It's not three-d graphics. It's layered two-d graphics with interesting transforms. You can make something look like it's flipping in or out, and you can do sprites, but you can't make a fully three-d game (that is, you can't rotate something around with bits sticking out).
Why not? Because this approach gets you a bunch of cool effects without the pain of real 3D programming.
John Galt is the protagonist of an irritating book espousing a failed theology.
I'm sorry -- was that a rhetorical question? How about this, then: Microsoft could be created in part because of American ideology -- an ideology that pays massive dividends to the rich. Are you Wal-Mart? Isn't it nice that there are good, cheap roads going everywhere. Along these roads are thousands of towns, each of which *could* stop you and make you pay a "customs fee". (they used to do this along the Rhine). But instead the Federal government makes the towns not stop you.
Are you ExxonMobile? We have an army ready to "keep the peace" where you trade, and a Navy to keep the seas free of pirates.
Are a stock trader? We have a host of accountants and lawyers keeping the market fairly honest -- so that everyone in the country trusts your wares.
Why? There wasn't even a hint that they were in Death Valley:-)
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
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Unix? Yes, we supported that -- but our bread-n-butter was Vaxes. And sun workstations (but not many people hung terminals off of those).
Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome
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Google Chrome, Day 2
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Actually, no, it started much earlier than that:-)
Once upon a time, they made "web browsers". Well, actually, no, what they made was hardware: a hunk of electronics, a keyboard, and a CRT (like a monitor from the days before LCDs). And they called them "terminals", and wired them to the computers. And the software on the computer would sniff the terminal to figure out what type it was so that the correct HTML (I mean, "escape sequences") could be sent. Esc [ 4 m, for example, was "bold". Esc [ 0 m meant make it plain again.
Only it turns out there was one popular terminal, the VT100 from the ever-present Digital Equipment Corporation ("DEC". Later they called themselves "Digital"). (Only it wasn't actually popular; the actual popular version was the VT102). So every minor terminal maker -- and there were hundreds -- would lie, and claim to be a VT100.
How do I know this? Because I worked on RS/1, an interactive statistical package and had to support those hundreds of terminals. And what a pain it was.
Ummm -- you are an idiot, yes? You can classify these "issues" into two buckets:
1. OMFG! I can cast a small number of extra votes! 2. Hey, cool -- I can cast as many votes as are needed for my party to win.
Which poses a bigger threat to democracy?
But wait! Before you go ahead and start making changes, you should do a cost/benefit analysis: how many people will your new system prevent from voting versus how many invalid votes will there be? Under your system, most ways of making onesies-twoies extra votes aren't blocked (photo ids are a dime a dozen). But your system will prevent many people from voting. Tens of thousands of people don't drive and don't have passsports -- why should you make them jump through lots of (expensive) hoops?
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal some months back -- a fellow turned 18 before trying to get a driver's license. He had to apply *in person* in the *state capitol*, hundreds of miles away. Why? Because if you're a minor, you're parent vouches for you. Over 18, they can't, and so you have to prove who you are. Which is hard, because you don't have a driver's license.
In short: photo verification solves essentially nothing, while disenfranchising tens of thousands.
I beg your pardon? The PC had some dandy analog input ports (normally built into the sound card). I recently even built a home-brew light sensor that interfaces directly to it to make a neat slide show controller.
(snarky comment on) Your income is $1,000. You have expenses of $1,200. And the thing that's dragging you down is the you're complaining about the $4.81 of B&O tax? Now, the $1,200 is probably mostly payroll (it is for most companies), so you're also paying about $75 in payroll taxes. Again, that's whether you're making money or not. But the $4.81 in B&O is killing you, and not the payroll taxes. Heck, it's apparently not the $1,200 in expenses dragging you down. It's the $4.81 in B&O tax. (snarky comment off)
Note: Washington towns also have a B&O tax; Redmond currently doesn't charge one.
and nitpicker's corner: the tax amounts are approximate.
Look -- there's a time and place for modeling things, and a time and place to not. In particular, you should make a model of how risky something is only if you don't already have lots of data (because the model is essentially providing you with the data that you otherwise don't have).
But in America we have lots of great data on exactly how often planes crash. For one thing, airplane crashes are new. For another thing, detailed and consistent statistics are kept. And this very plentiful, real-world data says that planes flying too close aren't really a problem.
Requests for commutation of a prison sentence generally are not accepted unless and until a person has begun serving that sentence. In addition, commutation requests are generally not accepted from a person who is currently challenging his or her conviction or sentence through appeal or other court proceeding. Accordingly, you should not complete and submit this petition until you have concluded all judicial challenges to your conviction and sentence and you have begun serving your sentence. You should also be aware that, in evaluating the merits of a commutation petition, clemency authorities take into consideration the amount of time the petitioner has already served and the availability of other remedies to secure the relief sought (such as parole or judicial action).
It also says, in section 10 (Exclusive Presidential authority)... As a matter of well-established policy, the specific reasons for the President's decision to grant or deny a petition are generally not disclosed by either the White House or the Department of Justice.
Note that not only has the President gone against tradition and explained his reasoning, but also that Mr. Scooter hasn't finished his appeals and hasn't served any time.
(I'm a programmer whose code ships on lots of OEM machines -- and got to be one of the ones to make all of our code Vista compatible by the end of last April (yay!)
The most braindead part of Vista copying? You can't copy from a network share to a local subdirectory -- you first get an elevation, and then it's refused. But you CAN copy from a network share to the desktop, and then from the desktop to the local subdirectory without an elevation. As afar as Microsoft is concerned, it's not about where you're coming from, or where you're going to -- it's all about the journey
DEC: all your network are belong to us SUN: the network is the computer Microsoft: the network is evil! EVIL!
Medical care has a big "long tail" problem: the median cost of health care is pretty low (because most people aren't very sick) but the average cost is much higher (because there are a few people with very large bills).
Take me, for example. Perfectly healthy, decent weight, bike to work, and I hardly ever see a doctor. Except that I've also got an uncommon genetic condition, and need $40,000 of drugs every year until I die. Which might be a bit sooner than I'd like:-( but not soon enough to save any money.
The same is true of the very common condition of "having a baby" (I've got two darling ones). Most deliveries are uneventful and not very expensive. Every now and then, though, you get 50k of bills or more.
Take a look at the equipment next time you're in a hospital. In particular, look at the plugs. Note how they are all clear? That's so the inspectors can tell if all of the power cords are hooked up right. Now look at the outlets: see how some are orange and others are not? That's so they can plug the important equipment into the UPS outlets, and the TVs and things into the non-UPS outlets. There's a lot of attention to detail that's expensive and serves the uncommon cases that are in reality all too common.
Lastly, look at how clean everything is. This isn't McDonalds where the floors are shiny but still crawling with bugs. This is a hospital: everything has to be cleaned as if the last person to touch anything was horribly sick, and the next person is immune deficient (because it's a hospital: lots of people do have horrible illnesses which have to be kept from spreading to the next person).
In short: it's expensive, but not in places where you think it is.
I have been up to my... knees... in Vista ever since January. Hi, I'm Peter, and I work for a company that ships on OEM computers. My company got a clear mandate from them: work with Vista, or we don't ship you any more. Needless to say, this was taken to be Very Important.
The (deleted) APIs are certainly neither (deleted) stable nor (deleted) documented. Every time Microsoft came out with a new release, it would be fun, fun, fun times while we tried to figure out what had (deleted) changed, and why the programming documentation didn't (deleted) mention it. Many of the APIs that we want to use don't (deleted) work the way any self respecting programmer would (deleted) expect.
Normally a pretty placid person. The amazing (deleted) of Vista continues to astound me.
We were bundled with AIM Games because we were selected as the 'games' provider for AIM. People clicked on 'games', and could play against their friends. We actually spent rather a lot of effort making (hopefully) fun games for people to play against their buddies. Management keeps telling us that our actual revenue info is secret, or I'd let you know how we did:-)
I can't answer why there's a "ton of wildtangent stuff" -- part of our QA pass is to make sure we don't leave (too much) stuff lying around. Among other things, our OEMs pretty much demand it. Again, any crud we leave behind is purely accidental (and believe me, after dealing with installers for a bunch of products for many years, actually uninstalling things is way harder than most people realize.
I certainly can't answer why it would ever come back. AFAICT, when we uninstall, that's it. We don't have weirdo processes for reinstalling, or hiding, or anything like that. If you let me know where your Wildtangent stuff is coming from, I'll try to duplicate what you're seeing in the QA lab. Unless, of course, people click on a game installer that includes our stuff.
Perhaps you missed the middle paragraph where I point out the evidence?
"Now let's look at probabilities and some history. Lots of other professional bodies that discouraged women have discovered that letting women do traditionally male work has worked out just fine. I can't think of any where allowing women was later decided to be a mistake. Most of our best universities started off explicitly not allowing women; now all of the major universities are integrated. The older generation had a big problem with letting women in; the current set of students thinks it's normal. In the sciences in general, women are a steadily advancing percent of the workers -- except for computer science, where the percentage is declining."
I am explicitly pointing to history (in the past, people with the idea that women "just don't want to" do something are generally wrong) and to current practice (women are flooding into almost every science and engineering field except ours; what's the chance that we have a 'special field' versus 'we are being jerks'?).
Oh -- as far as "immoral" -- because if our field is uninviting or unfriendly to women, then at least some women for whom the field would be a great career are instead somewhere else that isn't as nice for them. I'm one of the people who loves computer programming; I can't image quite what I would have done if I had been born a hundred years ago. No other field has the same wonderful ratio of interesting work compared to awful work along with good working conditions (air conditioning! free soda pop!) and good pay. Personally I would think that blocking people from working in such a great field counts as "immoral".
And are you seriously saying that immoral conditions should not be fixed? It's hard to parse your statement any other way, but I'm astonished that anyone would declare that immorality should not be fixed.
That's quite an assumption you're making -- that women "just dont WANT to be in IT". What I'm saying is that is most likely wrong (and if it is wrong, it's immoral and should be fixed).
Well, on the one hand we can pretend that there isn't a problem. Hey, maybe we'll get lucky, and it isn't a problem. Or, maybe our profession is, in fact, lousy for women-in-general, and there might even be something we can do about it.
Now let's look at probabilities and some history. Lots of other professional bodies that discouraged women have discovered that letting women do traditionally male work has worked out just fine. I can't think of any where allowing women was later decided to be a mistake. Most of our best universities started off explicitly not allowing women; now all of the major universities are integrated. The older generation had a big problem with letting women in; the current set of students thinks it's normal. In the sciences in general, women are a steadily advancing percent of the workers -- except for computer science, where the percentage is declining.
Which is it? Are we (as a profession) are being jerks? Or is it that women "just can't do it". Personally, I know which side I'm on: somehow, we're being jerks. And I wish the rest of you would stop it!
Hi there everybody! Let me introduce myself as a very old WildTangent employee. But I'm not speaking for them; I just work there.
No, we aren't spyware. No, we aren't hard to remove (unless you have trouble with the concept of 'add/remove programs'). And no, we aren't on anyone's "spyware" list (we spent a lot of time getting off lists that we were incorectly on, though). (Bizzaro-world annecdote: some anti-spyware makers dinged us for having an auto-update feature. The same people, though, automatically updated their own products.)
More importantly, we make money by selling games. Sometimes we sell games directly to the end-user; sometimes to an advertiser; sometimes to a manufacturer. We don't make money selling personal information because
there's not much money it in
it would screw up our game sales
it would kill our reputation with all of the major OEMs (we ship on pretty much every major name-brand computer in America)
we don't have any personal information to sell (unless you buy a game from us -- then we obviously got a bit in order to charge your credit card)
We used to have a (fairly nifty) background auto-updating system similar to just about everybody's. Now we have a different (but still fairly nifter) non-background auto-updating system that is also similar to - just about everybody's. I was always surprised how a small number of people are vehemently against auto-update systems; this is especially true considering that pretty much every big package is updatable now.
I'm also one of the people at WildTangent that had to deal with Vista. My impression: they should (explitive) document their own (explitive) changes so that we can (explitive) figure out what's (explitive) going on. (explitive). And I'm not normally inclined to swearing.
a "cell" is the fundimental unit of a battery. A "D" battery contains one cell -- and indeed, in old books was just called a "D cell" and never a "D battery". The "cell" is the fundimental battery unit because of chemistry.
A "battery" contains a bunch of cells. The actual word "battery" means "a bunch of identical things" -- so that a bunch of cannon all grouped together (for example) is a "battery" -- hence the existance of "Battery Park" in New York.
Thanks to the average person's inability to keep these concepts seperate (and the lack of a reason why they should be seperate), "battery" is now used to mean either a battery in the old-fashioned sense OR a cell in the old fashioned sense (but only if the cell is, as it were, individually wrapped). Once again crystal clear tech language is subverted. (Note to self: don't go on a wild tangent about dumb terminals)
The "battery" in your laptop contains a bunch of cells -- I see from Google that at least some laptops use batteries of 12 cells. The "batteries" in the Tesla contains exactly one cell and would be better termed "cells", except that (per above) language is changing.
A big chunk of the cost of buying batteries for your laptop are: 1. You aren't buying in bulk. Bulk is lots cheaper. 2. You are also buying specialized circuitry that inside of the 3. Expensive plastic
I would expect that your 90%-off-in-bulk isn't high enough. Add in another by-twelve factor, and the price-per-year drops even more.
Maybe there's more to your figures than you're letting on, but frankly you're not selling your point very well.
Just sitting in your office, you cost your company about $150,000/year. They could lay you off, and use that money to pay Sun. They can then make up the difference by selling off their computers, netting, say, $100,000. They stop writing huge checks to the local power company, and sub-lease your computer space. They also save money on hardware fixes for the computers in your cluster, and on the cost of technicians.
From what you've said, Sun looks cheaper than your current solution (except for the porting, but heavens, that's not very expensive these days!)
A number of myths or exaggerations can still be found in the literature with regard to the details of this climate period [see Jones and Mann, 2004]. These include the citation of frost fairs on the River Thames as evidence of extreme cold conditions in England. Thames freeze-overs (and sometimes frost fairs) only occurred 22 times between 1408 and 1814 [Lamb, 1977] when the old London Bridge constricted flow through its multiple piers and restricted the tide with a weir. After the Bridge was replaced in the 1830s the tide came further upstream and freezes no longer occurred, despite a number of exceptionally cold winters. Winter 1962/3, for example, was the third coldest winter recorded in instrumental records extending back to 1659, yet the river only froze upstream of the present tidal limit.
So, no, the Thames didn't freeze regularly. Indeed, the entire "Little Ice Age" seems to be more myth than reality
Old news: this was reported in the HP Journal!
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HP was happy enough about this that their old "HP Journal" -- a monthly tech. magazine that would go in-depth into HP technology -- had an entire sidebar about the exact escape sequences needed to play the music. It was a sad day when they stopped publication; it was a fun read.
The same issue had, as its cover story, an article about how strap-on heart monitors work. Very cool, and the cover picture, of a small baby with a monitor on its foot, was striking. The same technology was put onto my oldest several years later when she was in the hospital right after being born.
You went from doctor to doctor, and each, seeing you once, went for the overwhelmingly obvious problem. When I had the same basic issue, that's what I did: my file got fat with visits at which point there was real paper to show that it wasn't just "being sick" or "asthma". The specialist figured it out right away, and I've hardly been sick since.
Doctors and bodies are like programmers and code: the obvious is always attacked first, and chronic issues are best handled by a single person.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not three-d graphics. It's layered two-d graphics with interesting transforms. You can make something look like it's flipping in or out, and you can do sprites, but you can't make a fully three-d game (that is, you can't rotate something around with bits sticking out).
Why not? Because this approach gets you a bunch of cool effects without the pain of real 3D programming.
(Disclaimer: I worked on silverlight)
John Galt is the protagonist of an irritating book espousing a failed theology.
I'm sorry -- was that a rhetorical question? How about this, then:
Microsoft could be created in part because of American ideology -- an ideology that pays massive dividends to the rich. Are you Wal-Mart? Isn't it nice that there are good, cheap roads going everywhere. Along these roads are thousands of towns, each of which *could* stop you and make you pay a "customs fee". (they used to do this along the Rhine). But instead the Federal government makes the towns not stop you.
Are you ExxonMobile? We have an army ready to "keep the peace" where you trade, and a Navy to keep the seas free of pirates.
Are a stock trader? We have a host of accountants and lawyers keeping the market fairly honest -- so that everyone in the country trusts your wares.
We are America; our government keeps ua rich.
An on-line link to the Texas election code: http://tlo2.tlc.state.tx.us/statutes/docs/EL/content/htm/el.011.00.000192.00.htm#192.031.00
Why? There wasn't even a hint that they were in Death Valley :-)
Unix? Yes, we supported that -- but our bread-n-butter was Vaxes. And sun workstations (but not many people hung terminals off of those).
Actually, no, it started much earlier than that :-)
Once upon a time, they made "web browsers". Well, actually, no, what they made was hardware: a hunk of electronics, a keyboard, and a CRT (like a monitor from the days before LCDs). And they called them "terminals", and wired them to the computers. And the software on the computer would sniff the terminal to figure out what type it was so that the correct HTML (I mean, "escape sequences") could be sent. Esc [ 4 m, for example, was "bold". Esc [ 0 m meant make it plain again.
Only it turns out there was one popular terminal, the VT100 from the ever-present Digital Equipment Corporation ("DEC". Later they called themselves "Digital"). (Only it wasn't actually popular; the actual popular version was the VT102). So every minor terminal maker -- and there were hundreds -- would lie, and claim to be a VT100.
How do I know this? Because I worked on RS/1, an interactive statistical package and had to support those hundreds of terminals. And what a pain it was.
Ummm -- you are an idiot, yes? You can classify these "issues" into two buckets:
1. OMFG! I can cast a small number of extra votes!
2. Hey, cool -- I can cast as many votes as are needed for my party to win.
Which poses a bigger threat to democracy?
But wait! Before you go ahead and start making changes, you should do a cost/benefit analysis: how many people will your new system prevent from voting versus how many invalid votes will there be? Under your system, most ways of making onesies-twoies extra votes aren't blocked (photo ids are a dime a dozen). But your system will prevent many people from voting. Tens of thousands of people don't drive and don't have passsports -- why should you make them jump through lots of (expensive) hoops?
There was an article in the Wall Street Journal some months back -- a fellow turned 18 before trying to get a driver's license. He had to apply *in person* in the *state capitol*, hundreds of miles away. Why? Because if you're a minor, you're parent vouches for you. Over 18, they can't, and so you have to prove who you are. Which is hard, because you don't have a driver's license.
In short: photo verification solves essentially nothing, while disenfranchising tens of thousands.
You can get one of the (original?) manuals from a Bitsaver mirror site:
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf
And, their original 'hello world' program does linear algebra (page "9")
I beg your pardon? The PC had some dandy analog input ports (normally built into the sound card). I recently even built a home-brew light sensor that interfaces directly to it to make a neat slide show controller.
(snarky comment on)
Your income is $1,000.
You have expenses of $1,200.
And the thing that's dragging you down is the you're complaining about the $4.81 of B&O tax?
Now, the $1,200 is probably mostly payroll (it is for most companies), so you're also paying about $75 in payroll taxes. Again, that's whether you're making money or not.
But the $4.81 in B&O is killing you, and not the payroll taxes.
Heck, it's apparently not the $1,200 in expenses dragging you down. It's the $4.81 in B&O tax.
(snarky comment off)
Note: Washington towns also have a B&O tax; Redmond currently doesn't charge one.
and nitpicker's corner: the tax amounts are approximate.
Look -- there's a time and place for modeling things, and a time and place to not. In particular, you should make a model of how risky something is only if you don't already have lots of data (because the model is essentially providing you with the data that you otherwise don't have).
But in America we have lots of great data on exactly how often planes crash. For one thing, airplane crashes are new. For another thing, detailed and consistent statistics are kept. And this very plentiful, real-world data says that planes flying too close aren't really a problem.
The DOJ says, at http://www.usdoj.gov/pardon/commutation_instructio ns.htm, :
... As a matter of well-established policy, the specific reasons for the President's decision to grant or deny a petition are generally not disclosed by either the White House or the Department of Justice.
4. Completion of court challenges
Requests for commutation of a prison sentence generally are not accepted unless and until a person has begun serving that sentence. In addition, commutation requests are generally not accepted from a person who is currently challenging his or her conviction or sentence through appeal or other court proceeding. Accordingly, you should not complete and submit this petition until you have concluded all judicial challenges to your conviction and sentence and you have begun serving your sentence. You should also be aware that, in evaluating the merits of a commutation petition, clemency authorities take into consideration the amount of time the petitioner has already served and the availability of other remedies to secure the relief sought (such as parole or judicial action).
It also says, in section 10 (Exclusive Presidential authority)
Note that not only has the President gone against tradition and explained his reasoning, but also that Mr. Scooter hasn't finished his appeals and hasn't served any time.
(I'm a programmer whose code ships on lots of OEM machines -- and got to be one of the ones to make all of our code Vista compatible by the end of last April (yay!)
The most braindead part of Vista copying? You can't copy from a network share to a local subdirectory -- you first get an elevation, and then it's refused. But you CAN copy from a network share to the desktop, and then from the desktop to the local subdirectory without an elevation. As afar as Microsoft is concerned, it's not about where you're coming from, or where you're going to -- it's all about the journey
DEC: all your network are belong to us
SUN: the network is the computer
Microsoft: the network is evil! EVIL!
Medical care has a big "long tail" problem: the median cost of health care is pretty low (because most people aren't very sick) but the average cost is much higher (because there are a few people with very large bills).
:-( but not soon enough to save any money.
Take me, for example. Perfectly healthy, decent weight, bike to work, and I hardly ever see a doctor. Except that I've also got an uncommon genetic condition, and need $40,000 of drugs every year until I die. Which might be a bit sooner than I'd like
The same is true of the very common condition of "having a baby" (I've got two darling ones). Most deliveries are uneventful and not very expensive. Every now and then, though, you get 50k of bills or more.
Take a look at the equipment next time you're in a hospital. In particular, look at the plugs. Note how they are all clear? That's so the inspectors can tell if all of the power cords are hooked up right. Now look at the outlets: see how some are orange and others are not? That's so they can plug the important equipment into the UPS outlets, and the TVs and things into the non-UPS outlets. There's a lot of attention to detail that's expensive and serves the uncommon cases that are in reality all too common.
Lastly, look at how clean everything is. This isn't McDonalds where the floors are shiny but still crawling with bugs. This is a hospital: everything has to be cleaned as if the last person to touch anything was horribly sick, and the next person is immune deficient (because it's a hospital: lots of people do have horrible illnesses which have to be kept from spreading to the next person).
In short: it's expensive, but not in places where you think it is.
(ahem)
... knees ... in Vista ever since January. Hi, I'm Peter, and I work for a company that ships on OEM computers. My company got a clear mandate from them: work with Vista, or we don't ship you any more. Needless to say, this was taken to be Very Important.
I have been up to my
The (deleted) APIs are certainly neither (deleted) stable nor (deleted) documented. Every time Microsoft came out with a new release, it would be fun, fun, fun times while we tried to figure out what had (deleted) changed, and why the programming documentation didn't (deleted) mention it. Many of the APIs that we want to use don't (deleted) work the way any self respecting programmer would (deleted) expect.
Normally a pretty placid person. The amazing (deleted) of Vista continues to astound me.
Let me try to address both of these at once:
:-)
We were bundled with AIM Games because we were selected as the 'games' provider for AIM. People clicked on 'games', and could play against their friends. We actually spent rather a lot of effort making (hopefully) fun games for people to play against their buddies. Management keeps telling us that our actual revenue info is secret, or I'd let you know how we did
I can't answer why there's a "ton of wildtangent stuff" -- part of our QA pass is to make sure we don't leave (too much) stuff lying around. Among other things, our OEMs pretty much demand it. Again, any crud we leave behind is purely accidental (and believe me, after dealing with installers for a bunch of products for many years, actually uninstalling things is way harder than most people realize.
I certainly can't answer why it would ever come back. AFAICT, when we uninstall, that's it. We don't have weirdo processes for reinstalling, or hiding, or anything like that. If you let me know where your Wildtangent stuff is coming from, I'll try to duplicate what you're seeing in the QA lab. Unless, of course, people click on a game installer that includes our stuff.
Perhaps you missed the middle paragraph where I point out the evidence?
"Now let's look at probabilities and some history. Lots of other professional bodies that discouraged women have discovered that letting women do traditionally male work has worked out just fine. I can't think of any where allowing women was later decided to be a mistake. Most of our best universities started off explicitly not allowing women; now all of the major universities are integrated. The older generation had a big problem with letting women in; the current set of students thinks it's normal. In the sciences in general, women are a steadily advancing percent of the workers -- except for computer science, where the percentage is declining."
I am explicitly pointing to history (in the past, people with the idea that women "just don't want to" do something are generally wrong) and to current practice (women are flooding into almost every science and engineering field except ours; what's the chance that we have a 'special field' versus 'we are being jerks'?).
Oh -- as far as "immoral" -- because if our field is uninviting or unfriendly to women, then at least some women for whom the field would be a great career are instead somewhere else that isn't as nice for them. I'm one of the people who loves computer programming; I can't image quite what I would have done if I had been born a hundred years ago. No other field has the same wonderful ratio of interesting work compared to awful work along with good working conditions (air conditioning! free soda pop!) and good pay. Personally I would think that blocking people from working in such a great field counts as "immoral".
And are you seriously saying that immoral conditions should not be fixed? It's hard to parse your statement any other way, but I'm astonished that anyone would declare that immorality should not be fixed.
That's quite an assumption you're making -- that women "just dont WANT to be in IT". What I'm saying is that is most likely wrong (and if it is wrong, it's immoral and should be fixed).
Well, on the one hand we can pretend that there isn't a problem. Hey, maybe we'll get lucky, and it isn't a problem. Or, maybe our profession is, in fact, lousy for women-in-general, and there might even be something we can do about it.
Now let's look at probabilities and some history. Lots of other professional bodies that discouraged women have discovered that letting women do traditionally male work has worked out just fine. I can't think of any where allowing women was later decided to be a mistake. Most of our best universities started off explicitly not allowing women; now all of the major universities are integrated. The older generation had a big problem with letting women in; the current set of students thinks it's normal. In the sciences in general, women are a steadily advancing percent of the workers -- except for computer science, where the percentage is declining.
Which is it? Are we (as a profession) are being jerks? Or is it that women "just can't do it". Personally, I know which side I'm on: somehow, we're being jerks. And I wish the rest of you would stop it!
Hi there everybody! Let me introduce myself as a very old WildTangent employee. But I'm not speaking for them; I just work there.
No, we aren't spyware. No, we aren't hard to remove (unless you have trouble with the concept of 'add/remove programs'). And no, we aren't on anyone's "spyware" list (we spent a lot of time getting off lists that we were incorectly on, though). (Bizzaro-world annecdote: some anti-spyware makers dinged us for having an auto-update feature. The same people, though, automatically updated their own products.)
More importantly, we make money by selling games. Sometimes we sell games directly to the end-user; sometimes to an advertiser; sometimes to a manufacturer. We don't make money selling personal information because
We used to have a (fairly nifty) background auto-updating system similar to just about everybody's. Now we have a different (but still fairly nifter) non-background auto-updating system that is also similar to - just about everybody's. I was always surprised how a small number of people are vehemently against auto-update systems; this is especially true considering that pretty much every big package is updatable now.
I'm also one of the people at WildTangent that had to deal with Vista. My impression: they should (explitive) document their own (explitive) changes so that we can (explitive) figure out what's (explitive) going on. (explitive). And I'm not normally inclined to swearing.
OK -- here's some basic terminology:
a "cell" is the fundimental unit of a battery. A "D" battery contains one cell -- and indeed, in old books was just called a "D cell" and never a "D battery". The "cell" is the fundimental battery unit because of chemistry.
A "battery" contains a bunch of cells. The actual word "battery" means "a bunch of identical things" -- so that a bunch of cannon all grouped together (for example) is a "battery" -- hence the existance of "Battery Park" in New York.
Thanks to the average person's inability to keep these concepts seperate (and the lack of a reason why they should be seperate), "battery" is now used to mean either a battery in the old-fashioned sense OR a cell in the old fashioned sense (but only if the cell is, as it were, individually wrapped). Once again crystal clear tech language is subverted. (Note to self: don't go on a wild tangent about dumb terminals)
The "battery" in your laptop contains a bunch of cells -- I see from Google that at least some laptops use batteries of 12 cells. The "batteries" in the Tesla contains exactly one cell and would be better termed "cells", except that (per above) language is changing.
A big chunk of the cost of buying batteries for your laptop are:
1. You aren't buying in bulk. Bulk is lots cheaper.
2. You are also buying specialized circuitry that inside of the
3. Expensive plastic
I would expect that your 90%-off-in-bulk isn't high enough. Add in another by-twelve factor, and the price-per-year drops even more.
Maybe there's more to your figures than you're letting on, but frankly you're not selling your point very well.
Just sitting in your office, you cost your company about $150,000/year. They could lay you off, and use that money to pay Sun. They can then make up the difference by selling off their computers, netting, say, $100,000. They stop writing huge checks to the local power company, and sub-lease your computer space. They also save money on hardware fixes for the computers in your cluster, and on the cost of technicians.
From what you've said, Sun looks cheaper than your current solution (except for the porting, but heavens, that's not very expensive these days!)
HP was happy enough about this that their old "HP Journal" -- a monthly tech. magazine that would go in-depth into HP technology -- had an entire sidebar about the exact escape sequences needed to play the music. It was a sad day when they stopped publication; it was a fun read.
The same issue had, as its cover story, an article about how strap-on heart monitors work. Very cool, and the cover picture, of a small baby with a monitor on its foot, was striking. The same technology was put onto my oldest several years later when she was in the hospital right after being born.
*Ahem*
Duh!
You went from doctor to doctor, and each, seeing you once, went for the overwhelmingly obvious problem. When I had the same basic issue, that's what I did: my file got fat with visits at which point there was real paper to show that it wasn't just "being sick" or "asthma". The specialist figured it out right away, and I've hardly been sick since.
Doctors and bodies are like programmers and code: the obvious is always attacked first, and chronic issues are best handled by a single person.