I guess you don't actually mean to drive the trains directly with wind; but if you could it'd be pretty fantastic. In many areas it wouldn't be practical since there are too many curves and overhead obstructions along the line. However, just imagine if we could eliminate the overhead obstructions and straighten the line. In some areas, that could be done. Then, a train pulls off on a siding outside of Denver, hooks up to some kind of fantastic tall-masted locomotive, shuts down the diesel, and sails all the way to Kansas City. It'd be worth the price just to see such a contraption sailing across the Great Plains.
OK, just kidding. In my case though, I'm limited as an iPhone developer because I don't want an iPhone. Of course, I don't usse FaceBook, MySpace or any of that crap. I only use IM occasionally because I know some other people who use it. And yes, GET OFF MY LAWN.
At least now I don't have to buy an iPhone to re-train for all those jobs where they're looking for iPhone devs (no, really, they are looking). I can rest assured that it's a waste of time because by the time I'd be any good at it, all those companies will have folded because their VCs realized they are a black hole. The last job lead I got was for a job with a financial company. It doesn't matter if the market is going up or down, people alway want to keep track of their money. Seems like a winner, especially since I'm officially over the hill now.:)
I said start with BASIC, not dwell on it. If a potential programmer becomes so ingrained with the shortcoming of *any* language, it's a fault in the programmer not the language. The quote is from 1975, wherein he also suggested that Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.
. I think Larry Wall would disagree, and whether you like Perl or not... you're soaking in it here on Slashdot.
Although, maybe, just maybe you should start them with BASIC. In other words, mirror the history of exposure that my generation got--slow BASIC, assembly to make it faster, high level procedural languages like Pascal, object oriented dreams, object oriented nightmares, and then that wierd thing called functional.
Yes, I know functional came before 8-bit micros; but for a lot of us the history I've outlined above is how it all progressed. I know I'll get flamed for this, but for many years you could come out of school without knowing anything about functional programming and do just fine. It seems like that's changed in the past few years; but we'll have to see if it really sticks. The recession might help it, since the complaint about not being able to find employees comfortable with functional programming will be mitigated by all the tech layoffs...
The bottom line though, is that underneath all that stuff you have a machine. Assembly gets you as close to that machine as possible. Everything else is just a cute wrapper for the machine. Too many CS grads have no feel for that "foundation". What if architects learned nothing about foundations?
No, No. Reindeer and bunnyrabits. No scary birth and resurrection stuff. (Closes eyes, puts hands over ears) "La, la, la". Is the scary religous holiday gone yet? Yes? Yaaay! Let's go shopping.
One of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever came as a result of US technology that was stolen by the Russians. Except, the CIA knew it was happening and instead of stopping it they decided to plant faulty chip designs. Once the USSR knew the tech was unreliable, they were stuck with one helluva an auditing problem, beyond their capability.
How much do you want to bet that somewhere on a "vulnerable" network, there are some designs that are just... a little... bit... off.
Does this mean that Eclipse will now fail when the network is down? Or, does it mean that Eclipse will have to check in with nodes on the network before it can start properly... actually... I can kind of see the benefit in this. Bear with me for a minute here. If we can get the next rev of Eclipse to start up sooo.... slooowly... that they can't even test it before most of us retire, then we can just forget about the next rev of Eclipse. Why, if this technology is integrated into current installs via automatic updates, we can shut Eclipse down alltogether. I like it already. Where do I go to sign up?
Yah, sounds like total BS to me. Most of these people have military experience. They could have just as easily ended up in Iraq with their buddy dying right next to them. Nobody is going to shut the mic off to "spare them their feelings".
Next OS release will finally be patched. There. Fixed that for ya.
Seriously though, how can the AV vendors have any leg to stand on? Whatever happened to that suit the makers of patches for inner tubes brought against the tire companies when tubeless tires were introduced?
As for this creating a security monoculture, and for that having an impact, then AV companies will just re-emerge.
Sorry. I have a hard time shedding any tears for AV companies. I don't run AV, it just slows down your machine. I'm vigilant, and have occasionally had to manually remove infections over the years. It's high time MS itself addressed the issue. If there's anything wrong it's the way they're doing it.
Instead of presenting their solution as AV software, they should present it as better control over the installation and running of executable code. That's all infection really is anyway--the undesired modification or introduction of executable code. If you can control that, you have solved the AV problem. The challenge is that there are so many legitimate executables, DLLs, processes, threads, etc. on a box that it's information overload even for technical users. Some of the solution's I've had in mind are a bit too much for a/. post.
DEP was a step in the right direction. I've seen it in action a couple times now.
Bottom line though, is that AV should have been nipped in the bud long before AV companies became so big. I mean, not just one, but a whole category of companies based on fixing a fundamental flaw in another company's software. I mean, just... wow.
"You can't con an honest man" is said to be a saying within underworld circles; perhaps by people who are not actually in those circles. I'm not sure who coined it, but it's more a turn of phrase and/or rule of thumb than an absolute. I mean, if it were an absolute, you would only need one honest man conned in order to disprove it. I didn't mean to imply it should be taken to that extreme.
When dealing with $3,000 a light has to go off in your head that says "there are procedures for dealing with this". Go to the police. Tell the guy you'll walk to the nearest police station with him, or that you'll call the non-emergency number with your cel phone. The police will hold the money for a statutory limit, and if nobody claims it, THEN you might get it. YMMV on the laws in your jurisdiction and how honest the cops are.
Now, if you're not a totally honest man a different light goes off in your head. That light says "How can I get this money, nevermind the victim or due process".
The other day on NPR there was a bit about how the check cashing industry was actually helpful to poor people. Now maybe patent trolling isn't so bad? What next? Dogs and cats sleeping together?
A tablet PC with an improved screen could do the same thing it does. It's just another DRM'd special purpose device, isn't it? What kind of Oprah Kool-Aid would I have to drink to want a Kindle? Oh, and not that it matters, but who picked the name for this thing? Why do I think of Fahrenheit 451 every time I hear about it?
Yay! Fond memories. I actually slugged a couple times when I was still living with my folks. Usually though, I was more comfortable coughing up for bus fare. It's funny. Somebody asked me if I ever hitchhiked, and I said "no". I never really thought of slugging as hitching; but that's really what it is.
As deed holder via the International Star Registry, that includes a deed on any planets in orbit, I forbid it. Why, there might even be rich deposits of diamelles and/or Ginsu steak knives on that planet. I'm not giving it up without a fight.
Obama will be Commander in Chief soon. He can just order them not to use it. He can also negotiate an international treaty regulating the power and frequency of sonar (although there will be a lot of other stuff on his plate). Monitoring compliance should be pretty easy. IANASubmariner, but doesn't active sonar GIVE AWAY YOUR POSITION which is kind of, ummm... bad for a submarine? Let's say the sonar is not actually on the sub; it would still "light up" the entire area, right? It would be the naval equivalent of a parachute flare. So, perhaps the idea with this thing is to light up the entire coast so we see anything that approaches; but unless we have it running almost all the time, it'd be useless. It seems like if you want to put an underwater defensive zone across our coasts, a well maintained network of passive and/or weaker active systems would do the job OK.
The bottom line though, is that the marine life along our coast is a valuable resource. You don't defend yourself by sacking your own resources. That's just nuts. The court blew it, and these 5-4 decisions... well, they just show that the court seems to have forgotten about the Constitution. They've become nothing more than political proxies, which is sad.
The video suffers from YouTube syndrome. Symptoms of this condition include one or more minutes of stuff we don't care about. The condition is most extreme when the event we care about is of short duration. Although it is not entirely curable, it can be treated by posting the time of the interesting event in the comments section. In this case, the event in question occurs at 2:38. Remember, this is a treatment not a cure. The treatment still consumes bandwidth and time. In the future, we may have a Flash plug-in where the annotation feature can be used to denote points of interest, with the ability to skip to a keyframe just before said point. Until then, only video posters can prevent YouTube syndrome. Remember, if the event of interest in your video is of short duration, the video should not be any more than twice as long as the actual event. Introduction, at most, should identify you and/or your company. Anything that can be explained more efficiently as text should be put in the little text section that appears in the upper right.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was indeed some kind of psychology behind CC's layout. The biggest "wide open space" was near the TVs and the AV room. Perhaps this open space was a way of saying "you're in the wealthy spot, where we can afford to have lots of space for you, our very important customer to walk around". The other side of the store, where cameras, DVDs, games, etc. were sold was more crowded.
Every Target I've been in has a wide aisle that takes you to the back; but you still have to walk along a more narrow aisle to get to the TVs, which are way in back. I seem to recall having heard at some point that TVs and sporting goods are in back because men "come in with a mission" and will "hunt down their prey", whereas women come to "gather" and will do so where "the grazing is easiest", so they put apparel up front (but the dressing rooms are in the rear, probably as much for practical reasons as psychological ones). Of course, the fact that outfits sold at Target cost $20 and TVs may cost $2000 probably has something to do with it too.
Yep. The Lunch Lady shouldn't have bought a house, and the guy with the 900 SAT score shouldn't have gone to college. Film at 11. Vo-tech at 12. The return of a decent highschool education at 1? Oh now... we're all too drunk from credit, and have fallen asleep by then.
The wide, inefficient layout might be a corporate standard. The one here is the same way. After my last post, I thought about why I bought at a department store instead of CC. Maybe the department store business model is just better for name-brand items. I mean, a Magnavox from one store is the same as a Magnavox from another. In other words, the brand name items are commodities with respect to the retailers. When the product is a commodity, price becomes the biggest differentiator, with customer service, return policy, etc. becoming the only other things the stores can use to differentiate themselves. CC lost on service with the attacking redshirts? That would be a bitter irony since they might have had more customers with fewer employees. I had to return something once, and to their credit that was actually an easy cash-back transaction with receipt. I haven't heard anybody else complain about their return policy.
I haven't been in Best Buy for a while. IIRC, they are layed out like Toys R Us, with most of the store filled with high aisles and a few areas with low aisles, and not a lot of open space except for near the registers where you have lines. You look at any big-box discount store, and there's that space near the register for the lines, and during the holidays that space fills up on weekends, backing up into the aisles. There is just no way CC could ever do that kind of volume.
Another thing too--CC comes off a bit as a "high end wannabe". Some finance guy the other night was saying that truly high-end stuff will survive a recession, since the rich always have money to spend. Bargain stuff will survive the recession because people want to save. The "high end for the working class" stores, he contended, are the ones that will fail. I believe he cited Macy's as something that might be in trouble, while Dress Barn and Gucci will prosper... not having any real sense for that market, I'd have to take his word for it; but the analogy seems appropriate.
...was the fact that they were across the street from the office. When you walked in, you always got mobbed by their people. They were waaay overstaffed with people who just ask "can I help you with anything" every five minutes. I would avoid "window shopping" there, for that very reason. I'm sure there were plenty of other ways they lost sales; but that was the main reason they lost sales from me. That, and when I made my last major purchase (LCD TV), Target whipped the pants off them price-wise. I was able to watch all the big screens at Target for 15 minutes, and decide which one had the best picture for the price. Nobody bothered me, and if anybody did ask "may I help you" it was just once, and they didn't do it again.
...not long after the clocks changed, I strung up Christmas lights indoors. I do this, Not to celebrate Christmas early, but to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder. I'm not formally diagnosed or anything, but the lights certainly help make up for the depressing onset of evening in what ought to be late afternoon.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you don't actually mean to drive the trains directly with wind; but if you could it'd be pretty fantastic. In many areas it wouldn't be practical since there are too many curves and overhead obstructions along the line. However, just imagine if we could eliminate the overhead obstructions and straighten the line. In some areas, that could be done. Then, a train pulls off on a siding outside of Denver, hooks up to some kind of fantastic tall-masted locomotive, shuts down the diesel, and sails all the way to Kansas City. It'd be worth the price just to see such a contraption sailing across the Great Plains.
OK, just kidding. In my case though, I'm limited as an iPhone developer because I don't want an iPhone. Of course, I don't usse FaceBook, MySpace or any of that crap. I only use IM occasionally because I know some other people who use it. And yes, GET OFF MY LAWN.
At least now I don't have to buy an iPhone to re-train for all those jobs where they're looking for iPhone devs (no, really, they are looking). I can rest assured that it's a waste of time because by the time I'd be any good at it, all those companies will have folded because their VCs realized they are a black hole. The last job lead I got was for a job with a financial company. It doesn't matter if the market is going up or down, people alway want to keep track of their money. Seems like a winner, especially since I'm officially over the hill now. :)
I said start with BASIC, not dwell on it. If a potential programmer becomes so ingrained with the shortcoming of *any* language, it's a fault in the programmer not the language. The quote is from 1975, wherein he also suggested that Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail. . I think Larry Wall would disagree, and whether you like Perl or not... you're soaking in it here on Slashdot.
Although, maybe, just maybe you should start them with BASIC. In other words, mirror the history of exposure that my generation got--slow BASIC, assembly to make it faster, high level procedural languages like Pascal, object oriented dreams, object oriented nightmares, and then that wierd thing called functional.
Yes, I know functional came before 8-bit micros; but for a lot of us the history I've outlined above is how it all progressed. I know I'll get flamed for this, but for many years you could come out of school without knowing anything about functional programming and do just fine. It seems like that's changed in the past few years; but we'll have to see if it really sticks. The recession might help it, since the complaint about not being able to find employees comfortable with functional programming will be mitigated by all the tech layoffs...
The bottom line though, is that underneath all that stuff you have a machine. Assembly gets you as close to that machine as possible. Everything else is just a cute wrapper for the machine. Too many CS grads have no feel for that "foundation". What if architects learned nothing about foundations?
No, No. Reindeer and bunnyrabits. No scary birth and resurrection stuff. (Closes eyes, puts hands over ears) "La, la, la". Is the scary religous holiday gone yet? Yes? Yaaay! Let's go shopping.
It was part of the Farewell Dossier
One of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever came as a result of US technology that was stolen by the Russians. Except, the CIA knew it was happening and instead of stopping it they decided to plant faulty chip designs. Once the USSR knew the tech was unreliable, they were stuck with one helluva an auditing problem, beyond their capability.
How much do you want to bet that somewhere on a "vulnerable" network, there are some designs that are just... a little... bit... off.
Does this mean that Eclipse will now fail when the network is down? Or, does it mean that Eclipse will have to check in with nodes on the network before it can start properly... actually... I can kind of see the benefit in this. Bear with me for a minute here. If we can get the next rev of Eclipse to start up sooo.... slooowly... that they can't even test it before most of us retire, then we can just forget about the next rev of Eclipse. Why, if this technology is integrated into current installs via automatic updates, we can shut Eclipse down alltogether. I like it already. Where do I go to sign up?
In a related story, a man who had his Playboy collection discovered by the wife explained that he "reads it for the articles".
Yah, sounds like total BS to me. Most of these people have military experience. They could have just as easily ended up in Iraq with their buddy dying right next to them. Nobody is going to shut the mic off to "spare them their feelings".
Next OS release will finally be patched. There. Fixed that for ya.
Seriously though, how can the AV vendors have any leg to stand on? Whatever happened to that suit the makers of patches for inner tubes brought against the tire companies when tubeless tires were introduced?
As for this creating a security monoculture, and for that having an impact, then AV companies will just re-emerge.
Sorry. I have a hard time shedding any tears for AV companies. I don't run AV, it just slows down your machine. I'm vigilant, and have occasionally had to manually remove infections over the years. It's high time MS itself addressed the issue. If there's anything wrong it's the way they're doing it.
Instead of presenting their solution as AV software, they should present it as better control over the installation and running of executable code. That's all infection really is anyway--the undesired modification or introduction of executable code. If you can control that, you have solved the AV problem. The challenge is that there are so many legitimate executables, DLLs, processes, threads, etc. on a box that it's information overload even for technical users. Some of the solution's I've had in mind are a bit too much for a /. post.
DEP was a step in the right direction. I've seen it in action a couple times now.
Bottom line though, is that AV should have been nipped in the bud long before AV companies became so big. I mean, not just one, but a whole category of companies based on fixing a fundamental flaw in another company's software. I mean, just... wow.
"You can't con an honest man" is said to be a saying within underworld circles; perhaps by people who are not actually in those circles. I'm not sure who coined it, but it's more a turn of phrase and/or rule of thumb than an absolute. I mean, if it were an absolute, you would only need one honest man conned in order to disprove it. I didn't mean to imply it should be taken to that extreme.
When dealing with $3,000 a light has to go off in your head that says "there are procedures for dealing with this". Go to the police. Tell the guy you'll walk to the nearest police station with him, or that you'll call the non-emergency number with your cel phone. The police will hold the money for a statutory limit, and if nobody claims it, THEN you might get it. YMMV on the laws in your jurisdiction and how honest the cops are.
Now, if you're not a totally honest man a different light goes off in your head. That light says "How can I get this money, nevermind the victim or due process".
The other day on NPR there was a bit about how the check cashing industry was actually helpful to poor people. Now maybe patent trolling isn't so bad? What next? Dogs and cats sleeping together?
A tablet PC with an improved screen could do the same thing it does. It's just another DRM'd special purpose device, isn't it? What kind of Oprah Kool-Aid would I have to drink to want a Kindle? Oh, and not that it matters, but who picked the name for this thing? Why do I think of Fahrenheit 451 every time I hear about it?
Tried to find it, but couldn't. It goes something like this:
Panel 1: PHB, walking by Dilbert's cube: Dilbert, why aren't you working?
Panel 2: Dilbert: My programs are compiling.
Panel 3: PHB, sitting back at his desk by himself, thought bubble: I wonder if my programs compile.
Yay! Fond memories. I actually slugged a couple times when I was still living with my folks. Usually though, I was more comfortable coughing up for bus fare. It's funny. Somebody asked me if I ever hitchhiked, and I said "no". I never really thought of slugging as hitching; but that's really what it is.
As deed holder via the International Star Registry, that includes a deed on any planets in orbit, I forbid it. Why, there might even be rich deposits of diamelles and/or Ginsu steak knives on that planet. I'm not giving it up without a fight.
Obama will be Commander in Chief soon. He can just order them not to use it. He can also negotiate an international treaty regulating the power and frequency of sonar (although there will be a lot of other stuff on his plate). Monitoring compliance should be pretty easy. IANASubmariner, but doesn't active sonar GIVE AWAY YOUR POSITION which is kind of, ummm... bad for a submarine? Let's say the sonar is not actually on the sub; it would still "light up" the entire area, right? It would be the naval equivalent of a parachute flare. So, perhaps the idea with this thing is to light up the entire coast so we see anything that approaches; but unless we have it running almost all the time, it'd be useless. It seems like if you want to put an underwater defensive zone across our coasts, a well maintained network of passive and/or weaker active systems would do the job OK.
The bottom line though, is that the marine life along our coast is a valuable resource. You don't defend yourself by sacking your own resources. That's just nuts. The court blew it, and these 5-4 decisions... well, they just show that the court seems to have forgotten about the Constitution. They've become nothing more than political proxies, which is sad.
The video suffers from YouTube syndrome. Symptoms of this condition include one or more minutes of stuff we don't care about. The condition is most extreme when the event we care about is of short duration. Although it is not entirely curable, it can be treated by posting the time of the interesting event in the comments section. In this case, the event in question occurs at 2:38. Remember, this is a treatment not a cure. The treatment still consumes bandwidth and time. In the future, we may have a Flash plug-in where the annotation feature can be used to denote points of interest, with the ability to skip to a keyframe just before said point. Until then, only video posters can prevent YouTube syndrome. Remember, if the event of interest in your video is of short duration, the video should not be any more than twice as long as the actual event. Introduction, at most, should identify you and/or your company. Anything that can be explained more efficiently as text should be put in the little text section that appears in the upper right.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was indeed some kind of psychology behind CC's layout. The biggest "wide open space" was near the TVs and the AV room. Perhaps this open space was a way of saying "you're in the wealthy spot, where we can afford to have lots of space for you, our very important customer to walk around". The other side of the store, where cameras, DVDs, games, etc. were sold was more crowded.
Every Target I've been in has a wide aisle that takes you to the back; but you still have to walk along a more narrow aisle to get to the TVs, which are way in back. I seem to recall having heard at some point that TVs and sporting goods are in back because men "come in with a mission" and will "hunt down their prey", whereas women come to "gather" and will do so where "the grazing is easiest", so they put apparel up front (but the dressing rooms are in the rear, probably as much for practical reasons as psychological ones). Of course, the fact that outfits sold at Target cost $20 and TVs may cost $2000 probably has something to do with it too.
Yep. The Lunch Lady shouldn't have bought a house, and the guy with the 900 SAT score shouldn't have gone to college. Film at 11. Vo-tech at 12. The return of a decent highschool education at 1? Oh now... we're all too drunk from credit, and have fallen asleep by then.
The wide, inefficient layout might be a corporate standard. The one here is the same way. After my last post, I thought about why I bought at a department store instead of CC. Maybe the department store business model is just better for name-brand items. I mean, a Magnavox from one store is the same as a Magnavox from another. In other words, the brand name items are commodities with respect to the retailers. When the product is a commodity, price becomes the biggest differentiator, with customer service, return policy, etc. becoming the only other things the stores can use to differentiate themselves. CC lost on service with the attacking redshirts? That would be a bitter irony since they might have had more customers with fewer employees. I had to return something once, and to their credit that was actually an easy cash-back transaction with receipt. I haven't heard anybody else complain about their return policy.
I haven't been in Best Buy for a while. IIRC, they are layed out like Toys R Us, with most of the store filled with high aisles and a few areas with low aisles, and not a lot of open space except for near the registers where you have lines. You look at any big-box discount store, and there's that space near the register for the lines, and during the holidays that space fills up on weekends, backing up into the aisles. There is just no way CC could ever do that kind of volume.
Another thing too--CC comes off a bit as a "high end wannabe". Some finance guy the other night was saying that truly high-end stuff will survive a recession, since the rich always have money to spend. Bargain stuff will survive the recession because people want to save. The "high end for the working class" stores, he contended, are the ones that will fail. I believe he cited Macy's as something that might be in trouble, while Dress Barn and Gucci will prosper... not having any real sense for that market, I'd have to take his word for it; but the analogy seems appropriate.
...was the fact that they were across the street from the office. When you walked in, you always got mobbed by their people. They were waaay overstaffed with people who just ask "can I help you with anything" every five minutes. I would avoid "window shopping" there, for that very reason. I'm sure there were plenty of other ways they lost sales; but that was the main reason they lost sales from me. That, and when I made my last major purchase (LCD TV), Target whipped the pants off them price-wise. I was able to watch all the big screens at Target for 15 minutes, and decide which one had the best picture for the price. Nobody bothered me, and if anybody did ask "may I help you" it was just once, and they didn't do it again.
...not long after the clocks changed, I strung up Christmas lights indoors. I do this, Not to celebrate Christmas early, but to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder. I'm not formally diagnosed or anything, but the lights certainly help make up for the depressing onset of evening in what ought to be late afternoon.