I'm afraid the travesty is all my own responsibility, no doubt due to a spelt.
KFG
Re:Sorry, I don't see what's so special
on
Cooking for Engineers
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
To understand the modern recipie you have understand it's history and just what it is it's trying to tell you.
The recipie as we know it comes to us from the French school of cooking. The French follow the practice of preparing all of the ingredients first and then applying process to them.
So the list of ingredients isn't simply a list, it's a list of things to do.
Chop some foo, put it in a bowl. Now take these spices, put them all in another bowl. Dice some bar, put it in a third bowl.
Now apply process 1 to bowl 1, etc.
It's perfectly concise and understandable once you understand the meta instructions.
Frankly I find those diagrams nearly unreadable and representative of what's wrong with most engineering manuals, but then I was raised by women.
I'm a much better cook than she is. That's ok, she's a much better welder. These are modern times. I make the Pad Thai, she makes the locomotives. It works for us.
I read recipies, but I don't "follow" them. I read them to get ideas, just as I use engineering manuals to get ideas, not find solutions. The books never have the questions I'm working on in them. When we ride on trains she'd be happier knowing I had designed it, I'd be happier knowing she'd built it. We don't ride trains much. We know too much.
The trick is to learn your ingredients and processes, then whatever you happen to have in the house (and/or lawn. Dandelions, purslane, violets, clover, day lilies, chicory, all wonderful foodstuffs) becomes your "recipie."
Recipies are great for the beginner or casual cook, but the idea really is to go beyond them, to use them as lab practicums to understand what you're doing and why.
Recipies are rarely presented this way though. Read James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. It's full of recipies, but they're all there to illustrate a point, much as a good engineering manual.
. ..anybody who signs up is a sure bet for a Darwin award.
My children are already old enough to breed themselves.
One of the advantages to growing old is the discharge of your social and genetic responsibilities, leaving you in a state where you can do any damned fool thing you want. My early expiration could, in fact, be viewed as a social boon, as I'm not quite old enough yet to begin drawing on age based entitlements.
Your joke is valid though. Once upon a time, Brian Redman got a call from Porsche asking him if he'd like to do some testing on their new car, the 917. Brian says the very first thing that ran through his mind was (my paraphrase), "Wait a minute. Porsche has a stable of the best test drivers in the business. If they're soliciting outside volunteers there's something seriously amiss with the car and they know it."
And the car did, in fact, develop a reputation as a man killer before it was tamed. It went 40 mph faster than any other car, but was aerodynamically unstable. Not a good combo.
Oh yeah, Brian took the ride, of course, and the rest is racing history. He helped tame it and didn't die much.
Not everyone considers the maximum extension of their life as the greatest achievment they can make. We're all going to die someday, like it or not, and I think there is validity in choosing a good day to die.
God rest Christa. You died "prematurely," but you died doing something that gave you a reason to live, which is more than can ever be said about most people.
Parallels are like vampires, they have no power unless you. ..
Oh, sorry. I live in an old colonial neighborhood and it's been dark and drizzly for days now. It starts to get to you after awhile and the theme to "Dark Shadows" is starting to run through my head every time I leave the house.
It's kinda like vampires. They have no power unless you invite them in, but once you do invite them in keeping them out of your bedroom might prove problematic.
And a network connection is inherently a form of invite.
Vampires are rather crafty as well and are very adept at tricking you into inviting them in without your even knowing they're vampires. ..until you're trapped in your bedroom, waiting, in fear, as the mist seeps under the door crack, suddenly realizing that that expensive deadbolt lock and 4x6 bar were installed in vain against the creatures of the night.
The Venus Flytrap does not use its flowers to attract prey, but just as most other flowering plants do to attract pollinators. That's why the Venus Flytrap flowers on the end of a long stalk, to prevent pollinators from being accidentally trapped and "eaten."
Pitcher plants are another story and they can stink quite revoltingly.
A radio, I'll give you. There could be some real benefit from that.
It comes with the lightbulb.
As for light at night, candles and oil lamps have been used for longer than lightbulbs have been around.
Ironically, here in the first world, within sight of where the first carbon filiment lightbulb was made and where until a few years ago 90% of the entire worlds electrical generators were made I rely on oil lamps, but back them up with lightbulbs.
They suck compared to lightbulbs
No they don't. They have certain advantages, but do have certain disadvantages. Fire risk is one of them, especially if you have children around the house. Mine had grown up and left.
would you rather provide for your children's future or would you rather have a lightbulb to see at night when you:
Why do you think I want the lightbulb?
1. Already have the means.
Third world does not in any imply you don't have the means, but even if you have the means first you may well need the infrastructure.
2. Have no real pressing need to see at night.
How about reading to your kids and helping them with their schoolwork, in a low fire risk enviroment?
What the fsck good is a lightbulb if you are still stuck in the third world?
Being able to see at night and plug a radio into the socket included in the light fixture, just like in the rest of the world.
Third world doesn't mean stone age, unless, of course, you don't have a lightbulb. It's the lightbulb that makes the difference.
I've lived in the third world in houses without and without lightbulbs and with and without indoor plumbing. The inclusion of a lightbulb is a far more desirable advancment than indoor plumbing.
As a corollary: Wouldn't this rather boost private satellite imaging if news stations were forced to gather their own images instead of just copying whatever the U.S. government has on file?
It might, although the affect there might be limited. You have to look at the function of this change to the act. What and whom does it protect?
The government, of course, is going to spin it as necessary to maintain security in pursuing the war on terrorism. Even just a couple minutes of thought can peirce that bullshit. The Freedom of Information Act already has enough wiggle room to delay releasing documents for years. If they're really uptight about stuff they can make the submiter sue for the information, delaying release a decade or more, by which time the documents will no longer have any relevance to ongoing operations.
No, this change to the act is to protect our own government and its members from public censure.
You won't be able to go back to the record and show the pictures that the goverment was looking at when they said they had proof of WMD in Iraq and similar cases, nor will you be able to rely on such sources to show where our own government actually had troops and facilities (perhaps contrary to their claims) at a given time.
Of course this only applies to documents that the government has in its files. It will certainly continue to release the images to the press that it wishes the press to publish, and the majority of the press will simply eat it up and publish as expected. No new source necessary.
So it becomes an issue of finding enough Daniel Ellsbergs, who, under current law, could simply be given a free vacation in Cuba for suspicion of aiding and abetting terrorist activities.
It only seems to apply to images the government buys.
Since the Freedom of Information Act only applies to the government, one would think.
If a company puts up a satellite that takes pictures and they dont sell the images to the govt, how would it affect them? I dont think it would.
It wouldn't. In fact, such would be unconstitutional prior restraint, which the Freedom of Information Act has no power to effect, as per above.
This is only about what information a citizen has a right to obtain directly from the government, not censorship of what information he might obtain from some other source.
No, not really. What he did was point out Slashdot comments that were personal and noted that these represented the majority.
Sometimes I too find myself getting tired of explaining the difference between "You're stupid" and "Your idea is stupid" just to try to have a meaningful exchange. It's particularly bothersome when the other person is in a position where knowledge of that difference legitimately ought to be assumed.
2. He treats Slashdot comments as well-thought responses to his articles. For Pete's sake come on! This is the place where professionals, interested parties, and random wannabes can foam at the mouth and say the first thing that comes to mind.
Not really. In fact what he does is point out that they aren't, even where the person posting purports to be a professional, even after making a concerted effort to find such in response to someone else making the claim that well thought out responses could be found here.
Why not just run in console mode? All this GUI stuff is just getting in the way of absolute performance.
Although this is a KDE related project the concept itself has nothing to do with whether you use a GUI or not and the performance hit comes at the level of the DB, not the GUI.
As for shifting the burden to the computer it doesn't really do much of that either as a human mind still has to formulate and input the query terms as well as judge the validity of the query result.
The DB as filesystem has a lot of merit, but really only in those situations where you have a massive number of files distributed across many systems. Take Google and the internet for example.
Now imagine having to google your local system to find every damned file.
Now, maybe I'm just different, but I've got 45,000 files spread across 1300 directories in my Home directory, and I can find any one of these by navigation in under your hypothetical 20 seconds saved, but then I'm the sort of person who sorts his laundry by placing it in seperate hampers in the first place instead of later spreading it across the basement floor and sorting it out. I know exactly where all my dirty whites are up front.
And the latter sort of person isn't likely to do a very good job of entering the metadata necessary to make a DB based filesystem work well anyway. The brain is a wonderful DB in and of itself and knows the "meaning" of things as well. I already know what 14t.jpg is all about. I'd have to tell my DB what it means.
Sure, let the computer do the work that it's better at, like recalculating spreadsheets or finding redheads with big ones on the web, but that doesn't replace the brain.
I already know which redheads have big ones on my local system and where to find them no matter what the file is named and the computer can't find all of the redheads with big ones on the web unless they all have the proper metadata attached to them. Some file out there somewhere named 1038754875747.jpg is just as anonymous to the computer as it is to you.
If a company wants to make that special effort, wants to go that extra mile, just to PISS ME OFF, thats fine. Let them waste their money.
To this day I will not buy Wisk.
If you really want to do something about it, write to the company (and the ad agency they use) and let them know that you will be buying the product of a competitor who uses less intrusive, annoying advertising.
Wisk "ring around the collar" ads garnered more negative mail than probably any other advertising camapaign in history.
This pained the makers who were actually distressed at pissing off so many potential customers, but. . . the campaign was also the most successful at driving sales of Wisk that they had ever run.
If you have a 10% market share and an ad pisses of half the population so badly that they'll never buy your product, ever, but you jump to a 50% market share, well, I'm afraid the bean counters count that as a win.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid the travesty is all my own responsibility, no doubt due to a spelt.
KFG
To understand the modern recipie you have understand it's history and just what it is it's trying to tell you.
The recipie as we know it comes to us from the French school of cooking. The French follow the practice of preparing all of the ingredients first and then applying process to them.
So the list of ingredients isn't simply a list, it's a list of things to do.
Chop some foo, put it in a bowl. Now take these spices, put them all in another bowl. Dice some bar, put it in a third bowl.
Now apply process 1 to bowl 1, etc.
It's perfectly concise and understandable once you understand the meta instructions.
Frankly I find those diagrams nearly unreadable and representative of what's wrong with most engineering manuals, but then I was raised by women.
KFG
13. Goto bathroom
14. Goto 1
KFG
3. Do whatever she says.
Mine always says, "Feed me."
I'm a much better cook than she is. That's ok, she's a much better welder. These are modern times. I make the Pad Thai, she makes the locomotives. It works for us.
I read recipies, but I don't "follow" them. I read them to get ideas, just as I use engineering manuals to get ideas, not find solutions. The books never have the questions I'm working on in them. When we ride on trains she'd be happier knowing I had designed it, I'd be happier knowing she'd built it. We don't ride trains much. We know too much.
The trick is to learn your ingredients and processes, then whatever you happen to have in the house (and/or lawn. Dandelions, purslane, violets, clover, day lilies, chicory, all wonderful foodstuffs) becomes your "recipie."
Recipies are great for the beginner or casual cook, but the idea really is to go beyond them, to use them as lab practicums to understand what you're doing and why.
Recipies are rarely presented this way though. Read James Beard's Theory and Practice of Good Cooking. It's full of recipies, but they're all there to illustrate a point, much as a good engineering manual.
KFG
. . . who is Christa?
Christa McAuliffe Bio
KFG
Damn, you've just given me ideas. I hate when that happens. I think I'll name my craft the "Wile E.".
Film at 11. Don't let the kids see it. It won't be pretty; and it might give them ideas.
KFG
. . .anybody who signs up is a sure bet for a Darwin award.
My children are already old enough to breed themselves.
One of the advantages to growing old is the discharge of your social and genetic responsibilities, leaving you in a state where you can do any damned fool thing you want. My early expiration could, in fact, be viewed as a social boon, as I'm not quite old enough yet to begin drawing on age based entitlements.
Your joke is valid though. Once upon a time, Brian Redman got a call from Porsche asking him if he'd like to do some testing on their new car, the 917. Brian says the very first thing that ran through his mind was (my paraphrase), "Wait a minute. Porsche has a stable of the best test drivers in the business. If they're soliciting outside volunteers there's something seriously amiss with the car and they know it."
And the car did, in fact, develop a reputation as a man killer before it was tamed. It went 40 mph faster than any other car, but was aerodynamically unstable. Not a good combo.
Oh yeah, Brian took the ride, of course, and the rest is racing history. He helped tame it and didn't die much.
Not everyone considers the maximum extension of their life as the greatest achievment they can make. We're all going to die someday, like it or not, and I think there is validity in choosing a good day to die.
God rest Christa. You died "prematurely," but you died doing something that gave you a reason to live, which is more than can ever be said about most people.
KFG
Parallels are like vampires, they have no power unless you. . .
Oh, sorry. I live in an old colonial neighborhood and it's been dark and drizzly for days now. It starts to get to you after awhile and the theme to "Dark Shadows" is starting to run through my head every time I leave the house.
KFG
I'm surprised this family is still around and in power, am I missing something as to how great they are or something?
It's kinda like vampires. They have no power until you elect them in, but once you do elect them in it can be problematic to keep them out of office.
KFG
TV watches you.
KFG
It's kinda like vampires. They have no power unless you invite them in, but once you do invite them in keeping them out of your bedroom might prove problematic.
.until you're trapped in your bedroom, waiting, in fear, as the mist seeps under the door crack, suddenly realizing that that expensive deadbolt lock and 4x6 bar were installed in vain against the creatures of the night.
And a network connection is inherently a form of invite.
Vampires are rather crafty as well and are very adept at tricking you into inviting them in without your even knowing they're vampires. .
KFG
The Venus Flytrap does not use its flowers to attract prey, but just as most other flowering plants do to attract pollinators. That's why the Venus Flytrap flowers on the end of a long stalk, to prevent pollinators from being accidentally trapped and "eaten."
Pitcher plants are another story and they can stink quite revoltingly.
KFG
A radio, I'll give you. There could be some real benefit from that.
It comes with the lightbulb.
As for light at night, candles and oil lamps have been used for longer than lightbulbs have been around.
Ironically, here in the first world, within sight of where the first carbon filiment lightbulb was made and where until a few years ago 90% of the entire worlds electrical generators were made I rely on oil lamps, but back them up with lightbulbs.
They suck compared to lightbulbs
No they don't. They have certain advantages, but do have certain disadvantages. Fire risk is one of them, especially if you have children around the house. Mine had grown up and left.
would you rather provide for your children's future or would you rather have a lightbulb to see at night when you:
Why do you think I want the lightbulb?
1. Already have the means.
Third world does not in any imply you don't have the means, but even if you have the means first you may well need the infrastructure.
2. Have no real pressing need to see at night.
How about reading to your kids and helping them with their schoolwork, in a low fire risk enviroment?
KFG
What the fsck good is a lightbulb if you are still stuck in the third world?
Being able to see at night and plug a radio into the socket included in the light fixture, just like in the rest of the world.
Third world doesn't mean stone age, unless, of course, you don't have a lightbulb. It's the lightbulb that makes the difference.
I've lived in the third world in houses without and without lightbulbs and with and without indoor plumbing. The inclusion of a lightbulb is a far more desirable advancment than indoor plumbing.
KFG
Why are you trying to bash Microsoft just because they decided to delay or abandon something?
For exactly the same reason we bash the GNU HURD.
KFG
The answer is flowers!
.shit and rotting meat.
Indeed. That may, in fact, be the very inspiration for this device, as flowers that attract flies and digest them smell like. .
Go figure.
KFG
Obviously, to fill that capacity you'll need one of these.
.saturated in gin.
Got one. Hey, it was only 5 bucks as a previously viewed VHS.
I like my women how I like my breakfast cereal:
Oddly enough given the joke, so do I. .
KFG
Apple, we don't yet have an established opinion on.
Ooooooooooooooo, Shiny!
KFG
The story was covered in slashdot, but I can't find a link.
See how well they hide?
KFG
As a corollary: Wouldn't this rather boost private satellite imaging if news stations were forced to gather their own images instead of just copying whatever the U.S. government has on file?
It might, although the affect there might be limited. You have to look at the function of this change to the act. What and whom does it protect?
The government, of course, is going to spin it as necessary to maintain security in pursuing the war on terrorism. Even just a couple minutes of thought can peirce that bullshit. The Freedom of Information Act already has enough wiggle room to delay releasing documents for years. If they're really uptight about stuff they can make the submiter sue for the information, delaying release a decade or more, by which time the documents will no longer have any relevance to ongoing operations.
No, this change to the act is to protect our own government and its members from public censure.
You won't be able to go back to the record and show the pictures that the goverment was looking at when they said they had proof of WMD in Iraq and similar cases, nor will you be able to rely on such sources to show where our own government actually had troops and facilities (perhaps contrary to their claims) at a given time.
Of course this only applies to documents that the government has in its files. It will certainly continue to release the images to the press that it wishes the press to publish, and the majority of the press will simply eat it up and publish as expected. No new source necessary.
So it becomes an issue of finding enough Daniel Ellsbergs, who, under current law, could simply be given a free vacation in Cuba for suspicion of aiding and abetting terrorist activities.
KFG
It only seems to apply to images the government buys.
Since the Freedom of Information Act only applies to the government, one would think.
If a company puts up a satellite that takes pictures and they dont sell the images to the govt, how would it affect them? I dont think it would.
It wouldn't. In fact, such would be unconstitutional prior restraint, which the Freedom of Information Act has no power to effect, as per above.
This is only about what information a citizen has a right to obtain directly from the government, not censorship of what information he might obtain from some other source.
KFG
KFG
1. He took Slashdot comments personally.
No, not really. What he did was point out Slashdot comments that were personal and noted that these represented the majority.
Sometimes I too find myself getting tired of explaining the difference between "You're stupid" and "Your idea is stupid" just to try to have a meaningful exchange. It's particularly bothersome when the other person is in a position where knowledge of that difference legitimately ought to be assumed.
2. He treats Slashdot comments as well-thought responses to his articles. For Pete's sake come on! This is the place where professionals, interested parties, and random wannabes can foam at the mouth and say the first thing that comes to mind.
Not really. In fact what he does is point out that they aren't, even where the person posting purports to be a professional, even after making a concerted effort to find such in response to someone else making the claim that well thought out responses could be found here.
KFG
Why not just run in console mode? All this GUI stuff is just getting in the way of absolute performance.
Although this is a KDE related project the concept itself has nothing to do with whether you use a GUI or not and the performance hit comes at the level of the DB, not the GUI.
As for shifting the burden to the computer it doesn't really do much of that either as a human mind still has to formulate and input the query terms as well as judge the validity of the query result.
The DB as filesystem has a lot of merit, but really only in those situations where you have a massive number of files distributed across many systems. Take Google and the internet for example.
Now imagine having to google your local system to find every damned file.
Now, maybe I'm just different, but I've got 45,000 files spread across 1300 directories in my Home directory, and I can find any one of these by navigation in under your hypothetical 20 seconds saved, but then I'm the sort of person who sorts his laundry by placing it in seperate hampers in the first place instead of later spreading it across the basement floor and sorting it out. I know exactly where all my dirty whites are up front.
And the latter sort of person isn't likely to do a very good job of entering the metadata necessary to make a DB based filesystem work well anyway. The brain is a wonderful DB in and of itself and knows the "meaning" of things as well. I already know what 14t.jpg is all about. I'd have to tell my DB what it means.
Sure, let the computer do the work that it's better at, like recalculating spreadsheets or finding redheads with big ones on the web, but that doesn't replace the brain.
I already know which redheads have big ones on my local system and where to find them no matter what the file is named and the computer can't find all of the redheads with big ones on the web unless they all have the proper metadata attached to them. Some file out there somewhere named 1038754875747.jpg is just as anonymous to the computer as it is to you.
KFG
No. The stock price of a company is based on what people are willing to pay for it.
KFG
If a company wants to make that special effort, wants to go that extra mile, just to PISS ME OFF, thats fine. Let them waste their money.
To this day I will not buy Wisk.
If you really want to do something about it, write to the company (and the ad agency they use) and let them know that you will be buying the product of a competitor who uses less intrusive, annoying advertising.
Wisk "ring around the collar" ads garnered more negative mail than probably any other advertising camapaign in history.
This pained the makers who were actually distressed at pissing off so many potential customers, but. . . the campaign was also the most successful at driving sales of Wisk that they had ever run.
If you have a 10% market share and an ad pisses of half the population so badly that they'll never buy your product, ever, but you jump to a 50% market share, well, I'm afraid the bean counters count that as a win.
KFG