"Is this more evidence that we in the science and tech fields undervalue art and pure creativity?"
No, it shows that the better your brain functions, the more attention span you have to pay attention to many fields. Those of us who have to work our brains hard for those occasional flashes of brilliance don't have enough ooomph left over for "frivolities".
Those who do not pay attention to the world around them, are doomed to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, balls covering water).
Thirty years ago, I was living in Sweden, where it was already nothing new that you cover an outdoor swimming pool with ping-pong balls to prevent heat losses and related evaporation. How come this was news, and a great stroke of genius, in California?
As an aside, they don't interfere with the use of the pool at all. You can dive in through them.
Why does anybody, anyone at all, still believe in this "cloud" thing? Any person or company that stores anything personal/private/confidential/valuable in "cloud space" is Just Asking For It.
I speak as a person with 50 years experience in IT. The lesson of those years is - You cannot, must not, trust Other People with your precious jewels. The human race does not just have malicious individuals; it is 80% composed of lazy incompetents who don't pay attention and can't keep promises.
Yes, but UK gov does not have any of those "smart as on Slashdot" IT pros. The UK gov outsourced all its IT to Big-Name-and-Big-Billing suppliers, and got rid of its own IT-literate employees. Now that the BNaBB suppliers have got UK gov over a barrel, the charges they invoice are extortionate. Remember the scandal over the lost CDs containing the entire Dept of Work and Pensions database (IIRC)? That was caused by the relevant dept being unable to write a simple SQL SELECT, and the supplier wanting £5000 for 20 minutes work.
Has anyone told him what sea water does to aluminium? Or mentioned that's why almost nobody operates flying boats commercially any longer? The constant corrosion? The constant leaks? The constant repairs?
Reminds me of those clowns who set out to cross the oceans in a small boat without no radio or nav equipment, and only a school atlas. Other people have to risk their lives to rescue them.
Let's hope the USCG makes him post a bond big enough to cover the cost of the rescue before he departs. That should slow him down a bit.
Are the pulsars and quasars distributed in any useful way? Maybe in a sparse but heavily-trafficked area you might want add a beacon or two? Second, the quasars are red-shifted - does that not mean their light gets preferentially absorbed by dust/gas etc, which makes them useful only at quite short ranges? (Short is of course a relative term for a starship navigator).
Then, of course, there are those captains that can't bothered follow the rules or even keep a lookout. http://www.scotsman.com/news/u...
When you do a hyperspace jump of any worthwhile length, the navigational inaccuracies accumulate, and you come out somewhere that you don't know exactly where you are. How long will it take you to work out where you are and get a position accurate enough for the next jump? Could be days if you are looking around for stars, trying to match their absorption spectra against a database, observing long enough to determine their real motion, etc etc.
What you need is a lighthouse. Preferably two-three so you can triangulate. Get a position in minutes.
We humans, setting out to use the trackless seas of our planet, with crap navigational instruments - one of the first nav aids we built were lighthouses, for instance the Pharos at Alexandria, more than 2,000 years ago.
I wonder if this star is anywhere near a hazard? That would confirm it in my mind.
So the bugs in Win 7 UI were actually created by Microsoft people?
1. In Win 7, open Windows Explorer
2. Get a list of files up.
3. Delete a file
4. Whoa, the file is STILL THERE in the list
5. Delete it again
6. Whoa, ERROR MESSAGE "file not found" - if so, why is it listed?
That's a fundamental breach of the user paradigm. No previous Windows has ever done anything so mindlessly wrong.
This shit is why I decided to stay with XP till the end, and then moved to Linux Mint Cinnamon. Which was an excellent move - it runs lighter and faster on my hardware than XP ever did, and looks and feels a lot more like the UI that I already knew than Win 7, Win 8, Win 8.1 does.
There is a solution already in use round the world. It's called "pumped storage". Dinorwic and Ben Cruachan are just two out of the many examples worldwide.
Base load from generators that aren't easy to start and stop (say nuclear) is used during low usage times to pump water up to height. When peak power is required, a flick of a switch sends the water through turbines that spin up extremely rapidly. Dinorwic can go from 0 to 1320 MW in 12 seconds.
This setup is excellent for using/storing solar power.
Microsoft has tried at least three times during my career to sell rental contracts for Office. The rental approach has never worked on any of those occasions. If they can't get it to work for Office, it'll never work for Windows.
On one of those occasions, I was deeply involved with an effort by a major international company to set up Office on rental licences, as part of their portfolio to offer to business customers. I helped set up and run a trial, we got some trial customers in, and tried to get Microsoft to do their bit to make it work. We met with a total blank indifference from the local Microsoft people, and a total refusal to move even an inch to be helpful to the trial customers.
There were constant problems (with updates, with licence management, with bugs), and Microsoft was massively unhelpful whenever we phoned the global assistance helpline (which we were paying through the nose for). I don't think we got a satisfactory answer to any of the problems we reported (alll probs that could not be fixed at either local or country level)
In the end we gave up, bought the trial customers full-price retail licences and boxed sets with manuals, just to be able to get out of the trial.
What's difficult for a human in assembling IKEA furniture is PAYING ATTENTION to the instructions. I have been assemblling IKEA furniture for 40 years (since there were only two IKEA stores in the whole world) and I have never had instructions that were not right. When humans screw up an IKEA assembly, it's because of choosing the wrong piece, or not rotating the piece to the correct orientation, or not using the correct screw/bolt/doohickey for the currrent stage.
Frankly, the "IKEA test" identifies creatures who claim to be human, but aren't.
Ever heard of hydroponic farming? They can grow their own food, and with good recycling keep on eating and producing oxygen for years. There's plenty of water ice on the Moon, frozen under the surface. And there's free solar energy in huge quantities.
Nobody would man a facility on the Moon without some backup means of staying alive.
Cake PHP will generate an app extremely quickly if all you want is Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) of records, in a Model-View-Controller structure.
1. Define the database in MySQL
2. Run the delightful commands "./cake bake model all", "./cake bake.controller all", "./cake bake view all"
3. And you are done, 20 minutes after you started.
Cake exploits naming conventions to give you auto generation of code, auto lookup of encoded values, etc etc. I have not yet discovered all it can do.
And best of all, you don't need to write any interface code, that is what a browser is for.
Slashdot Mirror
Now who the hell modded this Insightful post down? Paid shills, I suppose. I've just burned my last mod point, otherwise I would mod up.
I hew my one-bits out of the living face of Chaos. I thought everybody did that.
"Is this more evidence that we in the science and tech fields undervalue art and pure creativity?"
No, it shows that the better your brain functions, the more attention span you have to pay attention to many fields. Those of us who have to work our brains hard for those occasional flashes of brilliance don't have enough ooomph left over for "frivolities".
..in those days, your iPhone was not a handheld, and the only entry in your Contacts list went to the Gods.
[What if iPhone model numbers could go negative?]
Those who do not pay attention to the world around them, are doomed to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, balls covering water).
Thirty years ago, I was living in Sweden, where it was already nothing new that you cover an outdoor swimming pool with ping-pong balls to prevent heat losses and related evaporation. How come this was news, and a great stroke of genius, in California?
As an aside, they don't interfere with the use of the pool at all. You can dive in through them.
Royal Bank of Screwups.
Why does anybody, anyone at all, still believe in this "cloud" thing? Any person or company that stores anything personal/private/confidential/valuable in "cloud space" is Just Asking For It.
I speak as a person with 50 years experience in IT. The lesson of those years is - You cannot, must not, trust Other People with your precious jewels. The human race does not just have malicious individuals; it is 80% composed of lazy incompetents who don't pay attention and can't keep promises.
What the hell is decadal cadence? Googling does not help.
Yes, but UK gov does not have any of those "smart as on Slashdot" IT pros. The UK gov outsourced all its IT to Big-Name-and-Big-Billing suppliers, and got rid of its own IT-literate employees. Now that the BNaBB suppliers have got UK gov over a barrel, the charges they invoice are extortionate. Remember the scandal over the lost CDs containing the entire Dept of Work and Pensions database (IIRC)? That was caused by the relevant dept being unable to write a simple SQL SELECT, and the supplier wanting £5000 for 20 minutes work.
Has anyone told him what sea water does to aluminium? Or mentioned that's why almost nobody operates flying boats commercially any longer? The constant corrosion? The constant leaks? The constant repairs?
Reminds me of those clowns who set out to cross the oceans in a small boat without no radio or nav equipment, and only a school atlas. Other people have to risk their lives to rescue them.
Let's hope the USCG makes him post a bond big enough to cover the cost of the rescue before he departs. That should slow him down a bit.
Fix the city. Make the app unnecessary.
Are the pulsars and quasars distributed in any useful way? Maybe in a sparse but heavily-trafficked area you might want add a beacon or two? Second, the quasars are red-shifted - does that not mean their light gets preferentially absorbed by dust/gas etc, which makes them useful only at quite short ranges? (Short is of course a relative term for a starship navigator).
Then, of course, there are those captains that can't bothered follow the rules or even keep a lookout. http://www.scotsman.com/news/u...
When you do a hyperspace jump of any worthwhile length, the navigational inaccuracies accumulate, and you come out somewhere that you don't know exactly where you are. How long will it take you to work out where you are and get a position accurate enough for the next jump? Could be days if you are looking around for stars, trying to match their absorption spectra against a database, observing long enough to determine their real motion, etc etc.
What you need is a lighthouse. Preferably two-three so you can triangulate. Get a position in minutes.
We humans, setting out to use the trackless seas of our planet, with crap navigational instruments - one of the first nav aids we built were lighthouses, for instance the Pharos at Alexandria, more than 2,000 years ago.
I wonder if this star is anywhere near a hazard? That would confirm it in my mind.
"after releasing Windows 7"
So the bugs in Win 7 UI were actually created by Microsoft people?
1. In Win 7, open Windows Explorer
2. Get a list of files up.
3. Delete a file
4. Whoa, the file is STILL THERE in the list
5. Delete it again
6. Whoa, ERROR MESSAGE "file not found" - if so, why is it listed?
That's a fundamental breach of the user paradigm. No previous Windows has ever done anything so mindlessly wrong.
This shit is why I decided to stay with XP till the end, and then moved to Linux Mint Cinnamon. Which was an excellent move - it runs lighter and faster on my hardware than XP ever did, and looks and feels a lot more like the UI that I already knew than Win 7, Win 8, Win 8.1 does.
Microsoft's UI designers will be first up against the wall...
There is a solution already in use round the world. It's called "pumped storage". Dinorwic and Ben Cruachan are just two out of the many examples worldwide.
Base load from generators that aren't easy to start and stop (say nuclear) is used during low usage times to pump water up to height. When peak power is required, a flick of a switch sends the water through turbines that spin up extremely rapidly. Dinorwic can go from 0 to 1320 MW in 12 seconds.
This setup is excellent for using/storing solar power.
So many damn funny/insightful posts in this thread, and my points expired at midnight....
Microsoft has tried at least three times during my career to sell rental contracts for Office. The rental approach has never worked on any of those occasions. If they can't get it to work for Office, it'll never work for Windows.
On one of those occasions, I was deeply involved with an effort by a major international company to set up Office on rental licences, as part of their portfolio to offer to business customers. I helped set up and run a trial, we got some trial customers in, and tried to get Microsoft to do their bit to make it work. We met with a total blank indifference from the local Microsoft people, and a total refusal to move even an inch to be helpful to the trial customers.
There were constant problems (with updates, with licence management, with bugs), and Microsoft was massively unhelpful whenever we phoned the global assistance helpline (which we were paying through the nose for). I don't think we got a satisfactory answer to any of the problems we reported (alll probs that could not be fixed at either local or country level)
In the end we gave up, bought the trial customers full-price retail licences and boxed sets with manuals, just to be able to get out of the trial.
What's difficult for a human in assembling IKEA furniture is PAYING ATTENTION to the instructions. I have been assemblling IKEA furniture for 40 years (since there were only two IKEA stores in the whole world) and I have never had instructions that were not right. When humans screw up an IKEA assembly, it's because of choosing the wrong piece, or not rotating the piece to the correct orientation, or not using the correct screw/bolt/doohickey for the currrent stage.
Frankly, the "IKEA test" identifies creatures who claim to be human, but aren't.
Ever heard of hydroponic farming? They can grow their own food, and with good recycling keep on eating and producing oxygen for years. There's plenty of water ice on the Moon, frozen under the surface. And there's free solar energy in huge quantities.
Nobody would man a facility on the Moon without some backup means of staying alive.
I would not write it off that quickly.
....but Steve Jobs has passed on.
Those that follow, are exactly that, followers. Neither Apple nor Microsoft has anybody capable of the vision thing.
My money is on the Next Big Thing coming out of the Maker movement.
700+ games ifor Linux in the Steam store. Clearly lots of people want to play games on Linux.
I found this in the Overview of the Announcement Letter
... the role of the mainframe in the new digital era of IT."
"The name change serves to signal
Us old farts are envious of the new digital mainframes - we were seriously handicapped back then, working on all those old analog mainframes.
It isn't that mainframes are eternal, it's that marketing wonks who write this sort of stuff are allowed to breed...
What did you pay to replace the software and test the new version?
Oh, and what is the name of the place? I don't want to have an account there for at least 10 years.
Cake PHP will generate an app extremely quickly if all you want is Create-Read-Update-Delete (CRUD) of records, in a Model-View-Controller structure.
1. Define the database in MySQL
2. Run the delightful commands "./cake bake model all", "./cake bake.controller all", "./cake bake view all"
3. And you are done, 20 minutes after you started. Cake exploits naming conventions to give you auto generation of code, auto lookup of encoded values, etc etc. I have not yet discovered all it can do.
And best of all, you don't need to write any interface code, that is what a browser is for.