... is a tablet that let's me read PDFs in the same size as the 8.2x11 output I would normally read after it was printed. I would really love a tablet -- or a generic e-book reader -- with a bunch of storage to allow me to carry around all of the PDFs of manuals that I might need when working on a problem at a customer site without having to download something from the web/cloud (which might not be available after all; that's why I'm on-site: trying to fix a problem that might have taken the network down). Shrinking the page down to fit a 10-inch screen doesn't hack it. Making me scroll a viewing window around to view the page especially doesn't hack it. I don't need/want a built-in camera (which frankly can't even begin to compete with my DSLR with interchangeable lens) , photo editing, or a bunch of games, etc. Make the darned screen bigger!
Yep. WD used to not support the Blue, Green, and Black drives in RAID setups. (I ran into this about a year ago.) WD now seems to support RAID0 and RAID1. RAID5 still doesn't appear to be officially supported by WD and I'm not sure what Seagate's current policy is on consumer class drives and RAID. I had nothing but headaches trying to get a pair of Green drives to work in a RAID1 setup. The raidset would go offline at the drop of a hat. The problem was related to a "feature" in the drive firmware and the way it dealt with a bad block. (The remapping could take quite a while and play havoc with Linux "md" raidsets.) At the time both vendors were saying that you had use "enterprise" class drives like, say, WD "RE" and Seagate Constellation ES, if you're going to use them in a RAID configuration. Of course, they cost a fair amount more than the consumer oriented disks.
... not going to be surprised when I forward them the particulars of this story and receive the "I told you so" (or is that "I informed you thusly"?) that I warned them about.
If I can't touch the disk drives I don't want my data residing on them.
Why? Jeez, I've been reading about E17 for so long now that it I'm starting to wonder if the thing'll ever see the light of day. A 3010 release doesn't seem all that unlikely the way it's been going. (Did they bring in the release manager from the Duke Nukem team?)
And you need to solve all of those problems (and many more) for multiple engines. Who operates single engine commercial passenger planes? Nobody. (I doubt one could even get FAA certification.) It'll likely be decades before anyone even makes the solar powered equivalent of a high-wing Cessna capable of carrying the typical four-passenger load that private planes easily handle now let alone a multi-engine commercial passenger plane.
Has anyone done the math for what the power output of a Cessna-sized wing covered with current technology solar panels would be? Are there any electric motors capable of translating that electrical output into sufficient lift to even get such a plane off the ground on a sunny day? If not, how big would such a wing need to be to get you enough power to get the plane off the ground? How maneuverable would the plane be with the gigantic wing that will likely be needed? I suspect that solar power may never be practical for use in aviation -- at least commercial aviation. Now I wouldn't bet against some EAA member concocting something that could be flown at Oshkosh. (But I would bet against their being able to fly it to and from the event.)
"Imagine not being able to sell your 4-5 year old car to buy a newer model. How will this ruling apply to things such as the secondary market for used CDs (many of which are imported)?"
There is a possibility that can SCOTUS rules that individuals have no rights to sell anything used. Think that won't happen? Well, the Citizen's United case was much more narrowly defined than what eventually came out of the Roberts court. One can only hope that, if they rule that way, Congress will wake up and set things straight though, personally, I wouldn't hold my breath of that happening. The money involved will prevent the little guy from seeing the right thing being done.
"In fact, for much of what I do, without X11 support (and only Wayland display supported), I would probably be better off with a Windows desktop instead of a Linux desktop."
I wonder if you haven't cracked the code. I see Wayland as just one more thing to make Linux more like Windows. (Like that's even a goal that the Linux community should be aspiring to.)
Personally, I would rather have a root canal without anesthetic than administer UNIX/Linux systems using a Windows desktop. If it weren't for Cygwin having a Windows desktop would be intolerable. Pity there isn't a way (at least I have seen one yet) to implement multiple workspaces on a Windows system.
... will see this and push to end all development of non-internal-combustion-based transportation technologies. And he will tout this development as the solution to climate change. (You know, the climate change that he denies is taking place.) Anyone want to bet on how long it takes for him to crawl out from under his rock to hold a press conference telling us about his intention to offer up legislation to that end?
I always thought the two starter books should be something like "The 8086 Primer" and, maybe, Peter Norton's "Inside the IBM PC". Except for a couple of basic microprocessor texts I used for undergraduate classes (by Peatman and Levanthal) those were my intros to programming. Then there were some titles from Sams. (I still have them but I'd have to go look for them.) C came later.
"You learn a lot about how terrible your code is by trying to document it."
I recall reading an article years (decades, actually) ago where students that were working on projects for a class were encouraged to write the documentation first. The groups that chose to go that route wound up with better working code. I've tried that on several occasions for smaller utilities that I'm going to be handing off to other teams to use. It really does seem to work especially if the users are able to give you feedback based on the early documentation. You may find that you're missing a feature/switch that they'd really like to see but that you overlooked. (It's often easier to build in those features without major rewrites. At least that's been my experience.)
Anyone using the excuse that they're coders and not technical writers should be worried about their job (IMNSHO). I'd bet anything that someone who is using that excuse already has a manager dissatisfied with their performance. If someone's writing the code just for their personal use then, fine, don't document it. (Just be aware that even though you know the code inside and out now doesn't mean you'll remember how it works in a year or so. I have boxes of floppies containing code that I would have to spend hours reverse engineering because I skipped the documentation -- or didn't comment thoroughly -- thinking that the code was self-explanatory. It wasn't after a time.) If someone does release their project and then complains about those pesky users who aren't willing to dive into the code to see how the wonderful tool works, don't surprised if your the base dwindles and dwindles quickly. Personally, I'd write the documentation just to avoid, or at least reduce, the nuisance emails.
"What the hell are you doing with 4-5 different distro installed at the same time. it sound to be a pain to maintain all that."
Exactly. Though I do have two running on systems now. But since one of them is really old, I don't have any hassle with updates. (Until I get around to replacing that system. Then I'll be down to a single distribution.)
Anyway...
Slackware -> RedHat -> SuSE -> OpenSUSE
Prior to that is was Coherent -> Consensys SVR4.2
And prior to that it was... wait... I'm getting off-topic now.
... but is this really better than good ol' Courier?
Personally, I find san-serif fonts a bit of a strain to read for long periods of time. For a while Lucida typewriter was fine but I keep switching back to Courier.
Take that first bit of the article and simply substitute the topic of the day:
"The Romney-Ryan campaign has released a white paper on fill-in-the-blank policy, which observers find to be long on criticisms of the Obama Administration but short on specific recommendations."
I think this could be used successfully to describe virtually everything released by the Republican candidates. Try it with "economic", "immigration", etc. See? It works!
As usual, my radar is alerting me to a financial reason for this surprising result. ("Follow the money", etc.)
I often buy "organic" but I can't ever recall doing that because "organically-grown" vegetables and fruits taste better -- I doubt my taste buds would be able to distinguish which one was organic -- or have a slightly higher nutritional content. It's the other nasty stuff on -- or more importantly in and can't be washed off -- the produce that I'm looking to avoid.
Given the choice between two pieces of produce that were grown by an organic farming method and another that was sprayed with the normal chemical bath that most agribusinesses rely on, I'll choose the one that doesn't contain the chemicals that could be (and in some cases shown to be) causing cancers.
How should they promote it to listeners who aren't already streaming music in their vehicles? These listeners use FM radio because they don't already have a sufficiently expensive data plan or they aren't aware of the streaming sites.
Or, you know, maybe they like radio. Some people actually do.
Nowadays, radio is fine is all you want is some background noise while you're performing some menial task.
But... if you try listening to the radio to actually hear music, you'll be very disappointed.
Any more, I only listen to the radio when I want to hear a talk show. Any other time, dinosaur that I am, I've played a CD or, if at home, a jukebox of CDs to avoid having to listen to close to thirty minutes of commercials per hour. (Happily, I can still listen to classical music on the radio. The commercials are fewer in number and announcer-read so they're not so jarring.) One "Classic Rock" station I grew up with started out as a classical station with Rock after midnight (then 11:00PM, then 10:00, and so on until they went Rock full time in the early/mid-'70s). A favorite memory: an hour of Bach organ music that segued -- without any announcement -- to Genesis's "Watcher of the Skies". Even after going to full-time Rock, they still played some classical music. It wasn't unusual to hear Beatles followed by Bach or Santana after some Stravinsky. That sort of thing will never happen on the radio ever again. They had announcer read ads. A very high music/ad ratio. Some years ago they were bought out by Clear Channel and, I swear, I cannot turn to that station without hearing a five-minute-long string of ads. Three songs in a row -- if you're lucky -- and another five minutes of ads. And, to make things even worse, their playlist is about 50% songs that have been used in TV ads. I can't listen to them any more. None of that matters, of course, to the Clear Channel executives that have ruined the airwaves.
If the royalties go up for the terrestrial radio stations, one can expect that the ratio of music time / commercial time will only decrease even further and, eventually, drive away any listeners that the radio station had. One would think that the RIAA would realize this but, sadly, their members' heads are so far up their collective asses that they would rather see the complete demise of radio stations than take a smaller profit year to year.
Sounds roughly what I recall was the difference between the overhead rate we used to have as a state-university research/engineering organization (~15%) versus what private companies were claiming (25%+). (We didn't have a CEO pulling down a huge salary so there was significant savings there.) You can't get down to 0% but guys like Ryan would love for you to believe that the free market would be able to attain that unrealistic goal.
``The system calls and lots of the design are clearly cloned. Anyone who used both CP/M and MS-DOS back in the day and who dabbled in assembly language programming on both would be able to spot it.''
Back when CP/M was still kicking around, I had a Columbia Data Products XT-clone. It shipped with MS-DOS and CP/M-86 and I recall reading through the programming manual and thinking ``Geez this looks a lot like DEC's RT-11.'' Remember when MS-DOS used to ask you to insert the diskette containing COMMAND.COM? That was a memory claiming trick that was part of CP/M as well. RT-11 would also overwrite part of the command interpreter when extra memory was needed -- after the OS was loaded you typically only had about 48KB or so in which to run programs unless you made heavy use of overlays -- and reload it after program execution was complete. (I cannot recall, though, ever being asked to reinsert the RT-11 OS disk.) Terminate and stay resident tricks? You could do that with IBM's CMS operating system. Imagine if the computer industry's legal teams had been as aggressive back in the early days of the PC as they are today. Once that silly suit involving spreadsheet look-and-feel came about, it was all downhill (IMHO).
``Nothing wrong with providing a quick glossary/appendix (or links thereto) either.''
While the editors would probably delete it because of "space concerns" (translation: "we needed that space for another advertisement") a glossary would most welcome in many articles. I use footnotes in my own writing instead of a glossary but those aren't exactly popular in many forms of writing. (They're downright horrible to try and incorporate into web publications; at least I've never found any implementations that weren't awkward for the reader to use.) At the very least, the author should expand acronyms the first time they are used rather than assume everyone knows what the darned things mean. What may be a commonly used acronym familiar to experts in one field may mean something completely different to readers from another field. For example, I can think of at least three ways to interpret "CMS". I'm sure there are many more.
...will soon be obsolete. Once you need to buy a new iPod or iPhone, it won't work with your existing clock/radio and you'll have to replace it. I'm sure Apple feels your pain when you have to throw out a perfectly functional piece of electronic equipment that is no longer usable with newer Apple products. But don't worry... there's plenty of room in the local landfill for your old clock/radio. I'm betting on this move to a smaller connector was at the request of the Apple aftermarket vendors who've had a hard time selling more of the iPod/iPhone clock/radio units, external speakers, etc. and who know that the Apple buying suckers will happily toss out their old-but-still-working hardware and replace it with something new but doesn't offer any advantages over the previous unit other than the being compatible with Apple's new connector. Not just stupid but f'ing stupid.
Apple's arrogance is what keeps me from owning anything with their logo on it. (Disclaimer: I have an old iPod nano that the CIO gave to everyone who completed a large project some years ago. Pity I need iTunes to use the damned thing and the only computer that'll run iTunes is used exclusively for work and I cannot install non-work software on it. Luckily, I already had a Cowon player that works perfectly well with all of the Linux systems at home.)
From the Gizmodo article:
``it's hard to fault a company for chasing after a newer and potentially better technology for our benefit''
And the benefit of this new/smaller connector for the end user is what? I can't recall the last time I read a more useless piece of Apple apologist drivel.
``The company is hoping that consumers will be willing to pay more, though it is unlikely that the âoeMade in Americaâ lineage will be part of any marketing campaign.''
Why the heck not? Based on the number of people I've talked with that complain about everything being made in Japan, China, or anywhere else across the big ponds, they ought to make that phrase part of the darned product name. Their sales certainly wouldn't be hurt by boasting about it being manufactured domestically.
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... is a tablet that let's me read PDFs in the same size as the 8.2x11 output I would normally read after it was printed. I would really love a tablet -- or a generic e-book reader -- with a bunch of storage to allow me to carry around all of the PDFs of manuals that I might need when working on a problem at a customer site without having to download something from the web/cloud (which might not be available after all; that's why I'm on-site: trying to fix a problem that might have taken the network down). Shrinking the page down to fit a 10-inch screen doesn't hack it. Making me scroll a viewing window around to view the page especially doesn't hack it. I don't need/want a built-in camera (which frankly can't even begin to compete with my DSLR with interchangeable lens) , photo editing, or a bunch of games, etc. Make the darned screen bigger!
Yep. WD used to not support the Blue, Green, and Black drives in RAID setups. (I ran into this about a year ago.) WD now seems to support RAID0 and RAID1. RAID5 still doesn't appear to be officially supported by WD and I'm not sure what Seagate's current policy is on consumer class drives and RAID. I had nothing but headaches trying to get a pair of Green drives to work in a RAID1 setup. The raidset would go offline at the drop of a hat. The problem was related to a "feature" in the drive firmware and the way it dealt with a bad block. (The remapping could take quite a while and play havoc with Linux "md" raidsets.) At the time both vendors were saying that you had use "enterprise" class drives like, say, WD "RE" and Seagate Constellation ES, if you're going to use them in a RAID configuration. Of course, they cost a fair amount more than the consumer oriented disks.
... not going to be surprised when I forward them the particulars of this story and receive the "I told you so" (or is that "I informed you thusly"?) that I warned them about.
If I can't touch the disk drives I don't want my data residing on them.
Why? Jeez, I've been reading about E17 for so long now that it I'm starting to wonder if the thing'll ever see the light of day. A 3010 release doesn't seem all that unlikely the way it's been going. (Did they bring in the release manager from the Duke Nukem team?)
And you need to solve all of those problems (and many more) for multiple engines. Who operates single engine commercial passenger planes? Nobody. (I doubt one could even get FAA certification.) It'll likely be decades before anyone even makes the solar powered equivalent of a high-wing Cessna capable of carrying the typical four-passenger load that private planes easily handle now let alone a multi-engine commercial passenger plane.
Has anyone done the math for what the power output of a Cessna-sized wing covered with current technology solar panels would be? Are there any electric motors capable of translating that electrical output into sufficient lift to even get such a plane off the ground on a sunny day? If not, how big would such a wing need to be to get you enough power to get the plane off the ground? How maneuverable would the plane be with the gigantic wing that will likely be needed? I suspect that solar power may never be practical for use in aviation -- at least commercial aviation. Now I wouldn't bet against some EAA member concocting something that could be flown at Oshkosh. (But I would bet against their being able to fly it to and from the event.)
There is a possibility that can SCOTUS rules that individuals have no rights to sell anything used. Think that won't happen? Well, the Citizen's United case was much more narrowly defined than what eventually came out of the Roberts court. One can only hope that, if they rule that way, Congress will wake up and set things straight though, personally, I wouldn't hold my breath of that happening. The money involved will prevent the little guy from seeing the right thing being done.
I wonder if you haven't cracked the code. I see Wayland as just one more thing to make Linux more like Windows. (Like that's even a goal that the Linux community should be aspiring to.)
Personally, I would rather have a root canal without anesthetic than administer UNIX/Linux systems using a Windows desktop. If it weren't for Cygwin having a Windows desktop would be intolerable. Pity there isn't a way (at least I have seen one yet) to implement multiple workspaces on a Windows system.
... will see this and push to end all development of non-internal-combustion-based transportation technologies. And he will tout this development as the solution to climate change. (You know, the climate change that he denies is taking place.) Anyone want to bet on how long it takes for him to crawl out from under his rock to hold a press conference telling us about his intention to offer up legislation to that end?
... sort of indicates "mission accomplished". (Though I doubt that ramming an "enemy" sub is part of normal procedure.)
I always thought the two starter books should be something like "The 8086 Primer" and, maybe, Peter Norton's "Inside the IBM PC". Except for a couple of basic microprocessor texts I used for undergraduate classes (by Peatman and Levanthal) those were my intros to programming. Then there were some titles from Sams. (I still have them but I'd have to go look for them.) C came later.
... well documented in"Crack in the World"?
I recall reading an article years (decades, actually) ago where students that were working on projects for a class were encouraged to write the documentation first. The groups that chose to go that route wound up with better working code. I've tried that on several occasions for smaller utilities that I'm going to be handing off to other teams to use. It really does seem to work especially if the users are able to give you feedback based on the early documentation. You may find that you're missing a feature/switch that they'd really like to see but that you overlooked. (It's often easier to build in those features without major rewrites. At least that's been my experience.)
Anyone using the excuse that they're coders and not technical writers should be worried about their job (IMNSHO). I'd bet anything that someone who is using that excuse already has a manager dissatisfied with their performance. If someone's writing the code just for their personal use then, fine, don't document it. (Just be aware that even though you know the code inside and out now doesn't mean you'll remember how it works in a year or so. I have boxes of floppies containing code that I would have to spend hours reverse engineering because I skipped the documentation -- or didn't comment thoroughly -- thinking that the code was self-explanatory. It wasn't after a time.) If someone does release their project and then complains about those pesky users who aren't willing to dive into the code to see how the wonderful tool works, don't surprised if your the base dwindles and dwindles quickly. Personally, I'd write the documentation just to avoid, or at least reduce, the nuisance emails.
Exactly. Though I do have two running on systems now. But since one of them is really old, I don't have any hassle with updates. (Until I get around to replacing that system. Then I'll be down to a single distribution.)
Anyway...
Slackware -> RedHat -> SuSE -> OpenSUSE
Prior to that is was Coherent -> Consensys SVR4.2
And prior to that it was... wait... I'm getting off-topic now.
Other accounts that I've read on this story indicate that he is a Republican. And one who's not doing so well in his campaign.
... but is this really better than good ol' Courier?
Personally, I find san-serif fonts a bit of a strain to read for long periods of time. For a while Lucida typewriter was fine but I keep switching back to Courier.
Take that first bit of the article and simply substitute the topic of the day:
I think this could be used successfully to describe virtually everything released by the Republican candidates. Try it with "economic", "immigration", etc. See? It works!
As usual, my radar is alerting me to a financial reason for this surprising result. ("Follow the money", etc.)
I often buy "organic" but I can't ever recall doing that because "organically-grown" vegetables and fruits taste better -- I doubt my taste buds would be able to distinguish which one was organic -- or have a slightly higher nutritional content. It's the other nasty stuff on -- or more importantly in and can't be washed off -- the produce that I'm looking to avoid.
Given the choice between two pieces of produce that were grown by an organic farming method and another that was sprayed with the normal chemical bath that most agribusinesses rely on, I'll choose the one that doesn't contain the chemicals that could be (and in some cases shown to be) causing cancers.
Nowadays, radio is fine is all you want is some background noise while you're performing some menial task.
But... if you try listening to the radio to actually hear music, you'll be very disappointed.
Any more, I only listen to the radio when I want to hear a talk show. Any other time, dinosaur that I am, I've played a CD or, if at home, a jukebox of CDs to avoid having to listen to close to thirty minutes of commercials per hour. (Happily, I can still listen to classical music on the radio. The commercials are fewer in number and announcer-read so they're not so jarring.) One "Classic Rock" station I grew up with started out as a classical station with Rock after midnight (then 11:00PM, then 10:00, and so on until they went Rock full time in the early/mid-'70s). A favorite memory: an hour of Bach organ music that segued -- without any announcement -- to Genesis's "Watcher of the Skies". Even after going to full-time Rock, they still played some classical music. It wasn't unusual to hear Beatles followed by Bach or Santana after some Stravinsky. That sort of thing will never happen on the radio ever again. They had announcer read ads. A very high music/ad ratio. Some years ago they were bought out by Clear Channel and, I swear, I cannot turn to that station without hearing a five-minute-long string of ads. Three songs in a row -- if you're lucky -- and another five minutes of ads. And, to make things even worse, their playlist is about 50% songs that have been used in TV ads. I can't listen to them any more. None of that matters, of course, to the Clear Channel executives that have ruined the airwaves.
If the royalties go up for the terrestrial radio stations, one can expect that the ratio of music time / commercial time will only decrease even further and, eventually, drive away any listeners that the radio station had. One would think that the RIAA would realize this but, sadly, their members' heads are so far up their collective asses that they would rather see the complete demise of radio stations than take a smaller profit year to year.
Sounds roughly what I recall was the difference between the overhead rate we used to have as a state-university research/engineering organization (~15%) versus what private companies were claiming (25%+). (We didn't have a CEO pulling down a huge salary so there was significant savings there.) You can't get down to 0% but guys like Ryan would love for you to believe that the free market would be able to attain that unrealistic goal.
Back when CP/M was still kicking around, I had a Columbia Data Products XT-clone. It shipped with MS-DOS and CP/M-86 and I recall reading through the programming manual and thinking ``Geez this looks a lot like DEC's RT-11.'' Remember when MS-DOS used to ask you to insert the diskette containing COMMAND.COM? That was a memory claiming trick that was part of CP/M as well. RT-11 would also overwrite part of the command interpreter when extra memory was needed -- after the OS was loaded you typically only had about 48KB or so in which to run programs unless you made heavy use of overlays -- and reload it after program execution was complete. (I cannot recall, though, ever being asked to reinsert the RT-11 OS disk.) Terminate and stay resident tricks? You could do that with IBM's CMS operating system. Imagine if the computer industry's legal teams had been as aggressive back in the early days of the PC as they are today. Once that silly suit involving spreadsheet look-and-feel came about, it was all downhill (IMHO).
While the editors would probably delete it because of "space concerns" (translation: "we needed that space for another advertisement") a glossary would most welcome in many articles. I use footnotes in my own writing instead of a glossary but those aren't exactly popular in many forms of writing. (They're downright horrible to try and incorporate into web publications; at least I've never found any implementations that weren't awkward for the reader to use.) At the very least, the author should expand acronyms the first time they are used rather than assume everyone knows what the darned things mean. What may be a commonly used acronym familiar to experts in one field may mean something completely different to readers from another field. For example, I can think of at least three ways to interpret "CMS". I'm sure there are many more.
...will soon be obsolete. Once you need to buy a new iPod or iPhone, it won't work with your existing clock/radio and you'll have to replace it. I'm sure Apple feels your pain when you have to throw out a perfectly functional piece of electronic equipment that is no longer usable with newer Apple products. But don't worry... there's plenty of room in the local landfill for your old clock/radio. I'm betting on this move to a smaller connector was at the request of the Apple aftermarket vendors who've had a hard time selling more of the iPod/iPhone clock/radio units, external speakers, etc. and who know that the Apple buying suckers will happily toss out their old-but-still-working hardware and replace it with something new but doesn't offer any advantages over the previous unit other than the being compatible with Apple's new connector. Not just stupid but f'ing stupid.
Apple's arrogance is what keeps me from owning anything with their logo on it. (Disclaimer: I have an old iPod nano that the CIO gave to everyone who completed a large project some years ago. Pity I need iTunes to use the damned thing and the only computer that'll run iTunes is used exclusively for work and I cannot install non-work software on it. Luckily, I already had a Cowon player that works perfectly well with all of the Linux systems at home.)
From the Gizmodo article:
And the benefit of this new/smaller connector for the end user is what? I can't recall the last time I read a more useless piece of Apple apologist drivel.
Texas and Florida are probably submitting bids at this very moment.
Why the heck not? Based on the number of people I've talked with that complain about everything being made in Japan, China, or anywhere else across the big ponds, they ought to make that phrase part of the darned product name. Their sales certainly wouldn't be hurt by boasting about it being manufactured domestically.
Boy that one probably just soared over a lot of peoples' heads. I'm guessing most didn't know what you were referring to without Googling it.