The human species developed from mammals over several million years. During almost all of that time, grains were those things that birds (the ex-dinosaurs) ate.
About 15,000 years ago, people discovered grains and agriculture. People stopped moving about so much and started down the slippery slope to the sedentary lifestyle we have now.
Simply put, we did not evolve eating grains, so what makes anybody think that they are suddenly a magic food source? And don't get me started on adult humans drinking milk, a perversion facilitated by a spontaneous gene mutation that has been traced back to Scandanavian countries far more recently than the birth of agriculture.
<rant>The food pyramid is a myth, created by the big farming businesses during the last century. The pyramid coincides with the actual food production in much the same way that some of the FDA recommended vitamin allowances were computed simply by dividing the vitamin production by the population of the US.</rant>
The only problem I have had with Word (97) documents was opening letters with pre-pended envelopes. OO.o would move the address on the envelope down to overlay the text on the first page of the letter.
Hmmm. You weren't around the last time this happened were you?
The main result of the last RAM tarrif was to throw all of North America into a deeper recession than it already was, and the economy at that time was in much better shape then than it is currently. Everybody else in the world got cheap RAM except the US and Canada. We got all that nice expensive RAM that was produced by the one company in the US that still manufactured it. As I recall, the one protected company still went tits up.
I guess it will all work out better this time around. Computers and embedded systems are too cheap right now, we really should double the prices so that we can keep electronics out of the hands of consumers. Y'all might want to ask your parents about how the computer industry <sarcasm>surged</sarcasm> during the Regan years.
If a foreign country wants use their citizen's tax dollars to support our computer consuming habits, let 'em I say.
Re:This is Slashdot worthy?
on
MIT Gnome Invasion
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Umm, no.
By my count (from the pictures) this was approximately 78 little bits of plaster placed around a few computers. Aside from the painting, this is about 5 minutes worth of work for one person.
News for nerds? Maybe, if they haven't found the big blue (grey) room yet. Stuff that matters? There are people at work with bigger belini (sp) figurine collections decorating their cubes.
I created a simple batch program for use under Win 2000 that uses infozip to create a zip file of all the important directories on the system. After the zip is created, it ftps to my linux machine and trades zip files. This batch file is then run by the administrator using Scheduled Tasks.
There is a corresponding cron job on the linux box to create zips of the user accounts and other special directories (/etc,/var/www,/local). The Win 2000 machine gets them after dropping off its zip file.
This shouldn't take too long to create for just about any situation.
There are two things I need in an xterm replacement that I haven't found yet:
a way to clear everything but still have the CLI history from that session available
a way to scroll an arbitrary number of lines with a single mouse click
I find myself frequently running commands that generate large amounts of output that I then scroll back and forth. It's nice to be able to eliminate all the output that came before the current command so that I don't wind up scrolling back too far, perhaps into a previous invocation of the command with slightly different arguments. Sending 5000 newlines to the terminal is somewhat inefficient.
I also find myself examining output that is very repetitive. It is nice to be able to scroll entire blocks of lines with a single mouse click so that my eyes can easily pick out differences between the blocks. Multiple clicks and scroll bars remove that simple "blink" differentiation between the blocks.
Besides those points, I have to agree with a previous poster that I usually need to look at multiple terminals at the same time. Tabs and buttons just get in the way of getting my job done.
And since many people don't seem to understand this...
Scott Adams reported in a Dilbert a few years back that 40% (that's nearly half) of all sick days are taken on Monday and Friday.
Someone I used to work with/for used to get into fights in the grad student lounge by loudly declaring that 50% of all women had below average intelligence.
Just because you have statistics on your side doesn't mean you have proven causuality.
Anybody can tell you that the full moon has a provable effect. Police reports all over the world show that nearly 100% of all crimes are committed within 14 days of a full moon.
Call your local police detachment and ask them if you don't believe me.
> Has anybody ever seen a bug-free piece of software of any complexity greater than "Hello World"?"
The answer is "yes" for any piece of code that I have written top to bottom that I have also had the chance to look at twice. It really isn't that difficult if you have been fixing other people's code and writing your own code for almost 20 years. More people would become competent programmers if they didn't become incompetent managers after five years instead.
I tend to write my code in several phases:
prototypes and stubs with comments
hardware specific features
software fault instrumentation (similar to printfs in code paths that "should not happen")
full internal code documentation
external documentation and specification
Yes, this is generally considered almost completely backwards, but I find it much easier to hold a large design in my head than it is to put it down on paper until after it has been realized. It probably explains why I don't have a crowd of programmers working for me instead of around me. But the programmers around me still ask me questions on how to do things all day long, so I must be doing something right (even though I no longer get anything done during regular work hours because of the continual interruptions).
I would also be putting the external documentation higher on the list if I wasn't currently being forced into using MS Word. Switching back and forth between a Windows box and a Sparc is not conducive to good work on both. The work on one or the other will suffer.
Just for the fun of it, let's keep the original argument intact and only add a couple more facts to it.
Mr. Kazmaier is lifting this weight vertically with two arms supporting the bar weight and two legs supporting the bar and his body. In other words, he is supporting the the same bar weight twice, something Mr. Bronto doesn't have to do. This gives us a total lifting power of:
47,558* lb x 2 = 95,116 lb
Now compare the size of Mr. Kazmaier's arms with his legs. You will note that his legs look quite a bit stronger than his arms, so his arms are probably the limiting factor in the weight he can lift. Supporting evidence for this is that weight lifters do move their feet around with the bar in the air. This involves temporarily having one foot off the ground, so we can probably assume that one leg equals at least two arms in total strength. So now our total lifting power is:
47,558* lb x 3 = 142,674 lb
This seems to be quite sufficient to lift 70,000 lbs, giving a considerable safety margin to allow lifting a foot off the ground in order to walk.
Then on the other hand, maybe the earth really is a big sponge and the Mexican impact 64 M years ago was caused by a black hole (5-10 times the mass of the earth) that is now resting at the center of the earth.
---
* Yeah, so I used the total weight instead of breaking out the weight supported by arms and legs separately. So sue me for being too bored to do the math perfectly (I even kept the preposterous 5 or 6 significant digits in the result). At least I didn't ignore the obvious factor of 2 or 3 that the original Holden article did.
In my neck of the woods, we have just seen the end of a trial of a girl who was 15 years old when she beat another girl to death. For background check out this list of newspaper art icles. The most relevant to this discussion is this article.
Highlights of the article referenced in the second link are:
One of her friends, according to court documents, described her as "messed up in her head... really weird," and that she liked punching people in the face.
Barbara Smith, her school counsellor, described her to the court as "a very angry kid, one who had refused counselling."
Is this someone who would be reported to WAVE? If so, would anything have been done? Should there have been something done?
It sounds like all the right bells were ringing in this case, but we still have one girl dead and another going to prison.
Note that the girl in question here could not possibly have fit the "standard geek profile".
Slashdot Mirror
<sarcasm>Patents sure worked well for the inventor of the television.</sarcasm>
Let's talk about evolution now.
The human species developed from mammals over several million years. During almost all of that time, grains were those things that birds (the ex-dinosaurs) ate.
About 15,000 years ago, people discovered grains and agriculture. People stopped moving about so much and started down the slippery slope to the sedentary lifestyle we have now.
Simply put, we did not evolve eating grains, so what makes anybody think that they are suddenly a magic food source? And don't get me started on adult humans drinking milk, a perversion facilitated by a spontaneous gene mutation that has been traced back to Scandanavian countries far more recently than the birth of agriculture.
<rant>The food pyramid is a myth, created by the big farming businesses during the last century. The pyramid coincides with the actual food production in much the same way that some of the FDA recommended vitamin allowances were computed simply by dividing the vitamin production by the population of the US.</rant>
Or so rumor has it.
The only problem I have had with Word (97) documents was opening letters with pre-pended envelopes. OO.o would move the address on the envelope down to overlay the text on the first page of the letter.
I never bothered looking for a solution.
This just showed up in my morning newspaper. Simple cause and effect that shows that video games don't have the corner on the violence market.
Should board games be outlawed next?
Hmmm. You weren't around the last time this happened were you?
The main result of the last RAM tarrif was to throw all of North America into a deeper recession than it already was, and the economy at that time was in much better shape then than it is currently. Everybody else in the world got cheap RAM except the US and Canada. We got all that nice expensive RAM that was produced by the one company in the US that still manufactured it. As I recall, the one protected company still went tits up.
I guess it will all work out better this time around. Computers and embedded systems are too cheap right now, we really should double the prices so that we can keep electronics out of the hands of consumers. Y'all might want to ask your parents about how the computer industry <sarcasm>surged</sarcasm> during the Regan years.
If a foreign country wants use their citizen's tax dollars to support our computer consuming habits, let 'em I say.
Umm, no.
By my count (from the pictures) this was approximately 78 little bits of plaster placed around a few computers. Aside from the painting, this is about 5 minutes worth of work for one person.
News for nerds? Maybe, if they haven't found the big blue (grey) room yet. Stuff that matters? There are people at work with bigger belini (sp) figurine collections decorating their cubes.
Sew a circle and diagonal line over the logo.
Instant topical shirts.
This sounds just like the sentiment expressed by the band Sum 41 in this article today.
Indeed, when a group of "real punks" attempt to spit on the band outside the Much showcase, Steve shrugs off their derision as a sign of success.
"It's nice to be so big that people who hate us stand outside in the cold to tell us they hate us," he says.
All you need are three free things:
I created a simple batch program for use under Win 2000 that uses infozip to create a zip file of all the important directories on the system. After the zip is created, it ftps to my linux machine and trades zip files. This batch file is then run by the administrator using Scheduled Tasks.
There is a corresponding cron job on the linux box to create zips of the user accounts and other special directories (/etc, /var/www, /local). The Win 2000 machine gets them after dropping off its zip file.
This shouldn't take too long to create for just about any situation.
There are two things I need in an xterm replacement that I haven't found yet:
I find myself frequently running commands that generate large amounts of output that I then scroll back and forth. It's nice to be able to eliminate all the output that came before the current command so that I don't wind up scrolling back too far, perhaps into a previous invocation of the command with slightly different arguments. Sending 5000 newlines to the terminal is somewhat inefficient.
I also find myself examining output that is very repetitive. It is nice to be able to scroll entire blocks of lines with a single mouse click so that my eyes can easily pick out differences between the blocks. Multiple clicks and scroll bars remove that simple "blink" differentiation between the blocks.
Besides those points, I have to agree with a previous poster that I usually need to look at multiple terminals at the same time. Tabs and buttons just get in the way of getting my job done.
Why is it that whenever this topic comes up, everybody always talks about Octave and gnuplot as if these are the only things available?
If you want a self contained program that runs on multiple platforms, take a look at Euler. This is about as close as it gets to being a MatLab clone.
And since many people don't seem to understand this...
Scott Adams reported in a Dilbert a few years back that 40% (that's nearly half) of all sick days are taken on Monday and Friday.
Someone I used to work with/for used to get into fights in the grad student lounge by loudly declaring that 50% of all women had below average intelligence.
Just because you have statistics on your side doesn't mean you have proven causuality.
Anybody can tell you that the full moon has a provable effect. Police reports all over the world show that nearly 100% of all crimes are committed within 14 days of a full moon.
Call your local police detachment and ask them if you don't believe me.
> Has anybody ever seen a bug-free piece of software of any complexity greater than "Hello World"?"
The answer is "yes" for any piece of code that I have written top to bottom that I have also had the chance to look at twice. It really isn't that difficult if you have been fixing other people's code and writing your own code for almost 20 years. More people would become competent programmers if they didn't become incompetent managers after five years instead.
I tend to write my code in several phases:
Yes, this is generally considered almost completely backwards, but I find it much easier to hold a large design in my head than it is to put it down on paper until after it has been realized. It probably explains why I don't have a crowd of programmers working for me instead of around me. But the programmers around me still ask me questions on how to do things all day long, so I must be doing something right (even though I no longer get anything done during regular work hours because of the continual interruptions).
I would also be putting the external documentation higher on the list if I wasn't currently being forced into using MS Word. Switching back and forth between a Windows box and a Sparc is not conducive to good work on both. The work on one or the other will suffer.
Go to mp3.com and listen to "Carrot Juice is Murder".
The article that is.
Just for the fun of it, let's keep the original argument intact and only add a couple more facts to it.
Mr. Kazmaier is lifting this weight vertically with two arms supporting the bar weight and two legs supporting the bar and his body. In other words, he is supporting the the same bar weight twice, something Mr. Bronto doesn't have to do. This gives us a total lifting power of:
47,558* lb x 2 = 95,116 lb
Now compare the size of Mr. Kazmaier's arms with his legs. You will note that his legs look quite a bit stronger than his arms, so his arms are probably the limiting factor in the weight he can lift. Supporting evidence for this is that weight lifters do move their feet around with the bar in the air. This involves temporarily having one foot off the ground, so we can probably assume that one leg equals at least two arms in total strength. So now our total lifting power is:
47,558* lb x 3 = 142,674 lb
This seems to be quite sufficient to lift 70,000 lbs, giving a considerable safety margin to allow lifting a foot off the ground in order to walk.
Then on the other hand, maybe the earth really is a big sponge and the Mexican impact 64 M years ago was caused by a black hole (5-10 times the mass of the earth) that is now resting at the center of the earth.
---
* Yeah, so I used the total weight instead of breaking out the weight supported by arms and legs separately. So sue me for being too bored to do the math perfectly (I even kept the preposterous 5 or 6 significant digits in the result). At least I didn't ignore the obvious factor of 2 or 3 that the original Holden article did.
In my neck of the woods, we have just seen the end of a trial of a girl who was 15 years old when she beat another girl to death. For background check out this list of newspaper art icles. The most relevant to this discussion is this article.
Highlights of the article referenced in the second link are:
One of her friends, according to court documents, described her as "messed up in her head ... really weird," and that she liked punching people in the face.
Barbara Smith, her school counsellor, described her to the court as "a very angry kid, one who had refused counselling."
Is this someone who would be reported to WAVE? If so, would anything have been done? Should there have been something done?
It sounds like all the right bells were ringing in this case, but we still have one girl dead and another going to prison.
Note that the girl in question here could not possibly have fit the "standard geek profile".