why screw around with boxes at all?
I think "turning off analog cable" in September is tantamount to encrypting everything, and no longer leaving it clear. I had analog basic cable with Comcast when I finally got a new digital TV, and I could receive everything just fine with the built-in tuner. Then one day they moved Cartoon Network such that it was impossible to receive without a set top box. I don't know the technical details, as I despise TV and refuse to learn anything about it. I just know I had to get a set top box to shut my children up.
Their price structure is highly variable, and they say one thing here and one thing there. There's talk on the thread of the first box being free, but my first box was $5 a month. Their website advertised this and that for $X, but after many hours of phone negotiation with them getting all of this crap set up, they insisted everything had to be $Y, which was a good bit higher than $X.
All in all Comcast blows and they can bite my ass. The municipality in question had better get to bending over, I expect. With Comast, anal lube is 20% off for the first six months at least, so the pain is gradual.
Even that scenario is more likely than the societal changes that would be required to alleviate the patch.
Probably true. Where I work, we're the second largest business in the area in terms of recycling, right after a company whose entire business is recycling. It's the easiest recycling I've ever experienced here on the east coast. All you have to do is take a heartbeat or two to think about where you're aiming your toss, and someone else deals with carting it all off and getting it taken care of. It's great. What could go wrong?
I've seen someone throw something in the general trash, and some other person pull it out, and toss it into the appropriate recycle bin, only to have the original person flip the first person off, remove the item from the recycle bin, and place it back in the general trash. "I'm an American, dammit, this is a free country, and you can't stop me from throwing my soda can away. Kiss my ass you tree-hugging pansy!"
Allllllrighty then. To the people ripping on America for being wasteful, I'm afraid this is one stereotype that's probably true.
Even Google can't tell me, I'm curious how this is done. I program code, how does one program DNA?
They program it in a combination of D, A+, and the top secret N language known only to genetic engineers. It's so secret, Wikipedia doesn't even have an article about N yet, but it will shortly after our genetically engineered Arctic bacteria vaccine overlords take over the world. Please allow me to be the first to welcome them.
Re:The problem of "alternative inputs"
on
The Mouse Vanishes
·
· Score: 1
Touch Screen? You think you have carpel tunnel issues now?
This is a good criticism of the current technology, at least. Where I work, most of the mice have disappeared to be replaced with resistive touch screen monitors. Jabbing your finger at a big piece of plastic the size of a monitor all day is not ergonomic at all. The low sensitivity of the screen requires a fair amount of pressure, and you're aiming straight on with the very tip of your finger, instead curling around to contact it with the pad on your fingertip. This means if you want to use your index finger, there's a strong tendency to jam your middle finger into the screen repeatedly over the course of a day. Ergonomics fail. I hate these things. I don't think touch screens are going to be physically comfortable to use until they figure out a way to make the screen out of something soft and pliable, like poking at a latex mattress instead of a big piece of Tupperware.
What do you have against templates? You're missing out on a lot if you throw them out of C++ so easily.
Such a pity I can't come up with anything from the real world on the spur of the moment, or work out a quick way to produce such an error on demand. You really have to see these things to appreciate the problem. Thirty lines of nested arcane gibberish just to say "you forgot a * dumbass" is pretty over the top. A lot of the time I have no idea what the hell the error means, and just try random things based on past experience with stupid things I've done, to see if anything works.
I get there eventually, somehow, but not through any help provided by those errors!
I don't think Qt is that much worse than the STL though. They're both really dreadful for producing ridiculously verbose and yet shockingly useless error messages about the most trivial of problems.
The problem with people off the street who want to help is they usually have no idea what to do, and have a hard time fitting into the culture of a project.
I've got a guy right now with a lot of heart and some fair amount of skill who really wants to help, but I have to lead him along with a trail of bread crumbs, coming up with something for him to do at every turn, and finishing most of his projects. I like the guy a lot, but his help is too expensive to be useful.
The most useful people I've got are the ones who showed up one day with a patch that demonstrated their understanding of a problem, and of the project's culture. These people are our greatest asset, because I don't have time to micro-manage my team and make up daily to do lists. I need people who can see a problem, have the courage to make their own decisions as to the best way to solve it with minimal discussion and hand-wringing, and who will listen to criticism if it turns out they need to reconsider some aspect of the patch.
It pretty much sucks working under these conditions, because you have to make decisions that could turn out wrong, and you could have to go back to the drawing board and do things a different way. It would be so much cleaner if everyone could agree on everything ahead of time, and no work would be undertaken without a solid understanding of the problem at hand, and the exact solution the project will find satisfactory. Unfortunately, trying to work like that guarantees nothing will ever get done. The only way to drive progress at this project is to stick your neck out and do something, and go with your instincts. All those attempts at sorting everything out ahead of time lead to features that sit there on the board for five years unimplemented. A lot of the time, things emerge during the course of working on something that nobody would have even considered at the outset. As much as it sucks, I have to work under the same crappy conditions myself, and the fact that I'm the project manager doesn't give my own code a pass if I go off on a wrong track, and get called on it. It's a team effort, and to a large extent, the end users are part of that team too.
My job is more that of "culture keeper" than project manager. I have to make sure all the pieces fit together, and ensure a certain amount of consistency across the huge spectrum of different uses people have for our software. Individual developers tend to get hung up on their own way of working and looking at the software, and something that makes sense from one perspective might be actively detrimental to a different class of user with different objectives and usage habits. Of course, it's impossible to make everyone happy, and to accommodate all the extreme edge cases, so deciding where the middle ground will be is part of my job too.
The less work you make for me trying to channel your effort, the more welcome your contributions are. We're always hiring, but we don't advertise, because we've found most random people off the street who just want to help are completely useless at best. Working here sucks. It has all the bad qualities that make it a job, but there's no paycheck to help the bitter pill go down. The only reason anybody would ever work here is passion for our software.
Wow, thanks for that one. I ended up sidetracked for hours reading about that, and trying to fathom its meaning for myself. Coolest "something new for today" I've learned in a very long time.
As a commercial Maemo developer (go ahead and laugh) I have to say I agree that Nokia should just give up and switch over to Android. They don't know what the hell they're trying to do with Maemo/MeeGo or the N900. The whole experience has been bitterly disappointing, like sitting around on a waiting list for months to get my new super exotic sports car, only to discover they neglected to install three of the pistons, and the transmission doesn't shift into reverse. It's really beautiful, but it doesn't run worth a damn, and it's basically useless.
However, as an experienced C++ and Qt developer trying to grapple with Android for the sake of taking my product to a platform that doesn't have its head shoved completely up its own ass, I find there' s just nothing to love about Android at all. Qt kicks this thing's ass all over the place, and this feels like trying to build a skyscraper out of LEGO instead of concrete and steel. It's just a damn shame Nokia have fucked all of this up so completely, and they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever competing. We're all stuck playing with Tinker Toys if we want to make any money. Or giving Apple a shit ton of money.
He gets kicked out of strip clubs on friday nights for getting sloshed and being a dick.
At the same time, his engineer is at home working to finish up the project he was working on to pay for that strip club outing.
Ahh the justice.
Yup. That's how it works. I'll never be in power. I'll never be rich. I have too much class and personal dignity. In other words, from their perspective, I'm a loser and a dweeb.
I live and die by my mind. The thought of a disease stealing it away from me, a little at a time, is my version of hell. I know I would prefer to be put out of my misery long before the disease takes me. I can't be alone in this.
Nope. You're not. The closest I ever come to praying is hoping I have enough of my wits about me to know when it's time to end it. I'm not at all suicidal, but given my family history, there is probably going to come a point, a line I do not wish to cross, a fate far worse than death.
I'm just saying, if I'm gonna rook myself into liking something that I don't automatically like, why not make it spinach or something, instead of alcohol?
I actually did rook myself into liking spinach, now that you mention it. Tasted horrible at first, but I got to where I could eat it and add a green leafy vegetable to my diet. I never could force myself to choke it down in any form other than straight up raw though, and along came E. coli O157:H7. Damn. Now eating something green and leafy in the only state I could sort of enjoy could kill me a lot faster than pizza and beer. I got out of the habit. It's apparently safe to eat spinach again, and has been for almost four years, but knowing my luck if I start eating it again, there will just be another outbreak.
Cheers! (Having a beer with my pizza. My poor arteries.)
..it _can_ be commercially viable. Maemo is exactly that.
Yeah, developers are lining up around the block to fill up the store with high quality apps, because developing apps that can't be sold is so lucrative. The Ovi store and Maemo Select are just teeming with first rate apps, and who could ever want an iPhone after this.
On my N900, I can download Japanese cartoons! Cartoons, people! Take that Apple. You fascists!
But you look at most parents today, and very, very few would let their kids do any of that. The paranoia that "oh my god, something will happen to them!" is so huge, that they end up sheltered, fragile, with all sorts of mental issues. (The topic of this article, actually.)
Another aspect to all of this that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that parents today are afraid of Social Services crawling up their ass because some busybody parent next door called to complain that little Jeffy wasn't wearing a helmet, little Jeffy was seen walking on the railroad tracks, etc. Even parents who don't have their head up their ass have to watch out for those who do.
I'm going through the whole ADHD thing myself right now too. My son hates school, and he's emo and depressed because even if he got good enough grades to win some magical scholarship to pay for the education we can't remotely dream of affording and do not promise to provide, both of his parents have lousy dreck jobs in spite of their good grades and education, and we haven't blown smoke up the kid's ass about his chances of living some fairy tale.
Real life is hard, and it's getting harder. In my parents' day, you could have a BA in basket weaving and work into a good job. In my day, you need a PhD in basket weaving, or you need to study something useful and in demand, which is anybody's guess in this job market. Learning to cope with that in a world where they teach you that every numbnuts who can rub two sticks together can become a brain surgeon or a nuclear physicist if only he tries hard and gets good grades makes the bitter pill that much harder to swallow.
So the reality is that if Mars wants to rebel, all Earth needs to do is cut off shipments to them and they'll slowly wither away as things break that they can't replace.
Not if they take the professor from Gilligan's Island with them. He can probably make a CPU fab out of a couple of rocks, some dust, and a pair of panties.
Un príncipe! Voy a salvarle a vuestra merced! Mi madre se llama Stephanie Michelle Johnson. Nació en Boise, Idaho en 1943. Mi color favorito es verde. Mi fruta favorito es la manzana. Mi cuenta es 867530942421492 de Wachovia, my número de Seguridad Social (SSN) es 447-88-4531 y yo nací en 1963 en Houston, Tejas.
Reading TFA, it sounds to me like the guy picked up a leech on his way to the robbery and happened to notice, remove, and discard it at the scene of that crime.
Slashdot Mirror
How else will the heathen space aliens hear the Good News concerning Jesus Christ?
Sad, but true. "Say, brother, put away your forehead tentacle and your disintegration beam, and oscillate closer, because I have some great news for you!"
In spite of how embarrassing it would be to see my species try to evangelize the stars, I'd almost settle for anything that got us off our duff and out there. It's really depressing that there's almost zero chance of me seeing this in my lifetime. I've gone from all the hope and optimism of the moon landings to seeing the space shuttle fly for real (pre-romanticized by Moon Raker) to... What? Basically everybody arguing world hunger is more important than space exploration, and we should just send robots from now on.
Unless we meet the Vulcans or something and they show us the way (assuming we don't nuke them, which we almost certainly would) I think our species is probably doomed to eventual extinction right here on this big blue rock where we started.
The customers are people whose annual income is less than most /. readers make in a day.
Random data point: I had a protracted conversation with a car load (five or six, jammed into a Toyota Corolla or thereabouts) of Indian students the other day. I asked them if they knew of anyone hiring C++ developers, and they all broke out into hearty peals of laughter.
Apparently they're all over here in the US getting electrical engineering degrees so they can go home and earn $10,000 USD a year and live like kings. I make twice that at a crappy subsistence job I took because it paid more than unemployment. It's pretty sobering.
That's exactly what I was thinking. If, as the OP says, "Most of the TVs in the town have digital tuners," then why screw around with boxes at all?
I think "turning off analog cable" in September is tantamount to encrypting everything, and no longer leaving it clear. I had analog basic cable with Comcast when I finally got a new digital TV, and I could receive everything just fine with the built-in tuner. Then one day they moved Cartoon Network such that it was impossible to receive without a set top box. I don't know the technical details, as I despise TV and refuse to learn anything about it. I just know I had to get a set top box to shut my children up.
Their price structure is highly variable, and they say one thing here and one thing there. There's talk on the thread of the first box being free, but my first box was $5 a month. Their website advertised this and that for $X, but after many hours of phone negotiation with them getting all of this crap set up, they insisted everything had to be $Y, which was a good bit higher than $X.
All in all Comcast blows and they can bite my ass. The municipality in question had better get to bending over, I expect. With Comast, anal lube is 20% off for the first six months at least, so the pain is gradual.
Even that scenario is more likely than the societal changes that would be required to alleviate the patch.
Probably true. Where I work, we're the second largest business in the area in terms of recycling, right after a company whose entire business is recycling. It's the easiest recycling I've ever experienced here on the east coast. All you have to do is take a heartbeat or two to think about where you're aiming your toss, and someone else deals with carting it all off and getting it taken care of. It's great. What could go wrong?
I've seen someone throw something in the general trash, and some other person pull it out, and toss it into the appropriate recycle bin, only to have the original person flip the first person off, remove the item from the recycle bin, and place it back in the general trash. "I'm an American, dammit, this is a free country, and you can't stop me from throwing my soda can away. Kiss my ass you tree-hugging pansy!"
Allllllrighty then. To the people ripping on America for being wasteful, I'm afraid this is one stereotype that's probably true.
Bastards, getting to hold breasts and suck on them with that smug look on their face.
Yeah, but have you tasted breast milk? YICK!!! Do not want.
Dioxin is scary stuff. Though not as scary as dark Force energy, which produces even more horrible disfiguration.
Even Google can't tell me, I'm curious how this is done. I program code, how does one program DNA?
They program it in a combination of D, A+, and the top secret N language known only to genetic engineers. It's so secret, Wikipedia doesn't even have an article about N yet, but it will shortly after our genetically engineered Arctic bacteria vaccine overlords take over the world. Please allow me to be the first to welcome them.
Touch Screen? You think you have carpel tunnel issues now?
This is a good criticism of the current technology, at least. Where I work, most of the mice have disappeared to be replaced with resistive touch screen monitors. Jabbing your finger at a big piece of plastic the size of a monitor all day is not ergonomic at all. The low sensitivity of the screen requires a fair amount of pressure, and you're aiming straight on with the very tip of your finger, instead curling around to contact it with the pad on your fingertip. This means if you want to use your index finger, there's a strong tendency to jam your middle finger into the screen repeatedly over the course of a day. Ergonomics fail. I hate these things. I don't think touch screens are going to be physically comfortable to use until they figure out a way to make the screen out of something soft and pliable, like poking at a latex mattress instead of a big piece of Tupperware.
What do you have against templates? You're missing out on a lot if you throw them out of C++ so easily.
Such a pity I can't come up with anything from the real world on the spur of the moment, or work out a quick way to produce such an error on demand. You really have to see these things to appreciate the problem. Thirty lines of nested arcane gibberish just to say "you forgot a * dumbass" is pretty over the top. A lot of the time I have no idea what the hell the error means, and just try random things based on past experience with stupid things I've done, to see if anything works.
I get there eventually, somehow, but not through any help provided by those errors!
I don't think Qt is that much worse than the STL though. They're both really dreadful for producing ridiculously verbose and yet shockingly useless error messages about the most trivial of problems.
The problem with people off the street who want to help is they usually have no idea what to do, and have a hard time fitting into the culture of a project.
I've got a guy right now with a lot of heart and some fair amount of skill who really wants to help, but I have to lead him along with a trail of bread crumbs, coming up with something for him to do at every turn, and finishing most of his projects. I like the guy a lot, but his help is too expensive to be useful.
The most useful people I've got are the ones who showed up one day with a patch that demonstrated their understanding of a problem, and of the project's culture. These people are our greatest asset, because I don't have time to micro-manage my team and make up daily to do lists. I need people who can see a problem, have the courage to make their own decisions as to the best way to solve it with minimal discussion and hand-wringing, and who will listen to criticism if it turns out they need to reconsider some aspect of the patch.
It pretty much sucks working under these conditions, because you have to make decisions that could turn out wrong, and you could have to go back to the drawing board and do things a different way. It would be so much cleaner if everyone could agree on everything ahead of time, and no work would be undertaken without a solid understanding of the problem at hand, and the exact solution the project will find satisfactory. Unfortunately, trying to work like that guarantees nothing will ever get done. The only way to drive progress at this project is to stick your neck out and do something, and go with your instincts. All those attempts at sorting everything out ahead of time lead to features that sit there on the board for five years unimplemented. A lot of the time, things emerge during the course of working on something that nobody would have even considered at the outset. As much as it sucks, I have to work under the same crappy conditions myself, and the fact that I'm the project manager doesn't give my own code a pass if I go off on a wrong track, and get called on it. It's a team effort, and to a large extent, the end users are part of that team too.
My job is more that of "culture keeper" than project manager. I have to make sure all the pieces fit together, and ensure a certain amount of consistency across the huge spectrum of different uses people have for our software. Individual developers tend to get hung up on their own way of working and looking at the software, and something that makes sense from one perspective might be actively detrimental to a different class of user with different objectives and usage habits. Of course, it's impossible to make everyone happy, and to accommodate all the extreme edge cases, so deciding where the middle ground will be is part of my job too.
The less work you make for me trying to channel your effort, the more welcome your contributions are. We're always hiring, but we don't advertise, because we've found most random people off the street who just want to help are completely useless at best. Working here sucks. It has all the bad qualities that make it a job, but there's no paycheck to help the bitter pill go down. The only reason anybody would ever work here is passion for our software.
Wow, thanks for that one. I ended up sidetracked for hours reading about that, and trying to fathom its meaning for myself. Coolest "something new for today" I've learned in a very long time.
10^24 times more likely the cause.
But they're not as fascinating as wild speculation, are they?
You're all missing the point that Raptor Jesus flipped the bit, because he is angry.
As a commercial Maemo developer (go ahead and laugh) I have to say I agree that Nokia should just give up and switch over to Android. They don't know what the hell they're trying to do with Maemo/MeeGo or the N900. The whole experience has been bitterly disappointing, like sitting around on a waiting list for months to get my new super exotic sports car, only to discover they neglected to install three of the pistons, and the transmission doesn't shift into reverse. It's really beautiful, but it doesn't run worth a damn, and it's basically useless.
However, as an experienced C++ and Qt developer trying to grapple with Android for the sake of taking my product to a platform that doesn't have its head shoved completely up its own ass, I find there' s just nothing to love about Android at all. Qt kicks this thing's ass all over the place, and this feels like trying to build a skyscraper out of LEGO instead of concrete and steel. It's just a damn shame Nokia have fucked all of this up so completely, and they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever competing. We're all stuck playing with Tinker Toys if we want to make any money. Or giving Apple a shit ton of money.
He gets kicked out of strip clubs on friday nights for getting sloshed and being a dick.
At the same time, his engineer is at home working to finish up the project he was working on to pay for that strip club outing.
Ahh the justice.
Yup. That's how it works. I'll never be in power. I'll never be rich. I have too much class and personal dignity. In other words, from their perspective, I'm a loser and a dweeb.
And Clippy. Don't forget Clippy.
Thanks. Now I have to change my shirt.
I live and die by my mind. The thought of a disease stealing it away from me, a little at a time, is my version of hell. I know I would prefer to be put out of my misery long before the disease takes me. I can't be alone in this.
Nope. You're not. The closest I ever come to praying is hoping I have enough of my wits about me to know when it's time to end it. I'm not at all suicidal, but given my family history, there is probably going to come a point, a line I do not wish to cross, a fate far worse than death.
I'm just saying, if I'm gonna rook myself into liking something that I don't automatically like, why not make it spinach or something, instead of alcohol?
I actually did rook myself into liking spinach, now that you mention it. Tasted horrible at first, but I got to where I could eat it and add a green leafy vegetable to my diet. I never could force myself to choke it down in any form other than straight up raw though, and along came E. coli O157:H7. Damn. Now eating something green and leafy in the only state I could sort of enjoy could kill me a lot faster than pizza and beer. I got out of the habit. It's apparently safe to eat spinach again, and has been for almost four years, but knowing my luck if I start eating it again, there will just be another outbreak.
Cheers! (Having a beer with my pizza. My poor arteries.)
See: Nokia N900.
..it _can_ be commercially viable. Maemo is exactly that.
Yeah, developers are lining up around the block to fill up the store with high quality apps, because developing apps that can't be sold is so lucrative. The Ovi store and Maemo Select are just teeming with first rate apps, and who could ever want an iPhone after this.
On my N900, I can download Japanese cartoons! Cartoons, people! Take that Apple. You fascists!
I have posts from BBSes in 1988-91 that are now archived on google.
Oh crap. As if the stuff from my university email account wasn't bad enough.
But you look at most parents today, and very, very few would let their kids do any of that. The paranoia that "oh my god, something will happen to them!" is so huge, that they end up sheltered, fragile, with all sorts of mental issues. (The topic of this article, actually.)
Another aspect to all of this that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that parents today are afraid of Social Services crawling up their ass because some busybody parent next door called to complain that little Jeffy wasn't wearing a helmet, little Jeffy was seen walking on the railroad tracks, etc. Even parents who don't have their head up their ass have to watch out for those who do.
I'm going through the whole ADHD thing myself right now too. My son hates school, and he's emo and depressed because even if he got good enough grades to win some magical scholarship to pay for the education we can't remotely dream of affording and do not promise to provide, both of his parents have lousy dreck jobs in spite of their good grades and education, and we haven't blown smoke up the kid's ass about his chances of living some fairy tale.
Real life is hard, and it's getting harder. In my parents' day, you could have a BA in basket weaving and work into a good job. In my day, you need a PhD in basket weaving, or you need to study something useful and in demand, which is anybody's guess in this job market. Learning to cope with that in a world where they teach you that every numbnuts who can rub two sticks together can become a brain surgeon or a nuclear physicist if only he tries hard and gets good grades makes the bitter pill that much harder to swallow.
So the reality is that if Mars wants to rebel, all Earth needs to do is cut off shipments to them and they'll slowly wither away as things break that they can't replace.
Not if they take the professor from Gilligan's Island with them. He can probably make a CPU fab out of a couple of rocks, some dust, and a pair of panties.
Mi por unu bonvenigas nian Esperanto-paroladon grandsinjoroj!
I don't care what they claim it's impossible to make a good translation.
A translation to good always possible being or not you are to believe in the mighty power of the Googol? Machine translations FWT!
Un príncipe! Voy a salvarle a vuestra merced! Mi madre se llama Stephanie Michelle Johnson. Nació en Boise, Idaho en 1943. Mi color favorito es verde. Mi fruta favorito es la manzana. Mi cuenta es 867530942421492 de Wachovia, my número de Seguridad Social (SSN) es 447-88-4531 y yo nací en 1963 en Houston, Tejas.
Reading TFA, it sounds to me like the guy picked up a leech on his way to the robbery and happened to notice, remove, and discard it at the scene of that crime.
Except to add more bugs and reduce stability, usually. Always important goals, don't get me wrong.