Perl for an embedded application!? I have a favorite scripting language too, but small and fast is king. I feel like a C compiler is a guilty convienience.
Then again, I'm used to the days when "embedded" meant 64K of ram on a 4 Mhz processor.
Hi, I once wrote a bulk mailer for a DotCom. I was young. I needed the money. They collected addresses the old fashioned way: free stuff. People would be more than happy to fill out a little questionaire for a discount drink, or (gasp) to get ONTO the mailing list.
To my credit I had written into the system a very simple and effective opt-out. Click, click, we were out of your life. Everyone on the list had taken the time to fill something out to get on the list. It wasn't really spam.
At least that's what I tell the voice in my head.
I also wrote the web statistic reporting engine, so I do know that pageviews to the website would skyrocket following a bulk mail. And no, most of the traffic wasn't for the "opt out" bin.
This was back in '98, when spam was a joke, not a fact of life. I recently turned down a job reverse engineering a web-database of a certain annoying industry to generate targetted mailing lists.
While I run my own Linux box at home, I have several clients and relatives I support. Giving them a happy blue box that blinks and costs $50 trumps any ability to ssh into it and fix.
The Linksys doesn't generally need fixing. And if it does, unplug and plug it back in. They are happy. I am happy. And I'm not getting calls during the weekend when a power outage fries the hard drive and I have to rebuild the Linux partition.
Others have an amazing capacity to assfucked by bad software architecture and keep going back for more.
Hey they same could be said of political parties, government, and in some cases, religion. There must be a treadmill gene that is present in most of the populis.
If we could just tap that gene, and harness the stupids, we could power the world...
To turn a friendly coin, Einstein once said You don't truely understand something until you can explain it to your grandmother.
That was around 1930 or so. I don't think he was trying to say the elderly were stupid. I think he was trying to say that Intellectuals too often think in shorthand, that often gets in the road of true understanding.
Great. Just what I need, a bunch of monty pythonesque characters bumbling into the back of the sanctuary looking for a Grail...
Sigh. Days like that make me wish we still used wine. Take the "strong grape juice" argument and flush it out your ass, there is no basis in reality. You can't store grape juice for very long without adaquate refridgeration, pasturization, and proper sealing. It becomes rancid. The people of ancient palestine made grape juice into wine for the same reason people drank beer in the middle ages like it was water. Booze stores pretty well, and the alcohol kills of the bacteria that cause disentary.
I forget which Stanislov book it is, but it is set in a world where everyone passes messages in cipher.
On character, to completely mess with the authorities, encrypted a meaningless garble of words. The intent was that someone would keep looking and looking and looking for meaning in it.
Second hand telling of a slashdot summary, I'm afraid.
This is a company with (supposedly) billions of dollars in the bank. How much does it cost them to mint a CD? Pennies. You have to pay for phone support, so you aren't getting that for your purchase price. They have been posting obscene profit after obscene profit.
You are paying for their overhead, screwups, and legal schenanigans. Kind of makes you wish they had to print where your money actually goes on the side of a product. Kind of like the ingredients, and nutritional info.
I just keep thinking of Ford whose calculations showed it was cheaper to settle a bunch of wrongful death suits than issuing a recall for exploding gas tanks.
(Of course that doesn't keep me from tooling around town in a Focus. Just goes to show, even cynics are goldfish.)
Just explain that it's Internet Explorer 7.0. Microsoft changes it's shit all the time. (Think 98 -> ME/2k -> XP, and don't get me started on the MMC. I feel like I'm managing the machine blindfolded.)
Save you indignation until after we come to a collective realization that the trillions of dollars spend on Missile defense and the War on Drugs were also a giant waste of money. In some sense, worse than a waste of money. Cracking down on drugs simply made the profit margin insane. Going off and actively researching missile defense involved shredding a few disarmerment treaties with the Russians (not to mention pissing them off.)
Back on the subject, information by it's very definition is measured by it's surprise. The approach taken by the TIA should really be called the "Total Data Awareness." They think that by viewing massive quantities of the ordinary will reveal the extraordinary.
They forget that databases can't file the extraordinary. All of the tips, leads, and missed clues were people noticing that something didn't jive, something didn't fit. Computers can't do that. At least not unaided.
The irony of it all was the Saddam thought he was in defiance. It turns out the scientists for his "Weapons of Mass Destruction" program were robbing him blind. Iraq of late was a giant "Kleptocracy."
The researchers and techs weren't hiding WMD from the UN. They were hiding the complete and utter absence of them from Saddam, lest they and their families be sent to afterlife in the most grisly way Uday could devise.
Slashdot Mirror
Perl for an embedded application!? I have a favorite scripting language too, but small and fast is king. I feel like a C compiler is a guilty convienience.
Then again, I'm used to the days when "embedded" meant 64K of ram on a 4 Mhz processor.
Heck, I just slashdot them.
The other half are wondering how they can get in on the game.
In a black and white world, I'm plaid.
To my credit I had written into the system a very simple and effective opt-out. Click, click, we were out of your life. Everyone on the list had taken the time to fill something out to get on the list. It wasn't really spam.
At least that's what I tell the voice in my head.
I also wrote the web statistic reporting engine, so I do know that pageviews to the website would skyrocket following a bulk mail. And no, most of the traffic wasn't for the "opt out" bin.
This was back in '98, when spam was a joke, not a fact of life. I recently turned down a job reverse engineering a web-database of a certain annoying industry to generate targetted mailing lists.
And that was from my brother.
In other news, Microsoft announces the name of it's new product: Faust.
Hey. It he wants to get the time he can just record for a few seconds and then play it back on the LCD.
While I run my own Linux box at home, I have several clients and relatives I support. Giving them a happy blue box that blinks and costs $50 trumps any ability to ssh into it and fix.
The Linksys doesn't generally need fixing. And if it does, unplug and plug it back in. They are happy. I am happy. And I'm not getting calls during the weekend when a power outage fries the hard drive and I have to rebuild the Linux partition.
Grandma's gotta stop getting her recipes from the Anarchist's Cookbook.
Hey they same could be said of political parties, government, and in some cases, religion. There must be a treadmill gene that is present in most of the populis.
If we could just tap that gene, and harness the stupids, we could power the world...
That was around 1930 or so. I don't think he was trying to say the elderly were stupid. I think he was trying to say that Intellectuals too often think in shorthand, that often gets in the road of true understanding.
Strawmen... why man invented lighter fluid and matches.
Pick Two.
Every engineering shop should have that and a copy of the "Blinkenlights" poster.
You know that, and I know that, but the people making these decisions wonder why email doesn't require stamps.
No, that's the Holey Grill, not the Holy Grail.
I'm going to be so busy in hell running into everyone I know...
Sigh. Days like that make me wish we still used wine. Take the "strong grape juice" argument and flush it out your ass, there is no basis in reality. You can't store grape juice for very long without adaquate refridgeration, pasturization, and proper sealing. It becomes rancid. The people of ancient palestine made grape juice into wine for the same reason people drank beer in the middle ages like it was water. Booze stores pretty well, and the alcohol kills of the bacteria that cause disentary.
Damn temperance movement.
On character, to completely mess with the authorities, encrypted a meaningless garble of words. The intent was that someone would keep looking and looking and looking for meaning in it.
Second hand telling of a slashdot summary, I'm afraid.
Can't buy it, only rent...
This is a company with (supposedly) billions of dollars in the bank. How much does it cost them to mint a CD? Pennies. You have to pay for phone support, so you aren't getting that for your purchase price. They have been posting obscene profit after obscene profit.
You are paying for their overhead, screwups, and legal schenanigans. Kind of makes you wish they had to print where your money actually goes on the side of a product. Kind of like the ingredients, and nutritional info.
(Of course that doesn't keep me from tooling around town in a Focus. Just goes to show, even cynics are goldfish.)
Just explain that it's Internet Explorer 7.0. Microsoft changes it's shit all the time. (Think 98 -> ME/2k -> XP, and don't get me started on the MMC. I feel like I'm managing the machine blindfolded.)
Back on the subject, information by it's very definition is measured by it's surprise. The approach taken by the TIA should really be called the "Total Data Awareness." They think that by viewing massive quantities of the ordinary will reveal the extraordinary.
They forget that databases can't file the extraordinary. All of the tips, leads, and missed clues were people noticing that something didn't jive, something didn't fit. Computers can't do that. At least not unaided.
The researchers and techs weren't hiding WMD from the UN. They were hiding the complete and utter absence of them from Saddam, lest they and their families be sent to afterlife in the most grisly way Uday could devise.
Though to his credit, Mao did take his people on a Long March.