If you want to see an example of Roman concrete, look at photos of or just go to Rome and visit the Pantheon, that great domed temple nearly 2000 years old. It's completely in tact and the dome is made of that marvelous concrete. No rebar, no reinforcement, just concrete. There is no way in hell that temple would have stood this long if it contained any kind of metallic rebar other than something made of gold or other material that doesn't corrode when exposed to the elements, and if it did the building would have been torn down to get to the metals inside as with the Colosseum. That's what happened to the bronze tiles that originally covered the dome.
Given the Chinese government's peculiar and primitive sense of justice and appropriate penalties for crime I'm surprised he wasn't burned at the stake.
"Only terrorists, criminals and spies should fear secret activities of the British and US intelligence agencies." William Hague, the utter of this sentence, left one very important phrase, this being, "if you trust the government." If I were a Brit I wouldn't trust the government. Brits have been guaranteed fewer civil rights than Americans. But as an American I wouldn't trust the American federal or any state or local government to do the "right thing". Politicians make their careers on doing the wrong thing. It is my hope that the revelations of this unwarranted snooping will raise such a stink that some big heads will roll. And I don't believe for a minute that the government only massages this information for patterns when there is a threat. That is government-issued, anti-FUD bullshit at its best. They are always looking for patterns. That's what the NSA and friends do.
The guy who did the analysis and bug fixes is someone who has way too much time on his hands. Fixing bugs in a thirty-year-old game that was a commercial failure which ran on a game system that was crude even by the standards written in 6502 assembly that nearly no one uses anymore seems to be the folly of a fellow who is either not working or needs to get a life. Still.... it was interesting to read what he did. Perhaps I have to much time on my hands!
I can just see it now. In a screening of the 1984 "Dune" flick or a superior remake, Paul Muadib is growling away working his weirding magic while everyone who left their phones on in the theater explodes.
Hogwash! COBOL only worked well on mainframes that had instruction sets that were designed for it. As an example of COBOL on a machine that was NOT designed for it I offer up the following. I learned COBOL on a Control Data Cyber 170-730 (yes, a successor to Seymour Cray's CDC 6000-series beasts from the 1960's). COBOL on this poor man's supercomputer was a dog and slow. But the university administration used this machine for many years and its database support was more than adequate for their needs.
Now, if you wanted to run FORTRAN programs on this beast that was a completely different story. Seymour Cray designed the CDC 6000-series machines specifically to allow the FORTRAN compiler to generate very efficient code.
Some day the Twelve Coding Tribes are going to going to leave their worlds in search of the Lost Planet of the Gods, COBOL. (Whoops, wrong universe [and spelling].)
I have, many years ago and only in school. My favorite COBOL statement I never used (was warned by professors NEVER, EVER to use) was ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y. Code modification anyone?
After all, which of us standing upon this lofty digital soapbox would not like to proclaim proudly that we have contracted an STD^H^H^H^H^H particular disease that might be MOST embarrassing if our friends found out? What if our mother's found out?!?!
Well, if not the slammer, at least get the lawyers sending out the letters disbarred. This is illegal conduct pure and simple and is an act of moral turpitude. Lawyers cannot hide behind their clients in practicing illegal behavior.
It would be nice if my bank's software had this kind of bug. It would be like winning the lottery... until they learned what happened and wanted their money back! But on a more serious note banks aren't supposed to have these problems because they don't use integers for storing monetary amounts, they use BCD or something along those lines. One of the few nice things that can be said about COBOL is that it natively permits this. No need for a Java BigInteger or BigDecimal class. Furthermore, the IBM mainframes that most COBOL programs run on can do these calculations in hardware (or so I understand).
This video is a wonderful reminder of the miracle of the modern postal service. We get so complacent with it and just take it for granted that if I write a letter (yes, I still do write real letters on real paper and with a real fountain pen), stuff it in an envelope with $0.46 worth of stamps attached, and put it into some blue metal box somewhere in the United States it will get to any other point in the United States (including the territories out in the Pacific) within a week. Most of the time it takes a couple days. E-mail is marvelous but it's really nothing more than just a more sophisticated version analog of the telegraph, the Victorian Internet. But actually getting a physical object from point to point, say from Guam to Puerto Rico or from New York to Nome, Alaska, for about the cost of 1/4 of a cup of Starbuck's coffee is indeed a miracle of efficiency and logistics. Not to bad for an organization that is essentially over 300 years old (if you take the British-operated postal service inherited by the country in 1776). Even though they've slowed things down a bit to save money it's still a marvel. So rejoice and be grateful!
Renting software (that is what Adobe is proposing after all) only works when there are no good alternatives, free or otherwise. But there are good alternatives such as The GIMP and it also just happens to be free. Can you imagine how fast the cash-strapped governments and companies of the world would dump Windows and move to Ubuntu (or some other reasonably friendly flavor of Linux) and OpenOffice or LibreOffice for those users who only need computers to browse, do e-mail, and produce documents and spreadsheets if Microsoft did this with Windows? (That fact that it's already happening to an extent only bears this thinking out.) This plan seems to be a rather bad move on Adobe's part.
Incidentally, I use OpenOffice on my Macs to produce documents and it's marvelous. It's got a couple very minor document painting glitches but on the whole it's a solid piece of software and I find it easier to use than Word.
If your car has an automatic transmission then I would guess that this is due to the way your car's transmission works. I bet you're in a lower gear when you're going 60 than when you're going 75. After all, this is a German car. People driving BMWs, designed to scream on the autobahn. It makes sense that they would gear it to run more efficiently at 75 than at 60.
When I accelerate slowly (yes, I'm the guy in front of you you regularly curse), drive a pickup with a stick shift and a 2.3 liter four-banger, keep my highway speed to about 60 mph (that's about 90 kph for you metric folks), and use my magic powers to keep the headwinds and crosswinds to a reasonable level my little pickup will get what the EPA said it gets: 29 miles per gallon. I think a lot of it really has to do with how a person drives. Now, in practice I drive a lot faster than that but it's nice to know that the EPA actually got it right.
It is about time! And with respect to any Israelis or Jews who might be offended by Google's actions today. I have just one thing to say to you: fuck you.
Google is responding to the reality of the situation on the ground today. The Palestinians people lived in a place called in English Palestine by everyone else including the Jews until 1948 when Israel was created. While it is true that they and other Arab neighbors did cause some problems by deciding not to bow to the reality of the political situation then and agree with the two-state solution created by the UN back then and to fight the Jews who through the UN legally stole half of Palestine from the Palestinians the fact of the matter is that there is a nation that is bottled up within the borders of the current state of Israel that do not want to be a part of Israel and would like some of the land back that the Israelis stole from them in 1967 not so fair and square.
Israel as it currently exists as a Jewish state is doomed because of the unsustainable situation it is in. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now. The nation is quickly losing the moral capital the Holocaust granted it by tacitly creating ghettos for the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, regularly depriving these people of commerce, jobs, food, water, and electricity, and then expecting that the people they victimize will simply put up with it. Google's actions today are just another nail in the coffin of the Jewish state.
Here is how I see it. One should never buy an extended warranty on anything unless such items have a reputation for failing. Only once have I owned a computer that has failed and that was a Mac iBook that I carelessly left in the back of a U-Haul truck driven from Los Angeles to Denver in one day at breakneck speed (my brother was driving;-} ). After that trip, it would run for about a 1/2 hour before heating up and crashing ingloriously. My last CD/MP3 player (yes, I still use those) from Sony lasted ten years before it finally died. The quality of consumer electronics is getting quite good these days. The same can be said about most new vehicles in 2013. They have a reliability and quality that has never existed. I've owned three Ford Ranger pickup trucks. My current one, a 2006 model year, a gasoline engine, has 206k miles on it, runs better now than it did when it was new, and does not burn oil. The only things I've replaced on it have been a starter, an alternator, both headlights, and one tail light. Furthermore, I have never replaced a clutch because I float the gears. I religiously change the oil. My previous one had 240k miles on it before I drove it to Denver to give to my brother who then put another 50k miles on it before blowing out the engine because he didn't change the oil! Now if you were like a friend of mine who bought a 2001 Mercedes-Benz at the time when they were having serious quality and reliability problems, buying an extended warranty would be a smart thing. He did buy one and used it many times during the 88k miles he put on it because of those problems.
My point is if you buy something NEW and take care of it, if it's going to fail it's likely to fail during the factory warranty period because the defect will show up then. Now, if I were to buy a USED car I'd be crazy to not buy the extended warranty, especially if it was once a rental car. I can control how I take care of something like that after I've bought it but I have no control over how it was driven or maintained before that time.
Yes, we should be demanding a large share of their profits for:
-- Allowing them to live on OUR planet; -- Breathe OUR air; -- Drinking OUR water and then contaminating it by pissing it out; -- Tolerating their greed, foolishness, short-sightedness, and stupidity; and -- Poorly mimicking the behavior of politicians.
Looks rather boring to me. But I'm old school... and after just made my first visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View in five years and seen bits of the beauty of old room-filling computers from the last sixty years on display, I can say with some certainty that the IU machine is dull to look at.
I haven't read the article but I'll wager that they're using Windows. I remember an article posted here about ten years ago that reported on a Navy ship that was being run completely using Windows NT 4.0. It's kind of strange to depend upon such a wonky piece of software. But today with everything being so interconnected, using Windows today would seem to be a bad gamble. But then it might be interesting. When it was demonstrated that voting machines were using Windows it was seen to be an opportunity to figure out who the hackers wanted to be president. Now it can even more interesting given the state of cyberwarfare. Not only can we learn who the Chinese want to be president, we can learn who they want to have the Americans destroy.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to see an example of Roman concrete, look at photos of or just go to Rome and visit the Pantheon, that great domed temple nearly 2000 years old. It's completely in tact and the dome is made of that marvelous concrete. No rebar, no reinforcement, just concrete. There is no way in hell that temple would have stood this long if it contained any kind of metallic rebar other than something made of gold or other material that doesn't corrode when exposed to the elements, and if it did the building would have been torn down to get to the metals inside as with the Colosseum. That's what happened to the bronze tiles that originally covered the dome.
Uh... it would help if I included the link: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/coffee-rationing-begins
Coffee was rationed during WW II. People used coffee substitutes like chicory and peanuts.
Given the Chinese government's peculiar and primitive sense of justice and appropriate penalties for crime I'm surprised he wasn't burned at the stake.
"Only terrorists, criminals and spies should fear secret activities of the British and US intelligence agencies." William Hague, the utter of this sentence, left one very important phrase, this being, "if you trust the government." If I were a Brit I wouldn't trust the government. Brits have been guaranteed fewer civil rights than Americans. But as an American I wouldn't trust the American federal or any state or local government to do the "right thing". Politicians make their careers on doing the wrong thing. It is my hope that the revelations of this unwarranted snooping will raise such a stink that some big heads will roll. And I don't believe for a minute that the government only massages this information for patterns when there is a threat. That is government-issued, anti-FUD bullshit at its best. They are always looking for patterns. That's what the NSA and friends do.
Then I was shocked to see Scalia was in the dissenting group.
Yes, so was I. That means that there is hope yet for that great foe of civil liberties.
The guy who did the analysis and bug fixes is someone who has way too much time on his hands. Fixing bugs in a thirty-year-old game that was a commercial failure which ran on a game system that was crude even by the standards written in 6502 assembly that nearly no one uses anymore seems to be the folly of a fellow who is either not working or needs to get a life. Still.... it was interesting to read what he did. Perhaps I have to much time on my hands!
I can just see it now. In a screening of the 1984 "Dune" flick or a superior remake, Paul Muadib is growling away working his weirding magic while everyone who left their phones on in the theater explodes.
You must still be in diapers.
Hogwash! COBOL only worked well on mainframes that had instruction sets that were designed for it. As an example of COBOL on a machine that was NOT designed for it I offer up the following. I learned COBOL on a Control Data Cyber 170-730 (yes, a successor to Seymour Cray's CDC 6000-series beasts from the 1960's). COBOL on this poor man's supercomputer was a dog and slow. But the university administration used this machine for many years and its database support was more than adequate for their needs.
Now, if you wanted to run FORTRAN programs on this beast that was a completely different story. Seymour Cray designed the CDC 6000-series machines specifically to allow the FORTRAN compiler to generate very efficient code.
Some day the Twelve Coding Tribes are going to going to leave their worlds in search of the Lost Planet of the Gods, COBOL. (Whoops, wrong universe [and spelling].)
I have, many years ago and only in school. My favorite COBOL statement I never used (was warned by professors NEVER, EVER to use) was ALTER X TO PROCEED TO Y. Code modification anyone?
After all, which of us standing upon this lofty digital soapbox would not like to proclaim proudly that we have contracted an STD^H^H^H^H^H particular disease that might be MOST embarrassing if our friends found out? What if our mother's found out?!?!
Well, if not the slammer, at least get the lawyers sending out the letters disbarred. This is illegal conduct pure and simple and is an act of moral turpitude. Lawyers cannot hide behind their clients in practicing illegal behavior.
It would be nice if my bank's software had this kind of bug. It would be like winning the lottery... until they learned what happened and wanted their money back! But on a more serious note banks aren't supposed to have these problems because they don't use integers for storing monetary amounts, they use BCD or something along those lines. One of the few nice things that can be said about COBOL is that it natively permits this. No need for a Java BigInteger or BigDecimal class. Furthermore, the IBM mainframes that most COBOL programs run on can do these calculations in hardware (or so I understand).
This video is a wonderful reminder of the miracle of the modern postal service. We get so complacent with it and just take it for granted that if I write a letter (yes, I still do write real letters on real paper and with a real fountain pen), stuff it in an envelope with $0.46 worth of stamps attached, and put it into some blue metal box somewhere in the United States it will get to any other point in the United States (including the territories out in the Pacific) within a week. Most of the time it takes a couple days. E-mail is marvelous but it's really nothing more than just a more sophisticated version analog of the telegraph, the Victorian Internet. But actually getting a physical object from point to point, say from Guam to Puerto Rico or from New York to Nome, Alaska, for about the cost of 1/4 of a cup of Starbuck's coffee is indeed a miracle of efficiency and logistics. Not to bad for an organization that is essentially over 300 years old (if you take the British-operated postal service inherited by the country in 1776). Even though they've slowed things down a bit to save money it's still a marvel. So rejoice and be grateful!
Renting software (that is what Adobe is proposing after all) only works when there are no good alternatives, free or otherwise. But there are good alternatives such as The GIMP and it also just happens to be free. Can you imagine how fast the cash-strapped governments and companies of the world would dump Windows and move to Ubuntu (or some other reasonably friendly flavor of Linux) and OpenOffice or LibreOffice for those users who only need computers to browse, do e-mail, and produce documents and spreadsheets if Microsoft did this with Windows? (That fact that it's already happening to an extent only bears this thinking out.) This plan seems to be a rather bad move on Adobe's part.
Incidentally, I use OpenOffice on my Macs to produce documents and it's marvelous. It's got a couple very minor document painting glitches but on the whole it's a solid piece of software and I find it easier to use than Word.
If your car has an automatic transmission then I would guess that this is due to the way your car's transmission works. I bet you're in a lower gear when you're going 60 than when you're going 75. After all, this is a German car. People driving BMWs, designed to scream on the autobahn. It makes sense that they would gear it to run more efficiently at 75 than at 60.
When I accelerate slowly (yes, I'm the guy in front of you you regularly curse), drive a pickup with a stick shift and a 2.3 liter four-banger, keep my highway speed to about 60 mph (that's about 90 kph for you metric folks), and use my magic powers to keep the headwinds and crosswinds to a reasonable level my little pickup will get what the EPA said it gets: 29 miles per gallon. I think a lot of it really has to do with how a person drives. Now, in practice I drive a lot faster than that but it's nice to know that the EPA actually got it right.
It is about time! And with respect to any Israelis or Jews who might be offended by Google's actions today. I have just one thing to say to you: fuck you.
Google is responding to the reality of the situation on the ground today. The Palestinians people lived in a place called in English Palestine by everyone else including the Jews until 1948 when Israel was created. While it is true that they and other Arab neighbors did cause some problems by deciding not to bow to the reality of the political situation then and agree with the two-state solution created by the UN back then and to fight the Jews who through the UN legally stole half of Palestine from the Palestinians the fact of the matter is that there is a nation that is bottled up within the borders of the current state of Israel that do not want to be a part of Israel and would like some of the land back that the Israelis stole from them in 1967 not so fair and square.
Israel as it currently exists as a Jewish state is doomed because of the unsustainable situation it is in. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now. The nation is quickly losing the moral capital the Holocaust granted it by tacitly creating ghettos for the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, regularly depriving these people of commerce, jobs, food, water, and electricity, and then expecting that the people they victimize will simply put up with it. Google's actions today are just another nail in the coffin of the Jewish state.
Ok, ok, I'm getting off my soap box now.
Here is how I see it. One should never buy an extended warranty on anything unless such items have a reputation for failing. Only once have I owned a computer that has failed and that was a Mac iBook that I carelessly left in the back of a U-Haul truck driven from Los Angeles to Denver in one day at breakneck speed (my brother was driving ;-} ). After that trip, it would run for about a 1/2 hour before heating up and crashing ingloriously. My last CD/MP3 player (yes, I still use those) from Sony lasted ten years before it finally died. The quality of consumer electronics is getting quite good these days. The same can be said about most new vehicles in 2013. They have a reliability and quality that has never existed. I've owned three Ford Ranger pickup trucks. My current one, a 2006 model year, a gasoline engine, has 206k miles on it, runs better now than it did when it was new, and does not burn oil. The only things I've replaced on it have been a starter, an alternator, both headlights, and one tail light. Furthermore, I have never replaced a clutch because I float the gears. I religiously change the oil. My previous one had 240k miles on it before I drove it to Denver to give to my brother who then put another 50k miles on it before blowing out the engine because he didn't change the oil! Now if you were like a friend of mine who bought a 2001 Mercedes-Benz at the time when they were having serious quality and reliability problems, buying an extended warranty would be a smart thing. He did buy one and used it many times during the 88k miles he put on it because of those problems.
My point is if you buy something NEW and take care of it, if it's going to fail it's likely to fail during the factory warranty period because the defect will show up then. Now, if I were to buy a USED car I'd be crazy to not buy the extended warranty, especially if it was once a rental car. I can control how I take care of something like that after I've bought it but I have no control over how it was driven or maintained before that time.
Yes, we should be demanding a large share of their profits for:
-- Allowing them to live on OUR planet;
-- Breathe OUR air;
-- Drinking OUR water and then contaminating it by pissing it out;
-- Tolerating their greed, foolishness, short-sightedness, and stupidity; and
-- Poorly mimicking the behavior of politicians.
These people truly are a waste of skin.
Looks rather boring to me. But I'm old school... and after just made my first visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View in five years and seen bits of the beauty of old room-filling computers from the last sixty years on display, I can say with some certainty that the IU machine is dull to look at.
I haven't read the article but I'll wager that they're using Windows. I remember an article posted here about ten years ago that reported on a Navy ship that was being run completely using Windows NT 4.0. It's kind of strange to depend upon such a wonky piece of software. But today with everything being so interconnected, using Windows today would seem to be a bad gamble. But then it might be interesting. When it was demonstrated that voting machines were using Windows it was seen to be an opportunity to figure out who the hackers wanted to be president. Now it can even more interesting given the state of cyberwarfare. Not only can we learn who the Chinese want to be president, we can learn who they want to have the Americans destroy.
Ack.... it's 3:30 in the morning and I can't spell. It's "probably dull TO look at". That ought to be modded down just for that little slip.