Because we are much more facile at using spoken language to be precise than we are at using mouse+keyboard to be precise
Wow. Where did you get that idea? Most of the non-engineers I have encountered require an interpreter ('consultant') to translate their spoken words into something which is sufficiently precise to enter into a computer. Anybody who's been involved in the analysis/specification stage of a development project will know what I mean.
They aren't any better at doing it with a keyboard, but they sure can't do it when speaking.
It's the airline's property so if they want to check your id before they let you onboard, its their right.
The whole point of Gilmore's suit has always been that the airlines are claiming they aren't doing it, and that in fact the government is requiring them to check people's identity, but that the instructions from the government are secret laws so they can't say anything more (the government refuses to explain or deny this). Yes, it's as confusing and inexplicable as it sounds. Gilmore has been trying to shake some sense out of this in the courts (without much luck so far).
You could read the website linked in the article in order to gain some modicum of insight into what the article is actually about.
Screw global warming, I want the electrical codes to mandate isolation switches on everything just as good design principle. That does not preclude the existence of a standby mode - most of my current computers have both an ATX soft power button, and an isolator on the back of the PSU. The isolator is switched off whenever I'm doing maintainance or leaving the system off for an extended period of time. And I think that *everything* should have such a function for exactly these purposes.
Otherwise penny-pinchers in management go around removing the isolator switches from products just to scrape a little bit more off the manufacturing cost.
Asimov was exploring the problem of how robots would interact with productive civilian life. His laws were designed with that goal in mind. They're practically a description of consumer rights laws, in those countries which have such ideas.
I don't think he ever seriously explored the idea of using robots for mindless retaliatory destruction. What would be the point? Humans already do so well at it on their own.
Re:My short experience with perl...
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 1
Perl's syntax is based on linguistics, not the last programming language you happened to use. It's something you'd expect if you'd bothered to learn it. Expecting $language_N to behave like $language_N-1 reflects on your expectations, not on $language_N.
It makes Perl's syntax a lot *easier* to get to grips with if you ever bother to learn it. If you don't bother to learn it, at least it got rid of you before you committed any more atrocities in the language.
In Python, you can sit down and pound out whatever dumb stuff you like, and then when you deploy it, it'll throw a nice pretty exception telling you exactly why you're fired. No thanks.
SUCH A WASTE of time. If my kids spent half the time that they play games on learning a computer language, then they would be pulling down six figure salaries.
Which is the most important thing, after all.
How else are you going to pay for all those games?
The 'problem' is that people want to believe that the work they are doing has some intrinsic value - rather than being mindless graft that any warm body can do with a little training. They believe this because governments and TV have been bombarding them with the idea that they 'deserve' to get paid, despite their job being little more than corporate largesse. They aren't willing to accept that in the capitalist market they think they like so much, everything - including them - is worth no more than what somebody is willing to pay for it.
Most people are stupid, and are doing stupid pointless jobs that would have been automated out of existence if people weren't so stupid. Callcenters for tier 1 support are a good example. The purpose of a callcenter is to read the manual to people who are too stupid to read it for themselves. That's all the operators are doing - sitting and reading from a script. This job has no right to exist in a sane world. You could just ship the script with the product and let people read it for themselves. But the world isn't sane, and so we have people doing a worthless job - and then complaining when somebody realises how disposable they are.
The next time you're getting paid to work, consider this: how much of what you're doing can be handled by any semiliterate muppet who has attended a training course? How much requires some form of skill, and how much merely requires a set of instructions?
This was inevitable really. Once Intel woke up and realised that they couldn't just coast along without opposition any longer, they had to trim the pork from their operation and start turning out cheaper processors. AMD didn't have any fundamental advantages over Intel, they were just trying harder. It's one of those rare occasions where the free market demonstrates actual competition that results in positive effects - or at least, it appears to be.
One of the most exciting is LINQ which will change the way we interact with SQL databases
Change the way we interact with SQL databases? Only if you've been lumbered with clumsy systems so far. There's nothing in here that perl hasn't had for years, and done better - like the positively scary Class::DBI::Loader, which peers into your database and whips up a class heirarchy to access it on the fly. And if your language needs language extensions to handle interfacing with SQL of all things, then that's a good indicator that your language sucks.
The rest of us know the industrial world is full of dangerous stuff that should be handled with care - except in clean nuclear fantasy land.
And in clean coal-power fantasy land. That was the point he was making. Coal plants just take all their dangerous stuff that should be handled with care... and pump it into the surrounding environment. Why are we so paranoid about nuclear plants (way above normal industrial caution) on the one hand, and so blase about coal plants (way *below* normal industrial caution) on the other?
Well, for technical reasons relating to fuel-efficient orbit paths, you want to launch from somewhere vaguely near to the equator - don't expect to see many orbital craft going up from canada any time soon (IIUC it doesn't matter so much if you aren't intending to make a stable orbit). And you need a highly developed local industry to support the launch site operations. But you still have several good choices outside the US.
I expect that this will mean there will be a fair number of launches from US territory, though.
No, it's not that "most people are perfectly fine with ads". It's that ad filtering technology has surpassed advertising technology and continues to stay ahead, and will continue to do so because marketdroids are stupid and people who hate ads are usually not. I almost never see adverts on the web any more, and when I do, I don't see them for long. Why bother complaining when I can simply remove them?
Of course, that means advertising is a fundamentally flawed funding model. It survives only in the gap between people who know how to use the service and people who know how to remove the ads. We knew that already.
You will never make money from me by advertising. You will do it only by convincing me that my life will be improved if I give you money. Forcing me to watch ads is reducing the quality of my life, so I then consider the person who forced them upon me to owe *me* money (which means I'm not likely to give them any). And I have no ethical qualms about causing my debtors to lose money by continuing to use their service.
That's not how capitalist markets work. You can target a niche (that nobody else is targetting), you can target the bottom end (on price), or you can target the top end (on price) - all of those methods will work. You cannot target a broad demographic (except based on religion or physical constraints, like gender and disability) or the middle of the market; if you try, then the people targetting the top and bottom ends will crush you between them. This is simplified (there's other things you can do and survive), but it gets the essential point across.
Somebody who makes 'cheap laptops' wins. Somebody who makes 'expensive laptops' wins. If you make 'laptops for schools' and 'laptops for consumers' then the former two groups gang up on you and wipe you out.
The thing which you target to schools, or consumers, or whatever, is your marketing - as always, this is unrelated to your product. Companies which appear to be targetting a particular demographic usually turn out to be reselling another product with a new logo slapped on it and an inflated price tag.
(This is unrelated to competition, which is the rare result of two companies mutually failing to wipe each other out of a given market segment)
The problem here is that all the large market segments for laptops are already filled with incumbents (like Dell), who have already started checking out their weaponry ready to take these guys on, should they attempt to invade the relevant segment. Here, they appear to be trying to look sufficiently innocent that they don't appear to be a threat to these industry giants, who are quite happy to crush them like a bug if they feel threatened. Not by making the devices unattractive, but by making them have no market value.
Surprisingly, network people are just that, people.
Worse - they're people who are stupid and ill-informed enough to be willing to work for Fox. Or else they're people who are using it as a career springboard, and are thusly only concerned with the performance in the time leading up to their resignation.
You can certainly get 'good routers' with filtering capabilities, and you can build a 'good firewall' out of a linux box, so long as your traffic is not unreasonably huge. But I can't think of any device which I would normally describe as a 'hardware firewall' that is anything but 'nasty junk'.
Aside from the rather strange desire some people feel to play god, why should we interfere? Don't we have anything better to do than create fake environments for creatures that couldn't adapt to survive in real ones?
From my (admittedly limited) understanding of this part of the Windows security model, anybody with "Administrators" access or better can install device drivers into the kernel. This is a piece of software that runs in kernel space, with no security restrictions at all. The 'restrictions' you are talking about apply only to non-driver software. So there's your "can do anything"-ness.
Who the fuck comes up with technology like this? Anime sci-fi geeks.
When anime sci-fi geeks design technology, it fucking *works*. The planes fly, the guns fire, and the robots are cute. This sounds more like Hollywood/Star Trek prats.
It's always been pretty much like every business out there. Most of the really cool stuff gets done by things that aren't really businesses (like individuals, volunteer organisations, and a few universities); all the businesses are ultimately interested only in the bottom line.
All you're seeing here are exit strategies - people have built something that works, or appears to, so now they're cashing in. That just tells you that they're just another business - it's the money that they care about. Thinking otherwise is naive at best, and shows a gross lack of attention to history.
Standard recipe for a startup:
1. Have a new idea 2. Develop the idea into a product 3. Sell out
Re:Cool Yes, Difficult Yes, Impossible No.
on
Hard Drive Window
·
· Score: 1
A little more precisely... people who create hard drives use a clean room because dust that gets in the drive can be harmless initially, but after the trauma of transporting the drive, the dust particles could have moved to a position where they cause damage. So that's a drive failure which can't be caught by QA, which means it'll be failures of *shipped* drives, which gives you a reputation for drive failures. Given the fairly low rate of failures, they wouldn't bother going to the trouble if they could catch them at QA time - a 95% yield is quite good enough to justify the reduced operating costs. But in the storage industry, nothing justifies a reputation for drives that fail.
People who open other people's hard drives to work on them use a clean room because they'd get sued if anybody found out they weren't. "Adequete precautions" and all that.
People who are opening their own hard drives can get by without, if they don't mind a little risk. And there's techniques to mitigate the risk (in this thread).
Yeah, it's a neat idea, but such multi-element rigs do have one considerable disadvantage over classical telescopes. Once construction has begun, there is a period of months or years during which the site has little or no political value, and its funding can be cut. A conventional telescope is either paid for or not. One of these interferometry rigs can be left half finished... and it happens all too often.
Re:Before you comment ...
on
Debian GNU/Solaris
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Read the article. This has got nothing to do with Debian, they're just trying to ride off our name. For one thing it's Ubuntu, and for another it's being done by some random person with no connection to Debian.
Slashdot Mirror
Because we are much more facile at using spoken language to be precise than we are at using mouse+keyboard to be precise
Wow. Where did you get that idea? Most of the non-engineers I have encountered require an interpreter ('consultant') to translate their spoken words into something which is sufficiently precise to enter into a computer. Anybody who's been involved in the analysis/specification stage of a development project will know what I mean.
They aren't any better at doing it with a keyboard, but they sure can't do it when speaking.
It's the airline's property so if they want to check your id before they let you onboard, its their right.
The whole point of Gilmore's suit has always been that the airlines are claiming they aren't doing it, and that in fact the government is requiring them to check people's identity, but that the instructions from the government are secret laws so they can't say anything more (the government refuses to explain or deny this). Yes, it's as confusing and inexplicable as it sounds. Gilmore has been trying to shake some sense out of this in the courts (without much luck so far).
You could read the website linked in the article in order to gain some modicum of insight into what the article is actually about.
Screw global warming, I want the electrical codes to mandate isolation switches on everything just as good design principle. That does not preclude the existence of a standby mode - most of my current computers have both an ATX soft power button, and an isolator on the back of the PSU. The isolator is switched off whenever I'm doing maintainance or leaving the system off for an extended period of time. And I think that *everything* should have such a function for exactly these purposes.
Otherwise penny-pinchers in management go around removing the isolator switches from products just to scrape a little bit more off the manufacturing cost.
Asimov was exploring the problem of how robots would interact with productive civilian life. His laws were designed with that goal in mind. They're practically a description of consumer rights laws, in those countries which have such ideas.
I don't think he ever seriously explored the idea of using robots for mindless retaliatory destruction. What would be the point? Humans already do so well at it on their own.
Perl's syntax is based on linguistics, not the last programming language you happened to use. It's something you'd expect if you'd bothered to learn it. Expecting $language_N to behave like $language_N-1 reflects on your expectations, not on $language_N.
It makes Perl's syntax a lot *easier* to get to grips with if you ever bother to learn it. If you don't bother to learn it, at least it got rid of you before you committed any more atrocities in the language.
In Python, you can sit down and pound out whatever dumb stuff you like, and then when you deploy it, it'll throw a nice pretty exception telling you exactly why you're fired. No thanks.
Which is the most important thing, after all.
How else are you going to pay for all those games?
The 'problem' is that people want to believe that the work they are doing has some intrinsic value - rather than being mindless graft that any warm body can do with a little training. They believe this because governments and TV have been bombarding them with the idea that they 'deserve' to get paid, despite their job being little more than corporate largesse. They aren't willing to accept that in the capitalist market they think they like so much, everything - including them - is worth no more than what somebody is willing to pay for it.
Most people are stupid, and are doing stupid pointless jobs that would have been automated out of existence if people weren't so stupid. Callcenters for tier 1 support are a good example. The purpose of a callcenter is to read the manual to people who are too stupid to read it for themselves. That's all the operators are doing - sitting and reading from a script. This job has no right to exist in a sane world. You could just ship the script with the product and let people read it for themselves. But the world isn't sane, and so we have people doing a worthless job - and then complaining when somebody realises how disposable they are.
The next time you're getting paid to work, consider this: how much of what you're doing can be handled by any semiliterate muppet who has attended a training course? How much requires some form of skill, and how much merely requires a set of instructions?
This was inevitable really. Once Intel woke up and realised that they couldn't just coast along without opposition any longer, they had to trim the pork from their operation and start turning out cheaper processors. AMD didn't have any fundamental advantages over Intel, they were just trying harder. It's one of those rare occasions where the free market demonstrates actual competition that results in positive effects - or at least, it appears to be.
One of the most exciting is LINQ which will change the way we interact with SQL databases
Change the way we interact with SQL databases? Only if you've been lumbered with clumsy systems so far. There's nothing in here that perl hasn't had for years, and done better - like the positively scary Class::DBI::Loader, which peers into your database and whips up a class heirarchy to access it on the fly. And if your language needs language extensions to handle interfacing with SQL of all things, then that's a good indicator that your language sucks.
The rest of us know the industrial world is full of dangerous stuff that should be handled with care - except in clean nuclear fantasy land.
And in clean coal-power fantasy land. That was the point he was making. Coal plants just take all their dangerous stuff that should be handled with care... and pump it into the surrounding environment. Why are we so paranoid about nuclear plants (way above normal industrial caution) on the one hand, and so blase about coal plants (way *below* normal industrial caution) on the other?
Well, for technical reasons relating to fuel-efficient orbit paths, you want to launch from somewhere vaguely near to the equator - don't expect to see many orbital craft going up from canada any time soon (IIUC it doesn't matter so much if you aren't intending to make a stable orbit). And you need a highly developed local industry to support the launch site operations. But you still have several good choices outside the US.
I expect that this will mean there will be a fair number of launches from US territory, though.
No, it's not that "most people are perfectly fine with ads". It's that ad filtering technology has surpassed advertising technology and continues to stay ahead, and will continue to do so because marketdroids are stupid and people who hate ads are usually not. I almost never see adverts on the web any more, and when I do, I don't see them for long. Why bother complaining when I can simply remove them?
Of course, that means advertising is a fundamentally flawed funding model. It survives only in the gap between people who know how to use the service and people who know how to remove the ads. We knew that already.
You will never make money from me by advertising. You will do it only by convincing me that my life will be improved if I give you money. Forcing me to watch ads is reducing the quality of my life, so I then consider the person who forced them upon me to owe *me* money (which means I'm not likely to give them any). And I have no ethical qualms about causing my debtors to lose money by continuing to use their service.
That's not how capitalist markets work. You can target a niche (that nobody else is targetting), you can target the bottom end (on price), or you can target the top end (on price) - all of those methods will work. You cannot target a broad demographic (except based on religion or physical constraints, like gender and disability) or the middle of the market; if you try, then the people targetting the top and bottom ends will crush you between them. This is simplified (there's other things you can do and survive), but it gets the essential point across.
Somebody who makes 'cheap laptops' wins. Somebody who makes 'expensive laptops' wins. If you make 'laptops for schools' and 'laptops for consumers' then the former two groups gang up on you and wipe you out.
The thing which you target to schools, or consumers, or whatever, is your marketing - as always, this is unrelated to your product. Companies which appear to be targetting a particular demographic usually turn out to be reselling another product with a new logo slapped on it and an inflated price tag.
(This is unrelated to competition, which is the rare result of two companies mutually failing to wipe each other out of a given market segment)
The problem here is that all the large market segments for laptops are already filled with incumbents (like Dell), who have already started checking out their weaponry ready to take these guys on, should they attempt to invade the relevant segment. Here, they appear to be trying to look sufficiently innocent that they don't appear to be a threat to these industry giants, who are quite happy to crush them like a bug if they feel threatened. Not by making the devices unattractive, but by making them have no market value.
I never understood why we aren't allowed to keep our old consoles so we can play our old games, while still having a new console to play new games on.
It's because the xbox is so fricking huge that there's no space in the house for any other consoles.
Surprisingly, network people are just that, people.
Worse - they're people who are stupid and ill-informed enough to be willing to work for Fox. Or else they're people who are using it as a career springboard, and are thusly only concerned with the performance in the time leading up to their resignation.
"...and a good hardware firewall"
Such devices exist?
You can certainly get 'good routers' with filtering capabilities, and you can build a 'good firewall' out of a linux box, so long as your traffic is not unreasonably huge. But I can't think of any device which I would normally describe as a 'hardware firewall' that is anything but 'nasty junk'.
Save those species now
In a word: why?
Aside from the rather strange desire some people feel to play god, why should we interfere? Don't we have anything better to do than create fake environments for creatures that couldn't adapt to survive in real ones?
From my (admittedly limited) understanding of this part of the Windows security model, anybody with "Administrators" access or better can install device drivers into the kernel. This is a piece of software that runs in kernel space, with no security restrictions at all. The 'restrictions' you are talking about apply only to non-driver software. So there's your "can do anything"-ness.
Who the fuck comes up with technology like this? Anime sci-fi geeks.
When anime sci-fi geeks design technology, it fucking *works*. The planes fly, the guns fire, and the robots are cute. This sounds more like Hollywood/Star Trek prats.
That guy reminds me of a quote: "A zealot is someone who can't change their mind, and won't change the subject."
(For bonus points, anybody remember who said it? I don't)
It's always been pretty much like every business out there. Most of the really cool stuff gets done by things that aren't really businesses (like individuals, volunteer organisations, and a few universities); all the businesses are ultimately interested only in the bottom line.
All you're seeing here are exit strategies - people have built something that works, or appears to, so now they're cashing in. That just tells you that they're just another business - it's the money that they care about. Thinking otherwise is naive at best, and shows a gross lack of attention to history.
Standard recipe for a startup:
1. Have a new idea
2. Develop the idea into a product
3. Sell out
A little more precisely... people who create hard drives use a clean room because dust that gets in the drive can be harmless initially, but after the trauma of transporting the drive, the dust particles could have moved to a position where they cause damage. So that's a drive failure which can't be caught by QA, which means it'll be failures of *shipped* drives, which gives you a reputation for drive failures. Given the fairly low rate of failures, they wouldn't bother going to the trouble if they could catch them at QA time - a 95% yield is quite good enough to justify the reduced operating costs. But in the storage industry, nothing justifies a reputation for drives that fail.
People who open other people's hard drives to work on them use a clean room because they'd get sued if anybody found out they weren't. "Adequete precautions" and all that.
People who are opening their own hard drives can get by without, if they don't mind a little risk. And there's techniques to mitigate the risk (in this thread).
Think special cases. Security cameras. Unrepeatable events. Quasi-autonomous robots.
In general, focussing *is* that hard if you're not there or don't have time to do it.
Yeah, it's a neat idea, but such multi-element rigs do have one considerable disadvantage over classical telescopes. Once construction has begun, there is a period of months or years during which the site has little or no political value, and its funding can be cut. A conventional telescope is either paid for or not. One of these interferometry rigs can be left half finished... and it happens all too often.
Read the article. This has got nothing to do with Debian, they're just trying to ride off our name. For one thing it's Ubuntu, and for another it's being done by some random person with no connection to Debian.