4x10^84 works for me. But in all my years of programming, spreadsheets, and scientific calculator work, I've wondered why the simpler 4E84 exponential notation has not become more popular in text media.
Any thoughts?
Are there any/. readers out there that don't understand 4E84?
For decades I have been aware that companies keep hiring new developers fresh out of college that work hard, are productive in the lines of code they write, maybe meet deadlines, and keep making mistakes experienced workers gave up on decades ago. This year's budget doesn't care about expenses several years from now.
The difference between Roddenberry trying for serious science fiction with a better future and Lucas writing space opera. When Start Trek first came out I was to young to understand and grew deeper into it later. When Star Wars first came out my opinion was low-grade science fiction but fantastic, well crafted and executed, cinema. Looked at them differently while enjoying them both.
Use the force, Spock. Live long and prosper, Luke.
Before you can register you need to find an unused name. The best way I know of for searching for unused domain names is to use the V3hois "Domain List" service at http://www.v3whois.com/domain-list.
The beauty here is you see all similar registered names which allows you to spot unused names. Also the names you are search for are never on the Internet so domain-name squatters never get a hint of what you are searching for no matter how they monitor DNS look-ups.
While "rich kids toy'" gets the publicity and PR,
NASA does suborbital flights and has looking for private launch firms to help there as well as orbital flights.
To this end a few month's ago Forbes reported NASA awarded Virgin Galactic a suborbital contract.
A quick web search turned up the Suborbital Research Association,
which is composed of people interested in the science side of suborbital flights.
No, Virgin Galactic flights are not just for rich playboys and playgirls. There is science waiting for the flights as well... science that may well private suborbital flights financially viable.
The ancient Greeks had mechanical devices, such as animated birds, water works, temple Gods, and more, as far back as the 350's BC. By year 1 it was going strong.
The Union of Concerned Scientists had their Doomsday Clock that advanced and backed off of midnight depending on the level of political sanity being shown.
Has something like that been done for climate change? How bad the floods will be in some future date? A measurement of a major seaport being underwater?
Time is a complex subject and nothing can make it simple. Sure, if you deal with local time things can be simple, but step into international times or high-precision measurements and you get complex. While the proposal to end time zones keeps popping up across the decades I've been tracking time keeping, I suspect that those who really work with time can have nightmares over it.
Ignoring the inertia of an international timekeeping rule that has been in effect for over a century that was based on conventions going back millennium, any proposal involves revolts of both the masses and many techies who do the actual work. But ignoring all of that,
If you force everyone to have a work cycle consistent around the world you will get revolts as most people like to get up near dawn and got to bed at night.
If you let people get up at dawn after shifting the local dawn time numbers to a new standard you will still get revolts. Worse, you must now remember what the working hours are for each zone you contact as they are no longer 9-17 (yes, I support the 24-hour clock). Rather than simplifying your zone calculations you just added more work to the effort.
Moon colonization and space habitats can be different due to the local day being non-existent or way different from earths.
Yes... some companies claim everything you think of on a 24x7 for the duration. Others just claim what you worked on with company equipment or company time.
If you signed the later you need to be able to document that you wrote it on your own computers, on your own time, etc.
I keep work and personal computing strictly separated by the bright line of not working on personal stuff on company equipment, time, nor any service the company pays for. Nor do I work for long for the 24x7 companies unless an agreement is reached.
If and when I import personal stuff into company land pulling it from a public open source archive seems best to me. Better, make an agreement like alostpacket mentioned and have your boss pull it from the public archive. No questions on how it got into the company then.
Without a bright-line and documentation I fear you may be lost.
For anything complex I tend to use a real programming language, just to avoid the script problems with strange characters in file names.
Personally I favor avoid shell scripts unless I totally control the incoming (file) name arguments scripts see. Using scripts where users provide input has proven deadly too many times as spaces are just mild annoying problems compared when ', $, ", and other fun characters shells treat as metacharacters, even within double quotes, are in file names.
for i in *.txt; do ugly and certain bug if really sufficiently evil chars are in file names done
My rules for safe shell follow:
Always enclose variables in double quotes (doesn't work on some specials).
Corollary: understand the difference between "$*" and "$@".
When you can, always use options to end file names in "\0" rather than end-of-line.
Corollary: always write any real programs that accept or spit file names to
support -0 options of some form.
Always allow scripts to be driven by other scripts. 100 % keyboard input is not
good beyond throwaway scripts.
Use find to get file names rather than "*" or "?" wild cards.
KISS:
if it's easier to write in
another language, than use that language if at all possible.
I would rather customers and users be safe than shelled.
A few straight jazz notes:
case "$in_point" in
xyx*?) echo "You can actually use file name wild cards here";;
esac
function die () { echo 2>&1 "DIE: $*"; exit 1; } #Easy way to quit with message
Command || die "Oops: already nominated by someone else, but let me add die"
First && Second && echo "Chain commands to stop" || die "Any failure dies"trap ERR "x = $?; echo 'BYE BYE'; exit $x"; #aggressively find errors & keep $?
(Not neat visual jazz, but anything that helps me find problems quicker is
music to my ears, but don't use things like above "die" within trap).
Back in the bad old days when the 56KB shaping you are dropped down to was the top end, I did indeed use Lynx. But from a shell account at my ISP (surely at a university there's a Linux system you can log onto with ssh). Therefore the download to my system was only the opening screen... the remainder of the download went to my ISP host, which was high speed and at no charge. For most pages the first or second screen was enough to reject pages that were not going to do me any good.
I still sometimes use this trick to this day for other reasons. But I have to admit more and more pages are not friendly to anything but browsers with Javas and Flash enabled. And Web 2 stuff requires it. But,
May I put a plug in for the Viewable With Any Browser Campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ as I believed in that before I found the campaign.
And if you don't need fancy graphics or fonts in your E-mail, there is pine/alpine text based e-mail agents. Again, less hit on your bandwidth if you run them from a shell account.
Slashdot Mirror
4x10^84 works for me. But in all my years of programming, spreadsheets, and scientific calculator work, I've wondered why the simpler 4E84 exponential notation has not become more popular in text media.
Any thoughts?
Are there any /. readers out there that don't understand 4E84?
For decades I have been aware that companies keep hiring new developers fresh out of college that work hard, are productive in the lines of code they write, maybe meet deadlines, and keep making mistakes experienced workers gave up on decades ago. This year's budget doesn't care about expenses several years from now.
If I hadn't seen some prior driver code testing "not ready" twice in a row I may have never solved the problem for a driver I was working on.
if ( ! device_ready(device) && ! device_ready(device) ) throw xxx:not_ready("device not ready");
The difference between Roddenberry trying for serious science fiction with a better future and Lucas writing space opera. When Start Trek first came out I was to young to understand and grew deeper into it later. When Star Wars first came out my opinion was low-grade science fiction but fantastic, well crafted and executed, cinema. Looked at them differently while enjoying them both.
Use the force, Spock. Live long and prosper, Luke.
Before you can register you need to find an unused name. The best way I know of for searching for unused domain names is to use the V3hois "Domain List" service at http://www.v3whois.com/domain-list.
The beauty here is you see all similar registered names which allows you to spot unused names. Also the names you are search for are never on the Internet so domain-name squatters never get a hint of what you are searching for no matter how they monitor DNS look-ups.
While "rich kids toy'" gets the publicity and PR, NASA does suborbital flights and has looking for private launch firms to help there as well as orbital flights. To this end a few month's ago Forbes reported NASA awarded Virgin Galactic a suborbital contract.
A quick web search turned up the Suborbital Research Association, which is composed of people interested in the science side of suborbital flights.
No, Virgin Galactic flights are not just for rich playboys and playgirls. There is science waiting for the flights as well... science that may well private suborbital flights financially viable.
The ancient Greeks had mechanical devices, such as animated birds, water works, temple Gods, and more, as far back as the 350's BC. By year 1 it was going strong.
greekautomata is just one listing I found.
The Union of Concerned Scientists had their Doomsday Clock that advanced and backed off of midnight depending on the level of political sanity being shown. Has something like that been done for climate change? How bad the floods will be in some future date? A measurement of a major seaport being underwater?
Time is a complex subject and nothing can make it simple. Sure, if you deal with local time things can be simple, but step into international times or high-precision measurements and you get complex. While the proposal to end time zones keeps popping up across the decades I've been tracking time keeping, I suspect that those who really work with time can have nightmares over it.
Ignoring the inertia of an international timekeeping rule that has been in effect for over a century that was based on conventions going back millennium, any proposal involves revolts of both the masses and many techies who do the actual work. But ignoring all of that,
Moon colonization and space habitats can be different due to the local day being non-existent or way different from earths.
Yes... some companies claim everything you think of on a 24x7 for the duration. Others just claim what you worked on with company equipment or company time.
If you signed the later you need to be able to document that you wrote it on your own computers, on your own time, etc.
I keep work and personal computing strictly separated by the bright line of not working on personal stuff on company equipment, time, nor any service the company pays for. Nor do I work for long for the 24x7 companies unless an agreement is reached.
If and when I import personal stuff into company land pulling it from a public open source archive seems best to me. Better, make an agreement like alostpacket mentioned and have your boss pull it from the public archive. No questions on how it got into the company then.
Without a bright-line and documentation I fear you may be lost.
For anything complex I tend to use a real programming language, just to avoid the script problems with strange characters in file names.
Personally I favor avoid shell scripts unless I totally control the incoming (file) name arguments scripts see. Using scripts where users provide input has proven deadly too many times as spaces are just mild annoying problems compared when ', $, ", and other fun characters shells treat as metacharacters, even within double quotes, are in file names.
My rules for safe shell follow:
Corollary: understand the difference between "$*" and "$@".
Corollary: always write any real programs that accept or spit file names to support -0 options of some form.
A few straight jazz notes:
xyx*?) echo "You can actually use file name wild cards here";;
esac
(Not neat visual jazz, but anything that helps me find problems quicker is music to my ears, but don't use things like above "die" within trap).
Back in the bad old days when the 56KB shaping you are dropped down to was the top end, I did indeed use Lynx. But from a shell account at my ISP (surely at a university there's a Linux system you can log onto with ssh). Therefore the download to my system was only the opening screen... the remainder of the download went to my ISP host, which was high speed and at no charge. For most pages the first or second screen was enough to reject pages that were not going to do me any good.
I still sometimes use this trick to this day for other reasons. But I have to admit more and more pages are not friendly to anything but browsers with Javas and Flash enabled. And Web 2 stuff requires it. But,
May I put a plug in for the Viewable With Any Browser Campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/ as I believed in that before I found the campaign.
And if you don't need fancy graphics or fonts in your E-mail, there is pine/alpine text based e-mail agents. Again, less hit on your bandwidth if you run them from a shell account.