(Full disclosure: I have a BA in Anthropology, and my advisor was one of the leading physical anthropologists in the US, so either I'm a brainwashed "one of them", or I know what the hell I'm talking about, depending on how you look at it.)
Haekels' embryos drawings, the old "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". Haekel was convicted of fraud by his University over these synthesized drawings in the late 1800's, yet textbooks published in the last five years still use them as "proof" of evolution.
No one believes in "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" anymore. No one. No one even remotely mainstream claims that the fact that embryos sometimes look like earlier evolutionary forms "proves" evolution, or even means very much of anything at all.
I notice, by the way, that you don't name any of these textbooks you claim are so wrong. Not that it would make much difference - you're falling into the logical trap of believing "(if X then Y) and (not X)" means "not Y". Whether or not any given textbook says that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny or whether any particular supporter of evolutionary theory was dishonest proves nothing about the theory. Think about it this way: if you're lying, does that mean evolution must be true?
Oh, hell no. comp.os.linux.*, comp.os.solaris.*, comp.sys.sgi.*, comp.unix.*...all are pretty active and relatively spam-free. Plus, your ISP may have local groups: depending on the quality of the ISP and its users, these can be very good and are entirely spam-free (unless one of the local users decides to spam them, which would be a spectacularly stupid move).
Maybe for the same reason we feed the grass to the cows instead of eating it directly ourselves... (Assuming a cow that gets fed grass these days, as opposed to soybeans, fish, and bits of other dead cow.:-P )
And, honestly... do you think that someone who can master all the necessery skills to be an astronaut can't do this?
Come on. There's a big damn difference between "learning how to fly the space shuttle" and "changing what foods you like to eat" and you damn well know it. Yes, you can acclimate yourself to things, but this is not necessarily desirable, for reasons I'll go into below...
Sure, it may be harder for some, but astronauts should be dedicated to their work. If you won't go to space without your BigMac, you are not fit to be an astronaut.
OK, so if this applies to meat, why doesn't it apply to everything? Why don't you tell them, "If you won't go to space without any reading material, you are not fit to be an astronaut"? After all, they don't really _need_ it. How about, "If you won't go to space without anything but flavorless (but nutritious) paste from a tube, you are not fit to be an astronaut"?
Fact is, morale is important, and it's only going to get more so as trips get longer. Keeping people happy is an important factor in getting them to work well, and if we want space travel to ever be anything more than the domain of a very select few, we've got to work at making it less of a chore. If I were given the opportunity to go to Mars, but I couldn't have any meat for the whole trip...I'd do it, but I'd be pretty cranky about having to eat mother-loving SOY PROTEIN the whole damn time.
Definitely neat, but I have to wonder: the guy rarely mentions his work. I don't know about you, but my workplace would not be too happy with me if I were collapsing at the office, or were unable to do the physical things my job requires, like lifting servers into racks. Pushing yourself like that sounds great, but it sounds mostly feasible for people who either don't have "work" to go to (like the writer he mentions) or whose work doesn't much care if they just flop in a chair wasted for the whole day. Then again, maybe I'm just making excuses instead of giving 100%...
Re:But he didn't actually chase any rabbits...
on
Chase the Rabbits
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Eyup. Humans are one of a very few creatures that are good at travelling very long distances. Lots of creatures can go faster than us over short distances, but very few can beat us in the long run. There were actually South American natives who'd hunt deer by walking after them. They'd find a trail and follow it. When they got close to the deer, it would run, and put some distance between itself and the hunters. They'd just keep following it, and it would have to run again. Eventually it would tire and be unable to run any more...and they'd be able to just walk right up to it.
yoyodyne:~$ uname -a
SunOS yoyodyne 5.8 Generic_108528-13 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIi-cEngine
yoyodyne:~$ grep Microsoft/usr/bin/clear
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation
# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft
So remember, kiddies, don't make unauthorized copies of/usr/bin/clear, or MS will come after you.
Marketing guys: Yeah, and we want a 1000 times raise and an office 1000 times as big. Get bent.
Hardware guys: *kick the developers in the nerts*
Give us games 1000 times better and we'll think about it, you pathetic freaks.
Re:Neat idea?
on
Nethack 3.4.0
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Realtime and/or multiplayer NH is a topic that comes up over and over again, but no one's ever found a very good way to make it work. A very large part of what gives NH its feel is that it is a turn-based game. If you want to sit and ponder your next move for ten minutes, you can do that. If you want to examine your inventory carefully while surrounded by angry orcs (to determine what item would best get you out of this fix, perhaps), you can do that. In a realtime game, you'd lose that ability, and it would be a very different game (and probably much worse, IMO).
Can you imagine using a scroll of genocide in a realtime fight? "Uh-oh, the orcs are hitting me! Quickly, I'll a)pply my bag (item T), take out the scroll (item h), r)ead it (it's item n now), answer 'orcs'..." You'd be dead; there's no way you could do it in realtime. The interface would have to change greatly, and again, it would be a very different game.
If, on the other hand, you make it multiplayer but keep it turn-based, what happens if Joe the Barbarian decides to take ten minutes examining his inventory? What if somebody has to be AFK to go to the bathroom? Everybody just has to wait? It would scale poorly and it would go extremely slowly. (By way of comparison, a chess game has maybe 70 moves by each player; a NH game might have 70,000, so anything that extends the length of a turn gets greatly multiplied.)
a work bench
Amen. I am getting so tired of working on the floor. But if you get a workbench, try and ensure that it is ONLY a workbench. We have a good table in our smaller server room, and guess what happened when a couple more machines needed to be added? You guessed it, right on the table.
a tool cart
Ditto. Carry your own Leatherman, but it's not a replacement for everything. A good toolkit, with adjustable wrenches, crescent wrenches, socket wrenches, screwdrivers of every imaginable size and shape, is worth its weight in gold.
a phone
A high-quality, cordless phone. Having to say "hold on", put down the phone, run over to check something, then come back is a pain and a half.
a seperate test subnet (firewalled from the real net)
Nice idea...but try getting my management to pay for "unnecessary" equipment.:-(
a good lock
Yup - but make sure you know how to pick it, because you will lock yourself out some day, and because lockpicking should be in every sysadmin's repertoire of skills.
Other ideas:
a dead-tree logbook. Not everything can or should go in computers' logfiles.
a terminal server (if appropriate for your hardware)
a graphical terminal (because setting something up, then having to run back to your desk to check on something is a real nuisance)
a labelmaker - label everything, but make sure it's accurate!
And choose generic linear hostnames for the systems, i.e. "web01"-"web99".
I still disagree...
a) Unless your organization is extremely anal-retentive, you will acquire gaps in the nameline and mismappings - that is, you'll have only web01, web02, web04, web05, and web07, and web01 will talk to db01, but web02 talks to db04, and web04 talks to db06...which you then have to account for, which pretty much takes you back to having meaningless hostnames.
b) You're vulnerable to typos. Most people don't actually think of this one, but I've seen it happen (a machine ended up in the wrong subnet for several days, for example). "OK, sir, I've re-OSed web58!"
"What?! I meant web59!!"
OTOH, you're highly unlikely to type "monkey" when you meant "dollyparton".
c) It's just damn confusing to have so many near-identical names. "OK, for the new project, I need staging-web56, staging-web83, and staging-web112...no, wait, that was staging-web101...or was it prod?"
You're not the only one - I've got rhecda, sadalsuud, altair, and algol right now, and I used to have zubeneshamali, menkent, and alderamin. I like the Arabic star names for my machines; my girlfriend's laptop got the very appropriate Latin "bellatrix". Admittedly, some of them do violate the suggestion that your hostnames be short and easy to type.
The equation still doesn't make any sense, IMO... The two MHz's on the right side cancel, leaving you with price = 2 * price ! The OP's concept is correct, but his algebra is messed up and he needs to repeat eighth grade math.
But I think there's another factor at work anyway. New laptops tend to be very expensive (at least relative to a comparable desktop). People, especially those who are not highly tuned into the PC market, absolutely hate thinking that what they spent $3000 for two years ago is now worth $500, if that. As a result, sellers tend to grossly overprice their laptops.
Acceptable according to who? "duck tape" is wrong. That isn't what it's called. And it was not "originally" called "duck tape"; it's always been called DUCT tape, because it was created for sealing HVAC ducts. "Duck" tape came about because a) it's easy to mishear, and b) people are illiterate morons who have no fscking idea what a duct is or why one might want to tape one.
Until the NBA's lawyers get the Basketball Copyright Act passed...
Don't joke. There's already been legal debate over whether things like game scores or descriptions of games are "news", a public happening and therefore free for the reproducing, or whether they're part of the game and therefore owned by the league! Wish I had a cite for this; maybe someone can find one...
Ditto. My canonical example of "good Flash" is HowStuffWorks.
They use it mostly for interactive demonstrations of physical processes, not just to make stuff whiz around the page. It also helps that they use it fairly minimally.
Even anti-MS linux friends are hailing MS giving them the ability to code across platforms with MS's latest intiatives.
Across which platforms? Answer: across whichever ones MS feels like letting you. Sure, there are projects like Mono, but if those make.NET truly "cross-platform", then we should just claim the existence of StarOffice makes DOC an open standard and WINE makes all Windows apps cross-platform.
If you really believe that MS is going to make their new initiatives cross-platform in an unbiased way...well, I think you're a little gullible, to say the least. Check out what they've done with HTTP/HTML, things/explicitly designed/ to be platform-agnostic, and MSN. (Go to music.msn.com with anything that isn't recent MSIE - it won't even let you try, it just insists that you can't possibly view their precious content.)
Eh...I remember when the (original) Pentium came out. The Mac afficionados were chortling over it, claiming that you'd NEVER be able to put it in a laptop, because its power consumption and heat output were too high. Three generations later... *shrug* If the chipmakers make it, someone's gonna want to put it in a laptop.
I'm not so sure about that. The same thing that makes buses inefficient makes almost any public transportation system inefficient. You want to foot the bill to build 700 miles of track, or whatever insane amount it would take to give decent coverage to Phoenix? Plus, with the city so spread out, unless the thing can manage an average speed of about 45 mph, it's still going to take forever to get anywhere.
What if the vendor doesn't exist any more? I rather suspect it turns into "then the state deals with it". Whoopee, another bureaucracy. (Although I actually wouldn't mind seeing this requirement imposed on cigarette companies..."Dear Marlboro; we found 3.1 billion of your cigarette butts on the streets of our city last week. Come pick them up or we'll charge you a buck for each one.")
The industry hasn't released content to the net because they know people will just steal it.
Eh...I'm not so sure about that. I think mostly they haven't released content to the net because they're stuck firmly on doing business the same old way. Their attitude is that they're making billions of dollars as it is, so why do they need to change anything? After all, Valenti was, IIRC, the guy who said that the VCR was "a dagger aimed at the heart of the movie industry", or some such flapdoodle. Contrary to his predictions, VCRs have flourished/and/ the movie industry is still huge and rich - at least partly/because/ of VCRs. Why anyone takes that nutter seriously is beyond me; it seems pretty clear his job is to be a professional Chicken Little lobbyist.
Apparently, if the Commies ever dropped the Big One on NYC, the survivors were supposed to live on water, crackers, and hard candies.
And the bodies of the dead! You forgot about the bodies of the dead! Nicely flash-cooked, of course. Assuming the rats didn't get to them first.
More seriously, I think those were probably expected to sustain you for 24 hours or so until the National Guard or what-have-you swooped in, seized everything, and set up refugee camps with food distribution centers.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice, by the way, that you don't name any of these textbooks you claim are so wrong. Not that it would make much difference - you're falling into the logical trap of believing "(if X then Y) and (not X)" means "not Y". Whether or not any given textbook says that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny or whether any particular supporter of evolutionary theory was dishonest proves nothing about the theory. Think about it this way: if you're lying, does that mean evolution must be true?
One important point, though, is that the market pays for value added. The more you outsource, the less value you're adding to anything.
Oh, hell no. comp.os.linux.*, comp.os.solaris.*, comp.sys.sgi.*, comp.unix.*...all are pretty active and relatively spam-free. Plus, your ISP may have local groups: depending on the quality of the ISP and its users, these can be very good and are entirely spam-free (unless one of the local users decides to spam them, which would be a spectacularly stupid move).
Maybe for the same reason we feed the grass to the cows instead of eating it directly ourselves... (Assuming a cow that gets fed grass these days, as opposed to soybeans, fish, and bits of other dead cow. :-P )
Fact is, morale is important, and it's only going to get more so as trips get longer. Keeping people happy is an important factor in getting them to work well, and if we want space travel to ever be anything more than the domain of a very select few, we've got to work at making it less of a chore. If I were given the opportunity to go to Mars, but I couldn't have any meat for the whole trip...I'd do it, but I'd be pretty cranky about having to eat mother-loving SOY PROTEIN the whole damn time.
Definitely neat, but I have to wonder: the guy rarely mentions his work. I don't know about you, but my workplace would not be too happy with me if I were collapsing at the office, or were unable to do the physical things my job requires, like lifting servers into racks. Pushing yourself like that sounds great, but it sounds mostly feasible for people who either don't have "work" to go to (like the writer he mentions) or whose work doesn't much care if they just flop in a chair wasted for the whole day. Then again, maybe I'm just making excuses instead of giving 100%...
Eyup. Humans are one of a very few creatures that are good at travelling very long distances. Lots of creatures can go faster than us over short distances, but very few can beat us in the long run. There were actually South American natives who'd hunt deer by walking after them. They'd find a trail and follow it. When they got close to the deer, it would run, and put some distance between itself and the hunters. They'd just keep following it, and it would have to run again. Eventually it would tire and be unable to run any more...and they'd be able to just walk right up to it.
yoyodyne:~$ uname -a /usr/bin/clear
So remember, kiddies, don't make unauthorized copies ofSunOS yoyodyne 5.8 Generic_108528-13 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraSPARC-IIi-cEngine
yoyodyne:~$ grep Microsoft
# Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation
# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft
Hardware guys: *kick the developers in the nerts* Give us games 1000 times better and we'll think about it, you pathetic freaks.
Can you imagine using a scroll of genocide in a realtime fight? "Uh-oh, the orcs are hitting me! Quickly, I'll a)pply my bag (item T), take out the scroll (item h), r)ead it (it's item n now), answer 'orcs'..." You'd be dead; there's no way you could do it in realtime. The interface would have to change greatly, and again, it would be a very different game.
If, on the other hand, you make it multiplayer but keep it turn-based, what happens if Joe the Barbarian decides to take ten minutes examining his inventory? What if somebody has to be AFK to go to the bathroom? Everybody just has to wait? It would scale poorly and it would go extremely slowly. (By way of comparison, a chess game has maybe 70 moves by each player; a NH game might have 70,000, so anything that extends the length of a turn gets greatly multiplied.)
Amen. I am getting so tired of working on the floor. But if you get a workbench, try and ensure that it is ONLY a workbench. We have a good table in our smaller server room, and guess what happened when a couple more machines needed to be added? You guessed it, right on the table.
a tool cart
Ditto. Carry your own Leatherman, but it's not a replacement for everything. A good toolkit, with adjustable wrenches, crescent wrenches, socket wrenches, screwdrivers of every imaginable size and shape, is worth its weight in gold.
a phone
A high-quality, cordless phone. Having to say "hold on", put down the phone, run over to check something, then come back is a pain and a half.
a seperate test subnet (firewalled from the real net) :-(
Nice idea...but try getting my management to pay for "unnecessary" equipment.
a good lock
Yup - but make sure you know how to pick it, because you will lock yourself out some day, and because lockpicking should be in every sysadmin's repertoire of skills.
Other ideas:
a) Unless your organization is extremely anal-retentive, you will acquire gaps in the nameline and mismappings - that is, you'll have only web01, web02, web04, web05, and web07, and web01 will talk to db01, but web02 talks to db04, and web04 talks to db06...which you then have to account for, which pretty much takes you back to having meaningless hostnames.
b) You're vulnerable to typos. Most people don't actually think of this one, but I've seen it happen (a machine ended up in the wrong subnet for several days, for example).
"OK, sir, I've re-OSed web58!"
"What?! I meant web59!!"
OTOH, you're highly unlikely to type "monkey" when you meant "dollyparton".
c) It's just damn confusing to have so many near-identical names. "OK, for the new project, I need staging-web56, staging-web83, and staging-web112...no, wait, that was staging-web101...or was it prod?"
You're not the only one - I've got rhecda, sadalsuud, altair, and algol right now, and I used to have zubeneshamali, menkent, and alderamin. I like the Arabic star names for my machines; my girlfriend's laptop got the very appropriate Latin "bellatrix". Admittedly, some of them do violate the suggestion that your hostnames be short and easy to type.
But I think there's another factor at work anyway. New laptops tend to be very expensive (at least relative to a comparable desktop). People, especially those who are not highly tuned into the PC market, absolutely hate thinking that what they spent $3000 for two years ago is now worth $500, if that. As a result, sellers tend to grossly overprice their laptops.
Acceptable according to who? "duck tape" is wrong. That isn't what it's called. And it was not "originally" called "duck tape"; it's always been called DUCT tape, because it was created for sealing HVAC ducts. "Duck" tape came about because a) it's easy to mishear, and b) people are illiterate morons who have no fscking idea what a duct is or why one might want to tape one.
Ditto. My canonical example of "good Flash" is HowStuffWorks. They use it mostly for interactive demonstrations of physical processes, not just to make stuff whiz around the page. It also helps that they use it fairly minimally.
If you really believe that MS is going to make their new initiatives cross-platform in an unbiased way...well, I think you're a little gullible, to say the least. Check out what they've done with HTTP/HTML, things /explicitly designed/ to be platform-agnostic, and MSN. (Go to music.msn.com with anything that isn't recent MSIE - it won't even let you try, it just insists that you can't possibly view their precious content.)
And with your new cast iron case, you can crush your entire desk when you put the computer on it.
85th most common name for boys born in the US in 2001. Ahead of "Miguel", interestingly enough.
Eh...I remember when the (original) Pentium came out. The Mac afficionados were chortling over it, claiming that you'd NEVER be able to put it in a laptop, because its power consumption and heat output were too high. Three generations later... *shrug* If the chipmakers make it, someone's gonna want to put it in a laptop.
I'm not so sure about that. The same thing that makes buses inefficient makes almost any public transportation system inefficient. You want to foot the bill to build 700 miles of track, or whatever insane amount it would take to give decent coverage to Phoenix? Plus, with the city so spread out, unless the thing can manage an average speed of about 45 mph, it's still going to take forever to get anywhere.
What if the vendor doesn't exist any more? I rather suspect it turns into "then the state deals with it". Whoopee, another bureaucracy. (Although I actually wouldn't mind seeing this requirement imposed on cigarette companies..."Dear Marlboro; we found 3.1 billion of your cigarette butts on the streets of our city last week. Come pick them up or we'll charge you a buck for each one.")
More seriously, I think those were probably expected to sustain you for 24 hours or so until the National Guard or what-have-you swooped in, seized everything, and set up refugee camps with food distribution centers.