I've seen it on T-shirts around Toronto here as well, which isn't surprising, given James lives just over in Kitchener, ON... haven't talked to him much in a few years, though.
Hardly new. Who remembers the Iomega Zip drive 'Click of Death'?
That didn't happen on the first launch drives, on any of the parallel or SCSI drives. It didn't happen until a couple of years later, when Iomega redesigned their drive mechanism to be cheaper for the mass production of IDE models. The 'now that we have it working, let's make it as cheap as possible for when we sell millions' problem is what killed them in the end.
Much like only Reagan could possibly have negotiated some of the disarmament treaties he did with the Soviet Union, because just about anybody else would have been pilloried as being 'soft on commies'. Nobody could have accused Reagan of that, not after his work as McCarthy's pit-bull in Hollywood.
And I'm playing Civilization: Call to Power on my Linux box right now. It was one of the first games released by Loki, and yes, I bought it from them fairly early on to help support Linux gaming. Still works just fine. Granted, it is a static binary.
We are talking about post-Stalin Soviet Russia here, the paranoid state incarnate.
What makes you think the 'grunt' operators even knew where the manual was? The basic operators had been told what to do under certain circumstances, none of them really knew what the circumstances meant.
And life in Canada is still Imperial to a large extent for one simple reason: the U.S. is still our largest trading partner, as well as largest source of television and the like. It's difficult to get away from it when our nearest neighbour is one of the loudest holdouts.
Back in 1986, when Expo '86 was running in Vancouver B.C., the highway distance signs (which had been replaced with Metric-only signs several years previously) got amended to add miles to them again because of all the Americans from Washington State who were expected to come visit for the fair.
And I suspect, as several others have said previously, that part of the actions of both the judges and IBM's lawyers is to make sure that all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed legally, and that SCO has had time to not only shoot out their foot but to track the gun all the way up to their hips so that whey they do try to whine later about how unfair it was... they won't have a leg to stand on.
Except that, when you get right down to it, they've already implemented pretty much all of the spec before submitting it to the standards agency. The spec being big won't slow them down any.
That song is a classic, but it's by Barnes and Barnes. (I have it on a Dr. Demento compilation)
Yep, it's on the 20th anniversary compilation. And the amusing bit is that one of the ‘Barnes’ was actually Bill Mumy, who also played Lennier on Babylon 5, the which contained the inspiration for the ‘put [his] head on a pike’ quote that started this...
I remember seeing a description once, that listed the rough percentage differences in genetic makeup between various groups. I seem to recall that the maximum difference between any two humans was about 0.2% of our genetic structure. (For comparison, humans and chimps differ in about 2% of our genetic structure.)
(As another note, these sorts of numbers are more than a little controversial, as there is great debate over whether to count all base pairs, only base pairs that would change the resulting amino acid, or only ‘active’ genes.)
The thing that got me from the original article was that to get the maximum difference between two humans, you had to take two people from two different relatively isolated and inbred tribes in Africa. Effectively, you get several ‘pools’ of genetic information when they're separated from each other, and the pools will tend to drift in different directions. Sure, all of those groups could still interbreed, but from a genetic point of view there were some pretty significant differences...
I'm reminded of an incident that happened up here in Toronto. A writer died, and as part of her will, she wanted a tree planted and her ashes used to fertilize it. The tree was to be planted on the grounds of a library that she had previously donated a lot of her book collection to, and which had already been named in her honour.
The problem was that there are local by-laws regarding disposal of corpses, and this violated at least one of them. I believe someone attached to the library branch snuck out at midnight to make sure the author's wishes were kept, despite the bureaucrats.
Back in the early 70s when I was a radioman in the Navy and the incremental cost of encryption was nonzero we nevertheless encrypted many innocuous-sounding messages.
Of course, there's another reason to do this, and that's to mess up traffic analysis. If only important messages are encrypted, then the enemy will focus their attention where the encrypted messages are being sent, even if they can't be read. Innocuous encrypted messages act as red herrings, throwing off traffic analysis attempts.
I have to agree with the ‘No, it wasn't.’ on this.
A little background: I used to work in a small research firm that was partially government-funded and partially University-funded. (Basic idea was to take University research, do the development work to make it usable, then either sell it off or spin it off to a new high-tech company in the area.) Most of the people there were old University research people who started on Unix; this was in early 1993, pre-Windows 95 and just as Mosaic was becoming known. Because of that, and because most of our equipment budget went to what we were actually developing rather than our computers, our central setup was based on a single large Sun server and most of the other people had NEC X-terminals.
Many people were still using an NEC 19r, which was a 19-inch monochrome X terminal. Myself included. In fact, that was still my main terminal up until the company shut down our lab in 2002.
Back in the days of Netscape 2, a bug showed up in the Netscape browser that only affected people using some monochrome displays. The graphics library made an assumption about which of 0 or 1 was black or white without asking the X server which was which. As a result, on the 19r, any graphics would have black and white swapped, making it difficult to view. Text was just fine, but graphics would be wrong. We, and several others I believe, complained about this, and it was fixed some time during the Netscape 2.x days; it stayed fixed all through 3.x.
Netscape 4.x brought the same bug back again. Never mind that it was a known and reported bug that had been fixed already, somehow in the transition to 4.x they re-introduced it. And I don't believe it ever did get fixed again through 4.7.2
Cool by default because it was a movie about hacking before the world at large even knew about hacking (and phreaking, and blue boxes...)
Not to mention the fact that, unlike so many other movies about hacking, War Games involved actual research on the system being targeted on the part of the main character in the movie. Sure, most of the research was done as a montage because otherwise it's boring, but it was strongly implied that he spent weeks trying to figure out names based on what he could see.
Well, they did the 'submerged mouse' bit in the movie The Abyss; apparently the mouse actually was submerged, that wasn't SFX, though the actor's weren't.
They apparently did the same thing with the Tandy Color Computer for a while, during the early days of the 32K upgrade. Or at least so the rumour went.
Not for very long, though; soon enough 64K chips were cheap enough that nobody bothered selling the half-bad ones.
I wouldn't say that. The point, I believe, is that by multiplying by the average citation age (and by 'citation age' I'm assuming here it means the time between the original paper and the citation of it), you bias the rankings toward the papers that continued being cited long after they were written, and against the 'flash in the pan' papers that got dozens of citations the year after they were done, and then were ignored.
BTW - The admin requirements for running user programs isn't a fault of Microsoft. Run any of their apps, and you'll see they graciously handle limited priviledge account.
*laugh* Now, maybe. Does anybody else remember when Microsoft Office couldn't run on Windows NT using NTFS because it expected to be able to put temporary files into one of the System folders?
The CS career path is alive and well. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, most software never sits on retail shelves. Most software is written internally to a company for a specialized task, and is never sold outside of that company.
The point that the parent was making is that people who know coding and only coding are the ones in trouble anywhere outside of an academic environment. People who are cross-trained will survive. Someone with both CS and English training can write manuals. Someone with CS and Art or Psychology degrees works on user interfaces. Someone with CS and Geology training writes software to locate oil deposits. Someone with CS and Medical training writes software to analyze X-rays. And so on.
The days of the 'pure' coder are numbered. Anybody with a specialization aside from that still has opportunities.
Hey, I was one of the people working on the S2 data recorder for radio astronomy work. We actually did work on a computer network storage version of that system, which could have got up to about half a petabyte of data if all tricked out.
The S3 data recording system would, in theory, have been able to record at one gigabit per second, which is almost what you need here. (7*1024*16*15000 is close to 1.7 Gb/s, by my calculations). We were working on having it run unattended observations for 24 hours straight at that rate by using a robot to change tapes.
Too bad the S3 system never got past the preliminary prototyping work because of funding issues... which weren't helped by the development of the Mark V disk-based system.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my high school teachers used to say:
A lecture is the process by which the notes of the lecturer enter the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either.
The Author in question is James D. Nicoll, http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-499.html.
I've seen it on T-shirts around Toronto here as well, which isn't surprising, given James lives just over in Kitchener, ON... haven't talked to him much in a few years, though.
Hardly new. Who remembers the Iomega Zip drive 'Click of Death'?
That didn't happen on the first launch drives, on any of the parallel or SCSI drives. It didn't happen until a couple of years later, when Iomega redesigned their drive mechanism to be cheaper for the mass production of IDE models. The 'now that we have it working, let's make it as cheap as possible for when we sell millions' problem is what killed them in the end.
Much like only Reagan could possibly have negotiated some of the disarmament treaties he did with the Soviet Union, because just about anybody else would have been pilloried as being 'soft on commies'. Nobody could have accused Reagan of that, not after his work as McCarthy's pit-bull in Hollywood.
And I'm playing Civilization: Call to Power on my Linux box right now. It was one of the first games released by Loki, and yes, I bought it from them fairly early on to help support Linux gaming. Still works just fine. Granted, it is a static binary.
but somebody had not read the fucking manual.
We are talking about post-Stalin Soviet Russia here, the paranoid state incarnate.
What makes you think the 'grunt' operators even knew where the manual was? The basic operators had been told what to do under certain circumstances, none of them really knew what the circumstances meant.
And you can make a better and better case these days that it's really Waterloo-Kitchener-Cambridge...
And life in Canada is still Imperial to a large extent for one simple reason: the U.S. is still our largest trading partner, as well as largest source of television and the like. It's difficult to get away from it when our nearest neighbour is one of the loudest holdouts.
Back in 1986, when Expo '86 was running in Vancouver B.C., the highway distance signs (which had been replaced with Metric-only signs several years previously) got amended to add miles to them again because of all the Americans from Washington State who were expected to come visit for the fair.
And I suspect, as several others have said previously, that part of the actions of both the judges and IBM's lawyers is to make sure that all the i's are dotted and the t's crossed legally, and that SCO has had time to not only shoot out their foot but to track the gun all the way up to their hips so that whey they do try to whine later about how unfair it was... they won't have a leg to stand on.
Except that, when you get right down to it, they've already implemented pretty much all of the spec before submitting it to the standards agency. The spec being big won't slow them down any.
Yes, I've long considered that the perfect introductory quote for Stallman.
That song is a classic, but it's by Barnes and Barnes. (I have it on a Dr. Demento compilation)
Yep, it's on the 20th anniversary compilation. And the amusing bit is that one of the ‘Barnes’ was actually Bill Mumy, who also played Lennier on Babylon 5, the which contained the inspiration for the ‘put [his] head on a pike’ quote that started this...
It all comes back around, sooner or later.
An ‘all-American’ sport that was invented by a Canadian; James Naismith was born in Ontario and went to University at McGill in Montreal.
I remember seeing a description once, that listed the rough percentage differences in genetic makeup between various groups. I seem to recall that the maximum difference between any two humans was about 0.2% of our genetic structure. (For comparison, humans and chimps differ in about 2% of our genetic structure.)
(As another note, these sorts of numbers are more than a little controversial, as there is great debate over whether to count all base pairs, only base pairs that would change the resulting amino acid, or only ‘active’ genes.)
The thing that got me from the original article was that to get the maximum difference between two humans, you had to take two people from two different relatively isolated and inbred tribes in Africa. Effectively, you get several ‘pools’ of genetic information when they're separated from each other, and the pools will tend to drift in different directions. Sure, all of those groups could still interbreed, but from a genetic point of view there were some pretty significant differences...
Heh.
I'm reminded of an incident that happened up here in Toronto. A writer died, and as part of her will, she wanted a tree planted and her ashes used to fertilize it. The tree was to be planted on the grounds of a library that she had previously donated a lot of her book collection to, and which had already been named in her honour.
The problem was that there are local by-laws regarding disposal of corpses, and this violated at least one of them. I believe someone attached to the library branch snuck out at midnight to make sure the author's wishes were kept, despite the bureaucrats.
Back in the early 70s when I was a radioman in the Navy and the incremental cost of encryption was nonzero we nevertheless encrypted many innocuous-sounding messages.
Of course, there's another reason to do this, and that's to mess up traffic analysis. If only important messages are encrypted, then the enemy will focus their attention where the encrypted messages are being sent, even if they can't be read. Innocuous encrypted messages act as red herrings, throwing off traffic analysis attempts.
netscape 4.7 ... was a good browser
No, it wasn't.
I have to agree with the ‘No, it wasn't.’ on this.
A little background: I used to work in a small research firm that was partially government-funded and partially University-funded. (Basic idea was to take University research, do the development work to make it usable, then either sell it off or spin it off to a new high-tech company in the area.) Most of the people there were old University research people who started on Unix; this was in early 1993, pre-Windows 95 and just as Mosaic was becoming known. Because of that, and because most of our equipment budget went to what we were actually developing rather than our computers, our central setup was based on a single large Sun server and most of the other people had NEC X-terminals.
Many people were still using an NEC 19r, which was a 19-inch monochrome X terminal. Myself included. In fact, that was still my main terminal up until the company shut down our lab in 2002.
Back in the days of Netscape 2, a bug showed up in the Netscape browser that only affected people using some monochrome displays. The graphics library made an assumption about which of 0 or 1 was black or white without asking the X server which was which. As a result, on the 19r, any graphics would have black and white swapped, making it difficult to view. Text was just fine, but graphics would be wrong. We, and several others I believe, complained about this, and it was fixed some time during the Netscape 2.x days; it stayed fixed all through 3.x.
Netscape 4.x brought the same bug back again. Never mind that it was a known and reported bug that had been fixed already, somehow in the transition to 4.x they re-introduced it. And I don't believe it ever did get fixed again through 4.7.2
-- Bryan Feir
I'm reminded of the Sluggy Freelance iSophagus ideas...
No, no. Before Sneakers there was "War Games."
Cool by default because it was a movie about hacking before the world at large even knew about hacking (and phreaking, and blue boxes...)
Not to mention the fact that, unlike so many other movies about hacking, War Games involved actual research on the system being targeted on the part of the main character in the movie. Sure, most of the research was done as a montage because otherwise it's boring, but it was strongly implied that he spent weeks trying to figure out names based on what he could see.
Well, they did the 'submerged mouse' bit in the movie The Abyss; apparently the mouse actually was submerged, that wasn't SFX, though the actor's weren't.
They apparently did the same thing with the Tandy Color Computer for a while, during the early days of the 32K upgrade. Or at least so the rumour went.
Not for very long, though; soon enough 64K chips were cheap enough that nobody bothered selling the half-bad ones.
I wouldn't say that. The point, I believe, is that by multiplying by the average citation age (and by 'citation age' I'm assuming here it means the time between the original paper and the citation of it), you bias the rankings toward the papers that continued being cited long after they were written, and against the 'flash in the pan' papers that got dozens of citations the year after they were done, and then were ignored.
BTW - The admin requirements for running user programs isn't a fault of Microsoft. Run any of their apps, and you'll see they graciously handle limited priviledge account.
*laugh* Now, maybe. Does anybody else remember when Microsoft Office couldn't run on Windows NT using NTFS because it expected to be able to put temporary files into one of the System folders?
No, you're the one who has missed the point.
The CS career path is alive and well. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, most software never sits on retail shelves. Most software is written internally to a company for a specialized task, and is never sold outside of that company.
The point that the parent was making is that people who know coding and only coding are the ones in trouble anywhere outside of an academic environment. People who are cross-trained will survive. Someone with both CS and English training can write manuals. Someone with CS and Art or Psychology degrees works on user interfaces. Someone with CS and Geology training writes software to locate oil deposits. Someone with CS and Medical training writes software to analyze X-rays. And so on.
The days of the 'pure' coder are numbered. Anybody with a specialization aside from that still has opportunities.
-- Bryan Feir
Hey, I was one of the people working on the S2 data recorder for radio astronomy work. We actually did work on a computer network storage version of that system, which could have got up to about half a petabyte of data if all tricked out.
The S3 data recording system would, in theory, have been able to record at one gigabit per second, which is almost what you need here. (7*1024*16*15000 is close to 1.7 Gb/s, by my calculations). We were working on having it run unattended observations for 24 hours straight at that rate by using a robot to change tapes.
Too bad the S3 system never got past the preliminary prototyping work because of funding issues... which weren't helped by the development of the Mark V disk-based system.
-- Bryan Feir