Ahh... the ever popular "I'll make outrageous inferences" troll. Either you're doing it on purpose to be difficult, it's an honest mistake, or I have some sort of defecit in my writing. I've been subject to this form of attack, if that's what it is, on more than on occasion. I've gotten to the point where I feel I must refuse to reply to them in terms of what's actually being implied. Instead, I can only offer that if you think I've said something ridiculous, odds are it was not what I intended to say. I wager that for just about any writing beyond one or two sentances, it's not difficult to craft an inference troll, either on purpose or by accident. That's why there's no point in trying to remedy this problem by being careful in my composition. If I did, it would likely read more like a legal document than a casual comment.
I put off stuff when I don't want to do it. End of story. I find that reminding myself of the consequences for not getting things done is only mildly effective. You have to have a balance of work and pleasure. Sometimes, going off and partying really is the answer. When you're "relaxed" or "partied out", then you're more willing to work. If you find yourself fulminating about something you don't want to do, stop. Get a cup of coffee, talk with a friend, play a game, whatever makes you feel good. This will take just as much time, but when you come back you'll be happier about rolling up your sleaves and getting the job done.
I first heard the term "craplets" applied to Java applets loading on web pages back around 1998 or 1999. I wish I could say I came up with it. I got it from a guy named Dan, a rather charismatic fellow who worked at an ISP with me. Another favorite term I got from him was "muckled" as in "an imcompatable driver muckled itself onto the COM port". I haven't seen him in years. He seems to have dropped out of the online world.
On my Dell at work there is a little folder called crap. I have this folder on every Windows machine I ever got from a major OEM. In there, I put all the desktop shortcuts that clutter my desk. It tidies up my desktop, and if I should, by some slim chance, ever need the app, it's not uninstalled. I can still access it.
In all my years as a Windows user, not once have I ever had a need to open the crap folder.
Some of the crap is bad enough that you have to uninstall it, in particular, "support agents" and other annoying popup generators or Bob-like help thingies. Immediately uninstall. This roughly doubles the time it takes to setup a new box, so in a sense OEMs have already been harminng Windows like this for years. It's just that they usually don't destabilize the entire OS. I guess maybe they just weren't trying hard enough. Way to go, big OEMs. Thank God for "screwdriver shops" and "known to work well" hardware setups learned about online.
The picture in the article is a Loony, but the text says they won't identify what coins are involved. Canadian pennies, nickles, and dimes are routinely passed by US cashiers. That's right--$US==$CAN if the the coinage is small enough and you aren't careful enough to look, which I have to admin I'm usually not. This doesn't piss me off nearly as much as the Dominican coin I got at a yardsale one time. That had to be nearly worthless; but I digress. The point is, small denomination Canadian coins are routinely passed in the US without much fuss. The nickel seems like the most likey target--big enough to hide whatever they want, small enough denominatino not to cause a fuss, common enough in change not to arrouse suspicion. Loonies never pass in the US, because we hate dollar coins down here. I've never seen a Can' quarter either, but I live in DC. Maybe it's more common near the border.
When you start to loose bone mass and are no longer 6 feet, you'll still probably be 1.8m, or 180cm. 180cm works well as a "good male height" because it's the same number as degrees for a half-circle. At least, that's the mnemonic I use for people who quote their height in cm or m.
FWIW, I think temperatures will be the last unit we start using. Fahrenheit is just so natural and ingrained--100 is close to body temp, zero is very cold, not just freezing, etc. There just isn't enough subtlety in the Celcius scale, it seems.
The objects are generated from files. They'll DRM those. Unsuccessfully of course. Even if you can't get ToyCo's action figure file, you'll easily get the "analog loopholed" version. Analog loophole might not be the right term, but it's the same idea. If it gets really bad, they'll start trying to control the basic materials. We'll end up with a tax on the silicone goo, like the blank media tax. Then every innocent Joe who needs to calk windows will be paying $50/tube for the stuff.
IP Issues to Hit Action Figure Market. Seems inevitable. Dad, can you print me a few dozen more Ninja Turtles? If it comes with a 3d scanner, kiss Barbie Good-Bye. Mattel becomes the next Sony.
Now, if only the specification language could be typed into a computer and compiled, then you'd really have something. Specs, except at the higher levels are, IMHO, over-rated for precisely this reason. As the specifications become increasingly detailed, they approach the complexity of the code. You end up with something that's every bit as complex as the code, except it doesn't compile. Worse yet, while it's a given that computer code is hard to read, people approach specs with the delusion that they'll be readable.
The trick is to figure out what's observable and testable by the user, and specify nothing more. Wherever possible, cite existing specs. If possible, break down your specs into logical parts and cite those (e.g., define what a "range of values" is for each datatype, so people have a prayer of knowing what you mean when you say "the user can enter a range of values".)
Even so, it's pretty much a lost cause. Some of the best software out there probably has no spec. Where's the formal spec for Apache? Linux kernel? GIMP? The libjpeg library (not the image standard, the lib itself)? Or, for that matter, any Open Source project? If you look at Open Source in general, you see a general lack of design docs and management in the traditional sense. You do see, however, other things that while not software, go along with software: documentation, bug tracking, versioning. It seems that Open Source has naturally weeded out the "metatasks" that aren't really integral to good software development, and formal specs (at least in some cases) appear to be unnecessary. Standards, however, are vital. A standard, however, unlike a formal software design spec, simply specifies what is to be implemented not how to implement it. Perhaps this is where most specs go horribly wrong.
Nah, bring in the right management team, and the problem is solved. The only reason the number 45,872nd seller on Amazon isn't number 1 is because the author wasn't being managed by an experienced team of managers familiar with Unified Authorship Model and Extreme Storytelling. Oh, and the right marketing team could have made it fly off the shelf. And what were they thinking writing this thing in English? Everybody knows it's too easy to make mistakes in English. Esperanto would have fixed that. I think the guy was lazy too. If they had barged into his garret and asked him for status reports every half hour, the book wouldn't have missed the deadline by six months. What a shame.
While a tech company in DC itself is considered "different", I know they exist because I work for one. We've got a certain ammount of pride in that difference, and that we attract more creative, urban, "socially conscious" employees. More common locations have been the butt of jokes, Chantilly being referred to as "Chantucky". I say "have been" because there is a chance we will leave the city, but there is a strong desire for us to at least stay Metro accessable and not be in "just another office box on a highway strip". We'll have to wait and see...
While "hard tech" and defense contractors are probably less common in the city, web design firms that need creative types seem to be more common. One of our web devs left to work for a company in the Columbia Heights neighborhood.
Why would anyone care about a box-store when NoVA has so many industrial parks? If you're looking for something truly interesting, just drive around back in those. The distributors often have small retail operations attached. It's been a while since I've been out in the 'burbs so maybe it's not so good these days. Shirley-Edsel just off 395 near the Beltway used to be my favorite. They had Reed Plastics, where you could get all kinds of lucite stuff. Then there was this electronics place that had all kinds of unusually sized rechargeable batteries and a parts department about 10 times the size of a typical radio shack. Interesting little startups are often coming and going in these parks too.
IPs are not as convenient as an all-in-one box store of course, but they are far more diverse and interesting. The one near my neighborhood actually had an arcade machine distro when I was in my teens. They might let you play one game without a quarter if you asked nicely, then they'd kick you out. The interesting thing was that they also moved slot machines through there--allegedly legal if the establishment didn't pay out on them, which they didn't... at least... not during regular business hours.:)
If you were faced with output from a 15 year old program, what would you do? 15 years? In software, that's an eternity. These tags are essentially saying "here is where this old crap used to be". How many people are actually using these programs? Maintaining documents in the old format? I defy any of you out there in Linux-land to say you wouldn't take the same approach under the same set of circumstances. Actually, Linux people would probably just say "it may not open old documents properly, but that's OK because you have the source". Really not much better.
The worst bugs are the ones that are hard to reproduce. In fact, when faced with a bug that's difficult to reproduce, I've been known to quip "yet another unintentional random number generator". The suggestion that they're going to apply a pseudo-fix that involves random allocations raises all kinds of red flags. I'd much rather have fine-grained control over which sections of code are allowed to access which sections of memory, and be able to track which sections of code are accessing a chunk of memory. I'd much rather have strict enforcement of a non-execute bit on memory that's only supposed to contain data (there is some support for this already). Introducing randomness into memory allocation? Worst. Idea. Ever. It's like throwing in the towel, and if they put that in at low levels in system libs and things like that, we're screwed in terms of every being able to *really* fix the problem. If their compiler is going to link against an allocator that has this capability, I hope they provide the ability to disable it.
%ecc posting.english -o test warning 1: ``like" is superfluous teen speak, construct discarded. warning 1: ``and like" is superfluous teen speak, construct discarded. warning 3: ``english" assumed to be ``English". warning 3: ``Geez" undefined. Linking against null action function. %./test The poster's meaning is that he tries to write a program. We have established that ``That" really sucks, and we are assuming that ``That" is the poster's act of writing a program. Can't someone write up some stuff that understands proper english (Y/N):
I skimmed it, and some of this stuff is a PiTA. For example, they make a lot of good points about the pre-processor, but I can't justify re-working all my code into D just from that alone. Some of this stuff is bells and whistles--e.g., the built in unit testing? You don't need a language construct for that. If your programmers are so lazy or stupid that they can't write unit tests in C or C++, having the language give them a little hand-holding, standard way of doing that is probably not going to help.
If I need classes (and usually I don't), I'd reach for C++
The real reason C and C++ are becoming less the language of choice? It's the libraries, stupid. Most of the new languages have extensive "standard libraries" that keep up with the modern world. C gives you the choice of linking anything, and I think the standard bodies refuse to endorse a wider ranging standard library because they don't want people to get the idea that you can only use a particular set of libs. The other reason of course is that they have better sandboxing and/or exception handling (Java still crashes, but it throws an exception instead of just dumping core or doing something else that's compiler dependant).
While D makes some valid points, they might be better off adding these features to C++ and C compilers, and ultimately converging the two standards. It'd take a long time, but it was 9 years between the revisions of C (the last major one being C99). These language standards move at a glacial pace, and we like it that way!
Something like D seems to offer neither the RAD approach of PHP, Ruby, etc. It doesn't seem to offer the backwards compatable standards track offered by a revision to the C or C++ standards either. It doesn't satisfy the "roll a script fast" crowd, or the "write code that will still be used 30 years from now" crowd, in any particular way. It looks lost in the middle. Unless it gets endorsed by a huge corporation, and I end up working for that corporation, or until it gains industry traction, I don't see any compelling reason to pay the early-adopter price and use it.
I think you're probably right about the compressed air starting system. This reminds me of when I used to mess around with car engines, and one of the conversation pieces the guys had around the shop was a valve with a diameter about 3 times larger than what you'd see on even a very large engine. It had AIR stamped on it, and nothing else. Word from the guys was that some large marine engines use a compressed air starting system, and that the valve was probaby a part of that system. I had no reason to disbelieve them. Keep in mind, an engine is really just a fancy air pump. If you blow air into it with appropriate timing, it'll turn, then you can probably start adding fuel and get the cycle running normally. If you used an electric start on something that huge, the starer motor would probably be the size of a bus.
Nevermind that, what does pumice do to your hull? To your prop? Obviously it doesn't hurt to go through a little, because they survived; but that stuff is abrasive. Did they have any frame of reference for this, or did they just not consider what it might do, and get lucky?
This would have been hard enough to pitch in '99. They're going to build a whole network for a niche application that isn't even consuming a single-digit percentage of the existing internet? That's nuts.
OK, maybe VR is consuming a significant percentage of the net if you define it as "network gaming" or something. If you do that though, you immediately provide an argument against the need for another network, since these applications are successful with the current net. You might be able to argue that you could provide more bandwidth-intensive applications with the dedicated network, but a logical first step is to write the software and run it over the existing network first, and then run demos on a LAN showing how a dedicated network would help. If your LAN demos blow people away, then maybe you have something... but if that were possible, you'd already be hearing network gamers say things like "this rocks on the corporate LAN, but is worthless on my cable modem". I haven't heard anything like that.
Then, as that linked blog pointed out, you'd want to be able to communicate with the Internet at large. So. Then you'd need a Neuronet to Internet gateway of some kind. Even if this conveyed an advantage, just think of the cost--bringing in another ISP just for one app that most people don't even care about???
This just makes no sense to anybody who knows anything. Maybe they'll fleece some really stupid VCs though.
unreasoning paranoia about anything that is new and different.
We've never sailed a ship this big in the North Atlantic before. Are you sure it's unsinkable? Wouldn't it be prudent to have a full compliment of lifeboats just in case it isn't? Are you sure we can manage hydrogen in our airships? It hasn't been this cold during a shuttle launch before. We'd better check with the engineers, and if they say not to launch, we ought to listen.
I hope you're not an engineer working on untested, mission-critical systems. If you are, it's your JOB to be paranoid about anything that's new and different.
The Scion xB is ugly on purpose. I've heard people say they like the fact that the designers essentially said, "we're not going to avoid the boxy look, we're going to embrace it as an aesthetic form". No American car maker has done anything that bold in my recent recollection.
The nuclear reactor reference is from a clasic one-time Saturday Night Live skit. Ed Asner was hosting and played the part of a retiring nuclear engineer. His last words to the people in the plant were "just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor". After he leaves, the reactor overheats. An argument ensues over what he meant. With lines like: "We should flood the reactor core, because hey, you can't put too much water in a reactor" being countered by "we should drain the reactor core! You can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor. There must be too much in there. That's why it's overheating."
The team is split, so they put it to a vote, and "drain the reactor" wins.
The final scene is Ed sitting on the beach, sipping a drink. A nuclear explosion appears in the distance. The waiter aks about it and he explains that it must be a test or something. His advice to the waiter? "just remember, you can't look too long at a nuclear explosion".
Are you sure you don't mean "Protein is Protein"? Just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor. (I wonder if anybody will get that reference).
BTW, I thought this might spawn a funny thread, but I like the serious direction it's taken.
Finally, AFAIK prions are proteins with the same basic chemistry (same exact number of atoms and linkages between atoms) as their healthy counterparts, but folded differently. Thus, "a protein folded properly is a protein folded properly". Maintaining things like that across generations of cloned copies? Do we really want to stake our lives on it? Cloned monoculture meat? Very serious issues. It's one thing when I, as a programmer, crash somebody's box. It's quite another to crash the food supply. I think we should be a lot more cautious with this stuff. We have redundant power supplies in those servers. Where's our redundantn food supply? If somebody's going to experiment with my food, I want a backup.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh... the ever popular "I'll make outrageous inferences" troll. Either you're doing it on purpose to be difficult, it's an honest mistake, or I have some sort of defecit in my writing. I've been subject to this form of attack, if that's what it is, on more than on occasion. I've gotten to the point where I feel I must refuse to reply to them in terms of what's actually being implied. Instead, I can only offer that if you think I've said something ridiculous, odds are it was not what I intended to say. I wager that for just about any writing beyond one or two sentances, it's not difficult to craft an inference troll, either on purpose or by accident. That's why there's no point in trying to remedy this problem by being careful in my composition. If I did, it would likely read more like a legal document than a casual comment.
I put off stuff when I don't want to do it. End of story. I find that reminding myself of the consequences for not getting things done is only mildly effective. You have to have a balance of work and pleasure. Sometimes, going off and partying really is the answer. When you're "relaxed" or "partied out", then you're more willing to work. If you find yourself fulminating about something you don't want to do, stop. Get a cup of coffee, talk with a friend, play a game, whatever makes you feel good. This will take just as much time, but when you come back you'll be happier about rolling up your sleaves and getting the job done.
What happens when an irresistable reality distortion field meets immovable FUD?
Dan, is that you?
I first heard the term "craplets" applied to Java applets loading on web pages back around 1998 or 1999. I wish I could say I came up with it. I got it from a guy named Dan, a rather charismatic fellow who worked at an ISP with me. Another favorite term I got from him was "muckled" as in "an imcompatable driver muckled itself onto the COM port". I haven't seen him in years. He seems to have dropped out of the online world.
On my Dell at work there is a little folder called crap. I have this folder on every Windows machine I ever got from a major OEM. In there, I put all the desktop shortcuts that clutter my desk. It tidies up my desktop, and if I should, by some slim chance, ever need the app, it's not uninstalled. I can still access it.
In all my years as a Windows user, not once have I ever had a need to open the crap folder.
Some of the crap is bad enough that you have to uninstall it, in particular, "support agents" and other annoying popup generators or Bob-like help thingies. Immediately uninstall. This roughly doubles the time it takes to setup a new box, so in a sense OEMs have already been harminng Windows like this for years. It's just that they usually don't destabilize the entire OS. I guess maybe they just weren't trying hard enough. Way to go, big OEMs. Thank God for "screwdriver shops" and "known to work well" hardware setups learned about online.
The picture in the article is a Loony, but the text says they won't identify what coins are involved. Canadian pennies, nickles, and dimes are routinely passed by US cashiers. That's right--$US==$CAN if the the coinage is small enough and you aren't careful enough to look, which I have to admin I'm usually not. This doesn't piss me off nearly as much as the Dominican coin I got at a yardsale one time. That had to be nearly worthless; but I digress. The point is, small denomination Canadian coins are routinely passed in the US without much fuss. The nickel seems like the most likey target--big enough to hide whatever they want, small enough denominatino not to cause a fuss, common enough in change not to arrouse suspicion. Loonies never pass in the US, because we hate dollar coins down here. I've never seen a Can' quarter either, but I live in DC. Maybe it's more common near the border.
When you start to loose bone mass and are no longer 6 feet, you'll still probably be 1.8m, or 180cm. 180cm works well as a "good male height" because it's the same number as degrees for a half-circle. At least, that's the mnemonic I use for people who quote their height in cm or m.
FWIW, I think temperatures will be the last unit we start using. Fahrenheit is just so natural and ingrained--100 is close to body temp, zero is very cold, not just freezing, etc. There just isn't enough subtlety in the Celcius scale, it seems.
The objects are generated from files. They'll DRM those. Unsuccessfully of course. Even if you can't get ToyCo's action figure file, you'll easily get the "analog loopholed" version. Analog loophole might not be the right term, but it's the same idea. If it gets really bad, they'll start trying to control the basic materials. We'll end up with a tax on the silicone goo, like the blank media tax. Then every innocent Joe who needs to calk windows will be paying $50/tube for the stuff.
IP Issues to Hit Action Figure Market. Seems inevitable. Dad, can you print me a few dozen more Ninja Turtles? If it comes with a 3d scanner, kiss Barbie Good-Bye. Mattel becomes the next Sony.
Now, if only the specification language could be typed into a computer and compiled, then you'd really have something. Specs, except at the higher levels are, IMHO, over-rated for precisely this reason. As the specifications become increasingly detailed, they approach the complexity of the code. You end up with something that's every bit as complex as the code, except it doesn't compile. Worse yet, while it's a given that computer code is hard to read, people approach specs with the delusion that they'll be readable.
The trick is to figure out what's observable and testable by the user, and specify nothing more. Wherever possible, cite existing specs. If possible, break down your specs into logical parts and cite those (e.g., define what a "range of values" is for each datatype, so people have a prayer of knowing what you mean when you say "the user can enter a range of values".)
Even so, it's pretty much a lost cause. Some of the best software out there probably has no spec. Where's the formal spec for Apache? Linux kernel? GIMP? The libjpeg library (not the image standard, the lib itself)? Or, for that matter, any Open Source project? If you look at Open Source in general, you see a general lack of design docs and management in the traditional sense. You do see, however, other things that while not software, go along with software: documentation, bug tracking, versioning. It seems that Open Source has naturally weeded out the "metatasks" that aren't really integral to good software development, and formal specs (at least in some cases) appear to be unnecessary. Standards, however, are vital. A standard, however, unlike a formal software design spec, simply specifies what is to be implemented not how to implement it. Perhaps this is where most specs go horribly wrong.
Nah, bring in the right management team, and the problem is solved. The only reason the number 45,872nd seller on Amazon isn't number 1 is because the author wasn't being managed by an experienced team of managers familiar with Unified Authorship Model and Extreme Storytelling. Oh, and the right marketing team could have made it fly off the shelf. And what were they thinking writing this thing in English? Everybody knows it's too easy to make mistakes in English. Esperanto would have fixed that. I think the guy was lazy too. If they had barged into his garret and asked him for status reports every half hour, the book wouldn't have missed the deadline by six months. What a shame.
While a tech company in DC itself is considered "different", I know they exist because I work for one. We've got a certain ammount of pride in that difference, and that we attract more creative, urban, "socially conscious" employees. More common locations have been the butt of jokes, Chantilly being referred to as "Chantucky". I say "have been" because there is a chance we will leave the city, but there is a strong desire for us to at least stay Metro accessable and not be in "just another office box on a highway strip". We'll have to wait and see...
While "hard tech" and defense contractors are probably less common in the city, web design firms that need creative types seem to be more common. One of our web devs left to work for a company in the Columbia Heights neighborhood.
Why would anyone care about a box-store when NoVA has so many industrial parks? If you're looking for something truly interesting, just drive around back in those. The distributors often have small retail operations attached. It's been a while since I've been out in the 'burbs so maybe it's not so good these days. Shirley-Edsel just off 395 near the Beltway used to be my favorite. They had Reed Plastics, where you could get all kinds of lucite stuff. Then there was this electronics place that had all kinds of unusually sized rechargeable batteries and a parts department about 10 times the size of a typical radio shack. Interesting little startups are often coming and going in these parks too.
IPs are not as convenient as an all-in-one box store of course, but they are far more diverse and interesting. The one near my neighborhood actually had an arcade machine distro when I was in my teens. They might let you play one game without a quarter if you asked nicely, then they'd kick you out. The interesting thing was that they also moved slot machines through there--allegedly legal if the establishment didn't pay out on them, which they didn't... at least... not during regular business hours. :)
If you were faced with output from a 15 year old program, what would you do? 15 years? In software, that's an eternity. These tags are essentially saying "here is where this old crap used to be". How many people are actually using these programs? Maintaining documents in the old format? I defy any of you out there in Linux-land to say you wouldn't take the same approach under the same set of circumstances. Actually, Linux people would probably just say "it may not open old documents properly, but that's OK because you have the source". Really not much better.
The worst bugs are the ones that are hard to reproduce. In fact, when faced with a bug that's difficult to reproduce, I've been known to quip "yet another unintentional random number generator". The suggestion that they're going to apply a pseudo-fix that involves random allocations raises all kinds of red flags. I'd much rather have fine-grained control over which sections of code are allowed to access which sections of memory, and be able to track which sections of code are accessing a chunk of memory. I'd much rather have strict enforcement of a non-execute bit on memory that's only supposed to contain data (there is some support for this already). Introducing randomness into memory allocation? Worst. Idea. Ever. It's like throwing in the towel, and if they put that in at low levels in system libs and things like that, we're screwed in terms of every being able to *really* fix the problem. If their compiler is going to link against an allocator that has this capability, I hope they provide the ability to disable it.
I skimmed it, and some of this stuff is a PiTA. For example, they make a lot of good points about the pre-processor, but I can't justify re-working all my code into D just from that alone. Some of this stuff is bells and whistles--e.g., the built in unit testing? You don't need a language construct for that. If your programmers are so lazy or stupid that they can't write unit tests in C or C++, having the language give them a little hand-holding, standard way of doing that is probably not going to help.
If I need classes (and usually I don't), I'd reach for C++
The real reason C and C++ are becoming less the language of choice? It's the libraries, stupid. Most of the new languages have extensive "standard libraries" that keep up with the modern world. C gives you the choice of linking anything, and I think the standard bodies refuse to endorse a wider ranging standard library because they don't want people to get the idea that you can only use a particular set of libs. The other reason of course is that they have better sandboxing and/or exception handling (Java still crashes, but it throws an exception instead of just dumping core or doing something else that's compiler dependant).
While D makes some valid points, they might be better off adding these features to C++ and C compilers, and ultimately converging the two standards. It'd take a long time, but it was 9 years between the revisions of C (the last major one being C99). These language standards move at a glacial pace, and we like it that way!
Something like D seems to offer neither the RAD approach of PHP, Ruby, etc. It doesn't seem to offer the backwards compatable standards track offered by a revision to the C or C++ standards either. It doesn't satisfy the "roll a script fast" crowd, or the "write code that will still be used 30 years from now" crowd, in any particular way. It looks lost in the middle. Unless it gets endorsed by a huge corporation, and I end up working for that corporation, or until it gains industry traction, I don't see any compelling reason to pay the early-adopter price and use it.
I think you're probably right about the compressed air starting system. This reminds me of when I used to mess around with car engines, and one of the conversation pieces the guys had around the shop was a valve with a diameter about 3 times larger than what you'd see on even a very large engine. It had AIR stamped on it, and nothing else. Word from the guys was that some large marine engines use a compressed air starting system, and that the valve was probaby a part of that system. I had no reason to disbelieve them. Keep in mind, an engine is really just a fancy air pump. If you blow air into it with appropriate timing, it'll turn, then you can probably start adding fuel and get the cycle running normally. If you used an electric start on something that huge, the starer motor would probably be the size of a bus.
Nevermind that, what does pumice do to your hull? To your prop? Obviously it doesn't hurt to go through a little, because they survived; but that stuff is abrasive. Did they have any frame of reference for this, or did they just not consider what it might do, and get lucky?
This would have been hard enough to pitch in '99. They're going to build a whole network for a niche application that isn't even consuming a single-digit percentage of the existing internet? That's nuts.
OK, maybe VR is consuming a significant percentage of the net if you define it as "network gaming" or something. If you do that though, you immediately provide an argument against the need for another network, since these applications are successful with the current net. You might be able to argue that you could provide more bandwidth-intensive applications with the dedicated network, but a logical first step is to write the software and run it over the existing network first, and then run demos on a LAN showing how a dedicated network would help. If your LAN demos blow people away, then maybe you have something... but if that were possible, you'd already be hearing network gamers say things like "this rocks on the corporate LAN, but is worthless on my cable modem". I haven't heard anything like that.
Then, as that linked blog pointed out, you'd want to be able to communicate with the Internet at large. So. Then you'd need a Neuronet to Internet gateway of some kind. Even if this conveyed an advantage, just think of the cost--bringing in another ISP just for one app that most people don't even care about???
This just makes no sense to anybody who knows anything. Maybe they'll fleece some really stupid VCs though.
unreasoning paranoia about anything that is new and different.
We've never sailed a ship this big in the North Atlantic before. Are you sure it's unsinkable? Wouldn't it be prudent to have a full compliment of lifeboats just in case it isn't? Are you sure we can manage hydrogen in our airships? It hasn't been this cold during a shuttle launch before. We'd better check with the engineers, and if they say not to launch, we ought to listen.
I hope you're not an engineer working on untested, mission-critical systems. If you are, it's your JOB to be paranoid about anything that's new and different.
The Scion xB is ugly on purpose. I've heard people say they like the fact that the designers essentially said, "we're not going to avoid the boxy look, we're going to embrace it as an aesthetic form". No American car maker has done anything that bold in my recent recollection.
The nuclear reactor reference is from a clasic one-time Saturday Night Live skit. Ed Asner was hosting and played the part of a retiring nuclear engineer. His last words to the people in the plant were "just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor". After he leaves, the reactor overheats. An argument ensues over what he meant. With lines like: "We should flood the reactor core, because hey, you can't put too much water in a reactor" being countered by "we should drain the reactor core! You can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor. There must be too much in there. That's why it's overheating."
The team is split, so they put it to a vote, and "drain the reactor" wins.
The final scene is Ed sitting on the beach, sipping a drink. A nuclear explosion appears in the distance. The waiter aks about it and he explains that it must be a test or something. His advice to the waiter? "just remember, you can't look too long at a nuclear explosion".
Are you sure you don't mean "Protein is Protein"? Just remember, you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor. (I wonder if anybody will get that reference).
BTW, I thought this might spawn a funny thread, but I like the serious direction it's taken.
Finally, AFAIK prions are proteins with the same basic chemistry (same exact number of atoms and linkages between atoms) as their healthy counterparts, but folded differently. Thus, "a protein folded properly is a protein folded properly". Maintaining things like that across generations of cloned copies? Do we really want to stake our lives on it? Cloned monoculture meat? Very serious issues. It's one thing when I, as a programmer, crash somebody's box. It's quite another to crash the food supply. I think we should be a lot more cautious with this stuff. We have redundant power supplies in those servers. Where's our redundantn food supply? If somebody's going to experiment with my food, I want a backup.