c6gunner appears to be spouting a lot of right-wing propaganda about this case, so I'll throw in some left wing stuff.
From reading on this topic a few months ago, I came to the conclusion that the "100% conviction rate" is based on complaints made before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal by a human rights lawyer (alas, I can't recall his name) who chooses his battles carefully. The actual number of complaints he has filed to date is small; less than ten, IIRC. But he has won all of them.
The political left in Canada is very much in favour of human rights commissions and tribunals. They are one way for less advantaged (and monied) people to make complaints of discrimination on the basis of race, colour, creed, gender, and sexual orientation. But even on the left there's considerable debate over the merits of this case. Anyone interested in seeing a part of this debate can visit this thread on Rabble.ca (which politically is probably further left than the Slashdot majority.)
The better known context of that story is George Bernard Shaw and Dorothy Parker. Apparently Parker was into eugenics at the time and suggested to Shaw they get together and have a baby.
"With my body and your brains," she said, "she would a brilliant playwright!"
"Yes," replied Shaw, "but what if the child had my body and your brains?"
I discovered what I call the Rinkworks site a few years ago. It doesn't get updated very often, but because it's edited, the content is usually pretty good.
I love the comment at the top of the "Computer Stupidities" page:
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
Ditto for me. I'm part of a team that's developing a website, and due to the fact no-one on the team likes IE, we all ended up testing with FireFox and Opera. It was only when users started complaining about certain features not working that we went back and tested using IE. It was then we discovered IE's issues with little things like following published web standards.
Interesting webslideshow, but often trying to figure out what a product does is next to impossible given the marketing claptrap that serves as the text. Like this:
This product family of commercial HVAC sensors and room controllers was designed in response to the company's identified need for a new product line that conveys quality, reliability and accuracy and is suitable for use in both the American and European markets and a wide array of commercial applications. Following extensive research, the design team succeeded in developing an innovative new line that offers greater accuracy, improved response times, a simpler and more intuitive user interface, quicker installation times, backwards compatibility, improved reliability and a thinner form factor.
What manufacturer of control equipment does not seek to improve quality, reliability and accuracy? In what way is the new interface more intuitive? From the picture it looks like a knob that can be turned clockwise or counterclockwise.
But that that mean it's more "intuitive"? What if I have to go left, right, right, left, push, left, left, right, push to program a setting? That's not intuitive.
But the article text is just a bunch of feel good fluff words that give me no information about how this new control device is supposed to be better than the keypad based devices it replaces.
Avoid acronyms. Always. It's just a good rule of thumb. Once your grandmother knows an acronym, it's okay to use it: DVD, ATM. Until then, use actual words. Don't say "POTS." Say "telephone line."
All my grandparents are dead, you insensitive clod!
It's important to note that the shred docs indicate it is not reliable on log-structured or journalled filesystems (JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, ext3, etc). On these filesystem all you end up doing is writing a bunch of entries to the journal; the original file data are still intact.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024k
will do a much more thorough job of it. But be aware the spooks at the NSA can still get at your data. Although a 50 ton punch press will make their jobs a lot tougher.
I remember solving the (then) inexplicable Ship Records Bug in TW2002. You know, the one where a player's Imperial Starship would suddenly end up as a Mule Trader or an escape pod, or you'd meet yourself out there in the galaxy and any damage you did to that other ship also went to yours. A friend and I wrote and distributed the TWBUGFIX package to correct that problem, and a similar bug where you could inherit all the Ferengi grudges that had been build up by another player.
What's wrong with the system that works so well and reliably in other places: using a pen, put a big cross in the box next to the person/answer being voted for. Any other marks invalidates the ballot slip.
One thing that's wrong with that is it makes it ridiculously simple to invalidate ballots after they are cast.
That's what scrutineers are for. Each party in an election has the right to post people in the polling stations to keep an eye out for irregularities. AFAIK, they're there for the polling and the counting.
It's not the deaths that are the problem... most mines are designed to injure and permanently maim people. In the end, looking after someone who has lost one or two legs is a lot more expensive than burying a body.
IBM Series/1 programming
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 1
On the Series/1, the EDL language had a construct like:
(VARNAME,#1) which means, "Take the value in register 1 [#1] and add it to the address in memory of variable VARNAME". Handy for things like tables and lists, and essential for working with strings. Kinda like adding to a pointer.
We had a program that crashed when we ran it in production, but worked when we were testing it. It turned out that on the production machine, the program ran higher in memory than in testing. The value in register 1 eventually got so large its high bit got set, which turned it into a negative number... so the program started writing into the memory space before the variable and not after it.
A similar server (tall and narrow) was being delivered to us when it fell over while still in a shipper's warehouse. They engaged the assistance of the forklift driver, who attempted to pick up the server... and ended up sending one of the forklift blades through the case. I wasn't there to see if any vital components were damaged, but I do know we didn't get that computer operational for another three months, so I suspect it was quite DOA on our loading dock.
Argh! I notice the URLs end in ".asp", which means it's running Microsoft stuff! Why is it that practcally every *big* site that uses Microsoft technologies feels compelled to add a whole whack of content that is unsupported by non-IE browsers? (I think I just asked a rhetorical question here.)
It appears that when people start developing web sites with MS technologies, a crucial part of their bran turns off... the part that should tell them there are other bowsers out there, and in a world where not everyone has a 1.6 GHz Pentium or an AMD 1800 CPU, half a gig of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, the latest copy of Windows, and a partial T1 connection to the internet, they should make allowances for people at the lower end of the spectrum... perhaps text mode only with lynx or w3m.
I think it is the responsibility of a child's parents, not the government, to guide children onto a good road for their life.
And the ratings system is designed to assist the parents in doing just that. Look at it not as a goverenment intervention ("Sorry kid, we can't rent you this game 'cause it's rated XXX w/ chocolate"), but rather as a tool to help parents find out what's inside the box. Parents have enough on their hands already; they may not have time to pre-screen every video game themsleves.
"Cooking" was a tough call for me to make, as these comments testify. I saw the phrases Cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old people. A few die-hards still broil a chicken or roast a leg of lamb... to mean that no one at all cooks any more. That for sure is not true. I know a lot of people my age and younger who are decent cooks and have well-stocked larders of flour, sugar, lard, etc.
But things like making a pie shell and filling from scratch are becoming less common. I can buy a pie shell and apple filling from a supermarket and sort of make my own pie:)
It's also interesting to note that calls to places like the Butterball Turkey Help Line are seeing a major increase in questions that used to be considered "common knowledge" in cooking.
Cooking is probably a dying art. But it's not dead yet, and is not likely to be for some time yet, unlike the implication given in the article.
The purpose of this improved Zworykin-Von Neumann automaton (read: computer) is to predict the
weather with an accuracy unattainable before 1980. It is a combination of
calculating machine and forecaster. The calculator solves thousands of
separate equations in a minute; the automatic forecaster carries out the
computer's instructions and predicts the weather from hour to hour. In 1950,
meteorologists had no time to deal with the 50-odd variables that should have
been mathematically handled to predict the weather 24 hours in advance.
Hit and Miss. Computers made weather
forecasting a lot more accurate, and in 2000 they handled a lot more than
fifty variables! But the computers collected the information and provided
sophisticated weather models; people still did the bulk of the analysis and
prediction. We didn't get the hour-to-hour predictions, either, because the
chaos theory that came out of research done in the 1980s proved it would be
impossible to do so.
It is a cheap house. With all its furnishings, Joe Dobson paid only $5000
for it. Though it is galeproof and weatherproof, it is built to last only
about 25 years. Nobody in 2000 sees any sense in building a house that will
last a century.
Miss. $5,000 in 1950 was $36,000
in 2000. Most homes in 2000 were in the $80,000 to $120,000 range, often much higher. This was
partly due to the use of "expensive" materials alluded to earlier in the article, and also
because we still built houses that would last a century or more. Building
codes were probably one reason. Another was that a cheaply built house would
probably cost more to maintain over its lifetime than a more expensive one.
By 2000, physicians have
several hundred of these chemical agents or antibiotics at their command.
Tuberculosis in all of its forms is cured as easily as pneumonia was cured at
mid-century.
Hit and Miss. Antibiotics were
wildly successful for the four decades following 1950. However, by the 1990s
their overuse had resulted in a classic Darwinian selection process
taking place within their intended target populations. One by one many
bacteria actually became resistant to the antibiotics we were using on them.
Ironically, tuberculosis was one of the diseases affected by this phenomenom.
This is actaully a year old. When it first came out, read through it carefully and came up with a list of hits and misses. Some of these were actually difficult to determine: for example, he mentioned milti-tiered highways, but said the tiers would be used for different classes of traffic. A hit? A miss? A hit and a miss? Tough to say.
Anyways, here's my list. Feel free to update as you see fit:)
HITS
1. Electric ranges
2. Widespread distribution of natural gas
3. Broad highways
4. Multidecked highways
5. Mercury and argon based street lighting
6. Failure to accept nuclear generated power widely
7. Generation of electricity using nuclear power to heat water
8. Use of nuclear reactors in military vessels
9. Microwave ovens
10. Videoconferencing
11. Shop at home via TV (the Internet)
12. Computer and robotic assisted manufacturing
13. Using computers to analyze weather data
14. Widespread international travel
15. Faster than sound travel
16. Supercities
17. Drop-off in the use of trains for travelling
18. Widespread use of facsimile machines
19. Widespread use of antibiotics
20. Manufacture of drugs from synthetic compounds
21. Recombinant DNA techniques to improve existing drugs
22. Lifespan of 85 years (close: Canadian female life expectancy is 84)
23. Use of equipment to peer inside the body in real-time
24. A cure of cancer being "just around the corner"
25. Use of elecrical devices to gain relief from medical conditions
25. People in 2000 are just as conformist as in 1950
MISSES
1. Airports in the centre of town
2. Lack of pollution
3. Cheap electrical heating
4. Factories burning gas
5. Highways with different decks for different speeds
6. Roads reserved exclusively for business traffic
7. Widespread use of nuclear generating stations in Canada and South America
8. Widespread use of solar power
9. Use of nuclear reactors in civilian passenger cruise ships
10. Use of lightweight metals in large building construction
11. Use of plastics to construct houses
12. One multipurpose unit to handle a home's hot water, heating and cooling
13. Houses that cost $36,000 (year 2000 dollars) and last only 25 years
14. Chemical removal of facial hair
15. Use of plastic plates that decompes at temperatures above 250 F
16. Cleaning plastic waterproof furniture by turning a hose on it
17. Paper tablecloths that are burned after use
18. Loss of culinary skills due to all food being delivered "fresh frozen"
19. Processes to turn wood pulp and sawdust into edible foods
20. Discarded paper linen and rayon underwear turned into candy
21. Videophones in every home
22. Using computers to generate forecasts (people still make the calls)
23. Preventing hurricanes by buring oil on the ocean
24. Not making it to the mooon
25. $36,000 (year 2000 dollars) to fly from Chicago to Paris
26. Rocket powered planes
27. Cars burning denatured alchohol as their primary fuel
28. Family helicopters
29. Ariel busses that hold 200 people for 100 mile commutes to work
30. Easy cures for bacterial diseases such as TB
31. Physical signs of aging no longer apparent
32. Widespread cures for viral diseases
33. Widespread treatments and cures of Parkinson's and Cerebral Palsy
Is it just me, or does anyone else see these little news clips as CNN's way of pushing MORE advertising into our faces... about, of all things, CNN? Not only do I get a a bloody ad banner in their javascript pop-up box, I get a five second CNN-related intro at the start of the clip, and the clip itself is followed with with ANOTHER ad!
Can you say, "Blowing your own horn?" Sheesh! And Americans wonder why nobody likes them.
End-user Linux five years from now
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 1
There's little doubt Windows still has a stranglehold on the desktop market, both in businesses and at home. The company I worked for up until a few days ago just laid me off, in part because they're de-emphasizing the UNIX side of things and going Windows in everything. I was one of the UNIX people...
So, do you see this trend reversing? Do you think that in five years Linux will have made a huge gain in end-user mindshare? I'm not talking going from 0.1% of the users worldwide to 0.2%. I'm talking about seeing Linux being used by 10% or more of all desktops out there.
Slashdot Mirror
c6gunner appears to be spouting a lot of right-wing propaganda about this case, so I'll throw in some left wing stuff.
From reading on this topic a few months ago, I came to the conclusion that the "100% conviction rate" is based on complaints made before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal by a human rights lawyer (alas, I can't recall his name) who chooses his battles carefully. The actual number of complaints he has filed to date is small; less than ten, IIRC. But he has won all of them.
The political left in Canada is very much in favour of human rights commissions and tribunals. They are one way for less advantaged (and monied) people to make complaints of discrimination on the basis of race, colour, creed, gender, and sexual orientation. But even on the left there's considerable debate over the merits of this case. Anyone interested in seeing a part of this debate can visit this thread on Rabble.ca (which politically is probably further left than the Slashdot majority.)
The better known context of that story is George Bernard Shaw and Dorothy Parker. Apparently Parker was into eugenics at the time and suggested to Shaw they get together and have a baby.
"With my body and your brains," she said, "she would a brilliant playwright!"
"Yes," replied Shaw, "but what if the child had my body and your brains?"
I discovered what I call the Rinkworks site a few years ago. It doesn't get updated very often, but because it's edited, the content is usually pretty good.
I love the comment at the top of the "Computer Stupidities" page:"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-- Charles Babbage (1791-1871)
Ditto for me. I'm part of a team that's developing a website, and due to the fact no-one on the team likes IE, we all ended up testing with FireFox and Opera. It was only when users started complaining about certain features not working that we went back and tested using IE. It was then we discovered IE's issues with little things like following published web standards.
Interesting webslideshow, but often trying to figure out what a product does is next to impossible given the marketing claptrap that serves as the text. Like this:
This product family of commercial HVAC sensors and room controllers was designed in response to the company's identified need for a new product line that conveys quality, reliability and accuracy and is suitable for use in both the American and European markets and a wide array of commercial applications. Following extensive research, the design team succeeded in developing an innovative new line that offers greater accuracy, improved response times, a simpler and more intuitive user interface, quicker installation times, backwards compatibility, improved reliability and a thinner form factor.
What manufacturer of control equipment does not seek to improve quality, reliability and accuracy? In what way is the new interface more intuitive? From the picture it looks like a knob that can be turned clockwise or counterclockwise.
But that that mean it's more "intuitive"? What if I have to go left, right, right, left, push, left, left, right, push to program a setting? That's not intuitive.
But the article text is just a bunch of feel good fluff words that give me no information about how this new control device is supposed to be better than the keypad based devices it replaces.
Quantum cryptography is neat, to be sure, but what happens if the cat dies?
tomorrow!
Avoid acronyms. Always. It's just a good rule of thumb. Once your grandmother knows an acronym, it's okay to use it: DVD, ATM. Until then, use actual words. Don't say "POTS." Say "telephone line."
All my grandparents are dead, you insensitive clod!
It's important to note that the shred docs indicate it is not reliable on log-structured or journalled filesystems (JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, ext3, etc). On these filesystem all you end up doing is writing a bunch of entries to the journal; the original file data are still intact.
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024k
will do a much more thorough job of it. But be aware the spooks at the NSA can still get at your data. Although a 50 ton punch press will make their jobs a lot tougher.
I remember solving the (then) inexplicable Ship Records Bug in TW2002. You know, the one where a player's Imperial Starship would suddenly end up as a Mule Trader or an escape pod, or you'd meet yourself out there in the galaxy and any damage you did to that other ship also went to yours. A friend and I wrote and distributed the TWBUGFIX package to correct that problem, and a similar bug where you could inherit all the Ferengi grudges that had been build up by another player.
What's wrong with the system that works so well and reliably in other places: using a pen, put a big cross in the box next to the person/answer being voted for. Any other marks invalidates the ballot slip.
One thing that's wrong with that is it makes it ridiculously simple to invalidate ballots after they are cast.
That's what scrutineers are for. Each party in an election has the right to post people in the polling stations to keep an eye out for irregularities. AFAIK, they're there for the polling and the counting.
It's not the deaths that are the problem ... most mines are designed to injure and permanently maim people. In the end, looking after someone who has lost one or two legs is a lot more expensive than burying a body.
On the Series/1, the EDL language had a construct like:
... so the program started writing into the memory space before the variable and not after it.
(VARNAME,#1)
which means, "Take the value in register 1 [#1] and add it to the address in memory of variable VARNAME". Handy for things like tables and lists, and essential for working with strings. Kinda like adding to a pointer.
We had a program that crashed when we ran it in production, but worked when we were testing it. It turned out that on the production machine, the program ran higher in memory than in testing. The value in register 1 eventually got so large its high bit got set, which turned it into a negative number
A similar server (tall and narrow) was being delivered to us when it fell over while still in a shipper's warehouse. They engaged the assistance of the forklift driver, who attempted to pick up the server ... and ended up sending one of the forklift blades through the case. I wasn't there to see if any vital components were damaged, but I do know we didn't get that computer operational for another three months, so I suspect it was quite DOA on our loading dock.
If this site crashes when a bunch of geeks reading slashdot hit it at once, what will happen when the browsers of the world are focussed on it?
Argh! I notice the URLs end in ".asp", which means it's running Microsoft stuff! Why is it that practcally every *big* site that uses Microsoft technologies feels compelled to add a whole whack of content that is unsupported by non-IE browsers? (I think I just asked a rhetorical question here.)
... the part that should tell them there are other bowsers out there, and in a world where not everyone has a 1.6 GHz Pentium or an AMD 1800 CPU, half a gig of RAM, 20 GB of hard disk, the latest copy of Windows, and a partial T1 connection to the internet, they should make allowances for people at the lower end of the spectrum ... perhaps text mode only with lynx or w3m.
It appears that when people start developing web sites with MS technologies, a crucial part of their bran turns off
Or is that going too low?
I think it is the responsibility of a child's parents, not the government, to guide children onto a good road for their life.
And the ratings system is designed to assist the parents in doing just that. Look at it not as a goverenment intervention ("Sorry kid, we can't rent you this game 'cause it's rated XXX w/ chocolate"), but rather as a tool to help parents find out what's inside the box. Parents have enough on their hands already; they may not have time to pre-screen every video game themsleves.
But things like making a pie shell and filling from scratch are becoming less common. I can buy a pie shell and apple filling from a supermarket and sort of make my own pie :)
It's also interesting to note that calls to places like the Butterball Turkey Help Line are seeing a major increase in questions that used to be considered "common knowledge" in cooking.
Cooking is probably a dying art. But it's not dead yet, and is not likely to be for some time yet, unlike the implication given in the article.
The results are here.
Hit and Miss. Computers made weather forecasting a lot more accurate, and in 2000 they handled a lot more than fifty variables! But the computers collected the information and provided sophisticated weather models; people still did the bulk of the analysis and prediction. We didn't get the hour-to-hour predictions, either, because the chaos theory that came out of research done in the 1980s proved it would be impossible to do so.
Miss. $5,000 in 1950 was $36,000 in 2000. Most homes in 2000 were in the $80,000 to $120,000 range, often much higher. This was partly due to the use of "expensive" materials alluded to earlier in the article, and also because we still built houses that would last a century or more. Building codes were probably one reason. Another was that a cheaply built house would probably cost more to maintain over its lifetime than a more expensive one.
Hit and Miss. Antibiotics were wildly successful for the four decades following 1950. However, by the 1990s their overuse had resulted in a classic Darwinian selection process taking place within their intended target populations. One by one many bacteria actually became resistant to the antibiotics we were using on them. Ironically, tuberculosis was one of the diseases affected by this phenomenom.
This is actaully a year old. When it first came out, read through it carefully and came up with a list of hits and misses. Some of these were actually difficult to determine: for example, he mentioned milti-tiered highways, but said the tiers would be used for different classes of traffic. A hit? A miss? A hit and a miss? Tough to say.
:)
Anyways, here's my list. Feel free to update as you see fit
HITS
1. Electric ranges
2. Widespread distribution of natural gas
3. Broad highways
4. Multidecked highways
5. Mercury and argon based street lighting
6. Failure to accept nuclear generated power widely
7. Generation of electricity using nuclear power to heat water
8. Use of nuclear reactors in military vessels
9. Microwave ovens
10. Videoconferencing
11. Shop at home via TV (the Internet)
12. Computer and robotic assisted manufacturing
13. Using computers to analyze weather data
14. Widespread international travel
15. Faster than sound travel
16. Supercities
17. Drop-off in the use of trains for travelling
18. Widespread use of facsimile machines
19. Widespread use of antibiotics
20. Manufacture of drugs from synthetic compounds
21. Recombinant DNA techniques to improve existing drugs
22. Lifespan of 85 years (close: Canadian female life expectancy is 84)
23. Use of equipment to peer inside the body in real-time
24. A cure of cancer being "just around the corner"
25. Use of elecrical devices to gain relief from medical conditions
25. People in 2000 are just as conformist as in 1950
MISSES
1. Airports in the centre of town
2. Lack of pollution
3. Cheap electrical heating
4. Factories burning gas
5. Highways with different decks for different speeds
6. Roads reserved exclusively for business traffic
7. Widespread use of nuclear generating stations in Canada and South America
8. Widespread use of solar power
9. Use of nuclear reactors in civilian passenger cruise ships
10. Use of lightweight metals in large building construction
11. Use of plastics to construct houses
12. One multipurpose unit to handle a home's hot water, heating and cooling
13. Houses that cost $36,000 (year 2000 dollars) and last only 25 years
14. Chemical removal of facial hair
15. Use of plastic plates that decompes at temperatures above 250 F
16. Cleaning plastic waterproof furniture by turning a hose on it
17. Paper tablecloths that are burned after use
18. Loss of culinary skills due to all food being delivered "fresh frozen"
19. Processes to turn wood pulp and sawdust into edible foods
20. Discarded paper linen and rayon underwear turned into candy
21. Videophones in every home
22. Using computers to generate forecasts (people still make the calls)
23. Preventing hurricanes by buring oil on the ocean
24. Not making it to the mooon
25. $36,000 (year 2000 dollars) to fly from Chicago to Paris
26. Rocket powered planes
27. Cars burning denatured alchohol as their primary fuel
28. Family helicopters
29. Ariel busses that hold 200 people for 100 mile commutes to work
30. Easy cures for bacterial diseases such as TB
31. Physical signs of aging no longer apparent
32. Widespread cures for viral diseases
33. Widespread treatments and cures of Parkinson's and Cerebral Palsy
Can you say, "Blowing your own horn?" Sheesh! And Americans wonder why nobody likes them.
So, do you see this trend reversing? Do you think that in five years Linux will have made a huge gain in end-user mindshare? I'm not talking going from 0.1% of the users worldwide to 0.2%. I'm talking about seeing Linux being used by 10% or more of all desktops out there.