And so the new slashdot layout is finally explained in full.
Yes. There's so much crap running on Slashdot's pages now that Firefox sometimes reports that a script is running too long. Pages load slowly because the five or so different ad servers all need time to respond. The page code has "document.write()" calls which load more Javascript, forcing operations which ought to be in parallel to wait for the previous step to complete.
I just had a Slashdot page load wait 9 seconds for "bs.serving-sys.com". That's a 9 second delay for a useless site that's trying to load a "tracking cookie". A Jetpack add-on to block all that stuff will be a huge win.
This sort of thing appeals to people with an addictive personality. I tried EverQuest once, and after about an hour, lost interest. Once I've seen the highlights in a game, it's not that interesting.
You really see this if you go to Vegas. I once went to Vegas for COMDEX (back when it mattered) and was booked into a casino/hotel. I watched a bus tour come in. The people got off the bus, and went straight to the slot machines. You'd think they'd check in, go to their room, take a shower, check out the entertainment guide to see what's going on, and then go out. Nah. Pure Skinner box behavior. It's depressing just to watch them.
I have a few Eee PC 2G Surf models, which I got cheaply from a company that bought a bunch of them. (The black ones were accepted, but their executives wouldn't be seen with the more unusual colors.) So I reloaded a pink unit from the CD, back to its factory state, and gave it to a friend of mine. She's non-technical, a horse trainer. She has a Windows laptop at home, but the 2G Surf is small enough to carry around for e-mail reading, web browsing, and Open Office work in coffee shops. She likes it and hasn't had any problems with it.
Silicon Valley is definitely in decline. The current recession is hurting, but that's not the real problem. Part of the problem is that manufacturing moved out. Venture capital
isn't doing well. Venture funds as a group are losing money, and have been for several years now. There was one tech IPO in 2008 before the crash.
Worse, there's an idea shortage. Here's a list of companies looking for venture funding this month. "Short dial codes" "Timeshare lead generation". "People powered search" (yes, that again). Yawn. There's nothing in the pipe that looks like a big win even if it succeeds.
Polaroid film had some unusual properties. For one thing, it's grainless. Unlike silver-based films, Polaroid film itself potentially has detail down to the molecular level.
Most of Polaroid's own cameras didn't have good enough optics to take full advantage of this, but there were Polaroid films for view cameras which did.
If you build something like this, there's another step needed to get reliably random numbers. Take two successive outputs. If A>B,, output a 1. If A
Even radioactive random number generators have to use that step. That was discovered in the 1950s.
It's another one of those crap articles from Physorg. They regularly report some minor advance in chemistry or device physics as a new product available Real Soon Now. Then somebody posts it to Slashdot, whose "editors" post it as news.
I read that book. I think it was even reviewed on Slashdot already.
One thing that's surprised me is that nobody in the Third World has built something like a V-1 "buzz bomb". That's WWII technology, and it was a low-end technology back then, built from sheet metal. Just duplicating the V-1, adding a JATO bottle so you can use a short portable launch ramp, and adding a half-decent autopilot would provide a precision cruise missile capability at a low price. A low-end GPS plus a backup capability to revert to compass and time in case of jamming would work.
Most of them will get through, especially if they each take different routes. The original V-1s flew in a straight line from launch site to target, the launch sites were fixed, and the target was usually London, so shooting them down wasn't hard. It took thousands of anti-aircraft guns, though. Who deploys thousands of anti-aircraft guns any more?
This is a good thing, but it has to be done right. Like the SEC's EDGAR system.
EDGAR now has a user-friendly interface and a search engine, but underneath is a huge
collection of raw SGML files accessible via FTP. These files stay up forever and their names
and contents do not change. Many big services (Bloomberg, EDGAR Online, Google, etc.)
grind through that data every day. One of my systems, Downside, does it too. There's no charge for access, bulk downloads are supported, and the raw filings are accessible. That's the way it should work.
What you don't want is something you can only access through a search engine, with some of the information on a pay site. A bad example is Delaware's corporate record system.
So the minimum standards for a public records system that replaces publication should be comparable to those maintained by EDGAR.
This author is writing from the viewpoint of someone who repairs existing things, rather than designs new things. Good machine design is a rare skill; it was rare even in the era of mechanical invention. The great machine designers were once famous in engineering circles; Edison, Burroughs (who designed the first reliable adding machine), Ed Klienschmidt (designed most of the good Teletype machines), and a few others. Dean Kamen is probably the best known person in that field today. There are so many subtle tradeoffs in machine design that few people can do it well.
Exotic dancers get bigger tips, and don't have to take shop classes with drooling delinquents.
Have you ever talked to a dancer about the job? (Not in a strip club, where the bosses are watching, but somewhere else.) Most clubs take a cut of the tips, and that cut has increased over the years. Not only are most dancers not paid wages, they pay a "stage fee" just to work. There are nights when a dancer will lose money.
Festo, the German automation manufacturer, has a line of training products, with a curriculum to go with them. They do this because they see a need for more people who know how to put together and fix automated production facilities. Some community colleges are now on board. There's a US competition and a world competition for mechatronic skills.
Festo's gear is very high quality and isn't cheap. It's serious industrial stuff. In Germany, vocational education is taken seriously. The US has forgotten this.
Companies that have the ability to design and implement an automated production line find outsourcing less tempting. Why deal with some unknown supplier in China who will keep reducing their quality, when you can just order some production equipment, hook it up, program it, and start banging out whatever it was you wanted to make?
Recall Alert
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission
Office of Information and Public Affairs Washington, DC 20207
May 23, 2009
Alert #09-993 M&A Companion Touch
The following product safety recall was voluntarily conducted by the firm in cooperation with the CPSC. Consumers should stop using the product immediately unless otherwise instructed.
Name of Product: "Companion Touch" notebook computer
Units: About 9,000
Distributor: M&A
Hazard: The laptop computer may have pre-installed hostile software (a "virus" or "worm")
which could result in the unauthorized transmission of private user data, including bank account numbers
and passwords, to a remote site.
Incidents/Injuries: None reported.
Remedy: Immediately stop using the device and return it to the point of sale for replacement. If bank account or credit card information has at any time been stored on the device, contact your bank and credit card providers to check for fraud and identity theft.
If computer security is to be taken seriously, such actions are essential.
Old stuff seems to last forever because the old stuff we have left is the stuff that survived..
Exactly. Some of the stuff we have now will be running in a century, but we don't know what it is yet.
Discouragingly, there are fundamental lifetime problems with ICs. As line width becomes smaller, small effects like electromigration eventually destroy something. The plastic ones aren't hermetically sealed. The "tin whiskers" problem has become much worse since packaging went lead-free. The lifetime of electronics is decreasing with its scale. This is a major problem for long-lived products like aircraft, industrial equipment, and even cars.
Nobody seems to be trying to re-think capitalism. I'm not talking about the current crisis.
There's a more fundamental problem - increased productivity no longer results in higher real income. US per-capita real income per hour worked peaked in 1973.
Think about that for a moment. We have incredibly good production technology. 20% of the workforce makes all the real stuff. That number was 50% in 1950 and 90% in 1900. Yet
workdays have been getting longer for several decades.
SF writers used to write about things like that. Harry Harrison did. Today, nobody touches it.
This seems to be aimed at applications which insist on running with administrator rights but don't actually use them. If the app actually tries to do something that needs administrator rights, it's going to fail anyway.
If applications without administrator rights can put files in administrator directories, especially ones that have OS components, then turning off administrator privileges is sort of pointless.
Not much. "Police Academy 8" is back in development, after being shelved in 2003 and 2006. I think that's the highest sequel number with the same title.
Hollywood is down to mining the more obscure comic books and toys. The Silver Surfer has been done. GI Joe comes out this summer. There's another Transformers movie. Yawn.
Even "Terminator Salvation" is disappointing.
"Angels and Demons" isn't bad, except that it turns into one of those stupid "beat the clock" movies. (Previous "beat the clock" movie: "12 Rounds". Next up, "The Taking of Pelham 123". Yes, idea shortage.)
We need another Spielberg. There isn't one in sight.
I think they just re-invented Greasemonkey. But not well.
At least with Greasemonkey, there's a well-defined language. It's all Javascript. This thing seems to have some horrible mess of intermixed Javascript, CSS, and HTML. Plus it has JQuery built in, and a special symbol ("$") for it. (For a moment, I thought I was reading Perl.)
I asked about ICBMs, whether once launched, they could be shut down. I was told no, they had no recall or self destruct.
That's correct. For test launches from Vandenberg, a range safety system is installed in missiles. But it's only useful during the boost phase, when the missile still has line of sight to the launch site.
There's a deterrence issue with this, but the real problem is that there's no way to communicate with the things downrange. Test launches require a whole string of ground stations, with big, steerable dish antennas, along the track of the booster. The "Pacific Missile Range" is such a set of ground stations, going out to Hawaii and beyond. This only works for launches along that line of fire.
So operational missiles don't have either a range safety system or telemetry downlinks.
I've read it. It sucks.
on
Space Vulture
·
· Score: 1
"Space Vulture" is a bad imitation of 1930s pulp fiction. It's so bad it's almost a parody, but it's not funny.
If you want to read modern over-the-top fiction written in 1930s pulp style, there's far better stuff around. Microsoft's pulp fiction division turned out some "Crimson Skies" novels which were published as books. They're surprisingly good. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is quite well done. John Zakour has several pulps about a future detective. Those are very funny. I could name others.
Or go back to the classics and read the whole Lensman series, which holds up well half a century later.
Slashdot Mirror
And so the new slashdot layout is finally explained in full.
Yes. There's so much crap running on Slashdot's pages now that Firefox sometimes reports that a script is running too long. Pages load slowly because the five or so different ad servers all need time to respond. The page code has "document.write()" calls which load more Javascript, forcing operations which ought to be in parallel to wait for the previous step to complete. I just had a Slashdot page load wait 9 seconds for "bs.serving-sys.com". That's a 9 second delay for a useless site that's trying to load a "tracking cookie". A Jetpack add-on to block all that stuff will be a huge win.
This sort of thing appeals to people with an addictive personality. I tried EverQuest once, and after about an hour, lost interest. Once I've seen the highlights in a game, it's not that interesting.
You really see this if you go to Vegas. I once went to Vegas for COMDEX (back when it mattered) and was booked into a casino/hotel. I watched a bus tour come in. The people got off the bus, and went straight to the slot machines. You'd think they'd check in, go to their room, take a shower, check out the entertainment guide to see what's going on, and then go out. Nah. Pure Skinner box behavior. It's depressing just to watch them.
What next, "GTA IV - Fire Island expansion pack?"
Yes, that site looks fake.
I have a few Eee PC 2G Surf models, which I got cheaply from a company that bought a bunch of them. (The black ones were accepted, but their executives wouldn't be seen with the more unusual colors.) So I reloaded a pink unit from the CD, back to its factory state, and gave it to a friend of mine. She's non-technical, a horse trainer. She has a Windows laptop at home, but the 2G Surf is small enough to carry around for e-mail reading, web browsing, and Open Office work in coffee shops. She likes it and hasn't had any problems with it.
Silicon Valley is definitely in decline. The current recession is hurting, but that's not the real problem. Part of the problem is that manufacturing moved out. Venture capital isn't doing well. Venture funds as a group are losing money, and have been for several years now. There was one tech IPO in 2008 before the crash.
Worse, there's an idea shortage. Here's a list of companies looking for venture funding this month. "Short dial codes" "Timeshare lead generation". "People powered search" (yes, that again). Yawn. There's nothing in the pipe that looks like a big win even if it succeeds.
"Who tells whom what to do?" - V. I. Lenin
Polaroid film had some unusual properties. For one thing, it's grainless. Unlike silver-based films, Polaroid film itself potentially has detail down to the molecular level. Most of Polaroid's own cameras didn't have good enough optics to take full advantage of this, but there were Polaroid films for view cameras which did.
(Sorry, HTML escape problem.)
If A < B, output a 0. If A==B, ignore and try again.
If you build something like this, there's another step needed to get reliably random numbers. Take two successive outputs. If A>B,, output a 1. If A Even radioactive random number generators have to use that step. That was discovered in the 1950s.
It's another one of those crap articles from Physorg. They regularly report some minor advance in chemistry or device physics as a new product available Real Soon Now. Then somebody posts it to Slashdot, whose "editors" post it as news.
Wikipedia has better editing than this.
I read that book. I think it was even reviewed on Slashdot already.
One thing that's surprised me is that nobody in the Third World has built something like a V-1 "buzz bomb". That's WWII technology, and it was a low-end technology back then, built from sheet metal. Just duplicating the V-1, adding a JATO bottle so you can use a short portable launch ramp, and adding a half-decent autopilot would provide a precision cruise missile capability at a low price. A low-end GPS plus a backup capability to revert to compass and time in case of jamming would work.
Most of them will get through, especially if they each take different routes. The original V-1s flew in a straight line from launch site to target, the launch sites were fixed, and the target was usually London, so shooting them down wasn't hard. It took thousands of anti-aircraft guns, though. Who deploys thousands of anti-aircraft guns any more?
This is a good thing, but it has to be done right. Like the SEC's EDGAR system.
EDGAR now has a user-friendly interface and a search engine, but underneath is a huge collection of raw SGML files accessible via FTP. These files stay up forever and their names and contents do not change. Many big services (Bloomberg, EDGAR Online, Google, etc.) grind through that data every day. One of my systems, Downside, does it too. There's no charge for access, bulk downloads are supported, and the raw filings are accessible. That's the way it should work.
What you don't want is something you can only access through a search engine, with some of the information on a pay site. A bad example is Delaware's corporate record system.
So the minimum standards for a public records system that replaces publication should be comparable to those maintained by EDGAR.
Of course he'd read Pirsig. He cites Pirsig.
This author is writing from the viewpoint of someone who repairs existing things, rather than designs new things. Good machine design is a rare skill; it was rare even in the era of mechanical invention. The great machine designers were once famous in engineering circles; Edison, Burroughs (who designed the first reliable adding machine), Ed Klienschmidt (designed most of the good Teletype machines), and a few others. Dean Kamen is probably the best known person in that field today. There are so many subtle tradeoffs in machine design that few people can do it well.
Exotic dancers get bigger tips, and don't have to take shop classes with drooling delinquents.
Have you ever talked to a dancer about the job? (Not in a strip club, where the bosses are watching, but somewhere else.) Most clubs take a cut of the tips, and that cut has increased over the years. Not only are most dancers not paid wages, they pay a "stage fee" just to work. There are nights when a dancer will lose money.
And dancer careers are over at age 28.
Festo, the German automation manufacturer, has a line of training products, with a curriculum to go with them. They do this because they see a need for more people who know how to put together and fix automated production facilities. Some community colleges are now on board. There's a US competition and a world competition for mechatronic skills.
Festo's gear is very high quality and isn't cheap. It's serious industrial stuff. In Germany, vocational education is taken seriously. The US has forgotten this.
Companies that have the ability to design and implement an automated production line find outsourcing less tempting. Why deal with some unknown supplier in China who will keep reducing their quality, when you can just order some production equipment, hook it up, program it, and start banging out whatever it was you wanted to make?
Recall Alert
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission
Office of Information and Public Affairs
Washington, DC 20207
May 23, 2009
Alert #09-993
M&A Companion Touch
The following product safety recall was voluntarily conducted by the firm in cooperation with the CPSC. Consumers should stop using the product immediately unless otherwise instructed.
Name of Product: "Companion Touch" notebook computer
Units: About 9,000
Distributor: M&A
Hazard: The laptop computer may have pre-installed hostile software (a "virus" or "worm") which could result in the unauthorized transmission of private user data, including bank account numbers and passwords, to a remote site.
Incidents/Injuries: None reported.
Remedy: Immediately stop using the device and return it to the point of sale for replacement. If bank account or credit card information has at any time been stored on the device, contact your bank and credit card providers to check for fraud and identity theft.
If computer security is to be taken seriously, such actions are essential.
We're still a long way from a self-sustaining robot economy.
When auto repair (not manufacturing, repair) goes fully robotic, worry.
Old stuff seems to last forever because the old stuff we have left is the stuff that survived..
Exactly. Some of the stuff we have now will be running in a century, but we don't know what it is yet.
Discouragingly, there are fundamental lifetime problems with ICs. As line width becomes smaller, small effects like electromigration eventually destroy something. The plastic ones aren't hermetically sealed. The "tin whiskers" problem has become much worse since packaging went lead-free. The lifetime of electronics is decreasing with its scale. This is a major problem for long-lived products like aircraft, industrial equipment, and even cars.
Nobody seems to be trying to re-think capitalism. I'm not talking about the current crisis. There's a more fundamental problem - increased productivity no longer results in higher real income. US per-capita real income per hour worked peaked in 1973.
Think about that for a moment. We have incredibly good production technology. 20% of the workforce makes all the real stuff. That number was 50% in 1950 and 90% in 1900. Yet workdays have been getting longer for several decades.
SF writers used to write about things like that. Harry Harrison did. Today, nobody touches it.
If you and the rest of your buddies are working at reviewing for finals, your addicted friend has already fucked the dog academically.
Yes. It's late May. He won't be back in September.
This seems to be aimed at applications which insist on running with administrator rights but don't actually use them. If the app actually tries to do something that needs administrator rights, it's going to fail anyway.
If applications without administrator rights can put files in administrator directories, especially ones that have OS components, then turning off administrator privileges is sort of pointless.
Not much. "Police Academy 8" is back in development, after being shelved in 2003 and 2006. I think that's the highest sequel number with the same title.
Hollywood is down to mining the more obscure comic books and toys. The Silver Surfer has been done. GI Joe comes out this summer. There's another Transformers movie. Yawn.
Even "Terminator Salvation" is disappointing.
"Angels and Demons" isn't bad, except that it turns into one of those stupid "beat the clock" movies. (Previous "beat the clock" movie: "12 Rounds". Next up, "The Taking of Pelham 123". Yes, idea shortage.)
We need another Spielberg. There isn't one in sight.
I think they just re-invented Greasemonkey. But not well.
At least with Greasemonkey, there's a well-defined language. It's all Javascript. This thing seems to have some horrible mess of intermixed Javascript, CSS, and HTML. Plus it has JQuery built in, and a special symbol ("$") for it. (For a moment, I thought I was reading Perl.)
Having done some non-trivial work with Greasemonkey, I'm not sure this thing is a step up.
I asked about ICBMs, whether once launched, they could be shut down. I was told no, they had no recall or self destruct.
That's correct. For test launches from Vandenberg, a range safety system is installed in missiles. But it's only useful during the boost phase, when the missile still has line of sight to the launch site.
There's a deterrence issue with this, but the real problem is that there's no way to communicate with the things downrange. Test launches require a whole string of ground stations, with big, steerable dish antennas, along the track of the booster. The "Pacific Missile Range" is such a set of ground stations, going out to Hawaii and beyond. This only works for launches along that line of fire.
So operational missiles don't have either a range safety system or telemetry downlinks.
"Space Vulture" is a bad imitation of 1930s pulp fiction. It's so bad it's almost a parody, but it's not funny.
If you want to read modern over-the-top fiction written in 1930s pulp style, there's far better stuff around. Microsoft's pulp fiction division turned out some "Crimson Skies" novels which were published as books. They're surprisingly good. "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" is quite well done. John Zakour has several pulps about a future detective. Those are very funny. I could name others.
Or go back to the classics and read the whole Lensman series, which holds up well half a century later.