Going to vectorized formats instead of, or as a complement to, bitmaps has much more to offer than 'only' 3D graphics. You could have a 3D drawing of the space shuttle Atlantis, complete with measurements, part numbers, manufacturer data and results from the latest metallurgy test. You could zoom in and out of the drawing at will, with no jagged edges. Vectorized formats are not just pretty pixels, it can be a lot of data behind the scenes too.
This Claimer: I have worked part-time as a consultant for ZoomON, a producer of webified 3D Java-based software and purveyor of 3D file format converters. Lately, they have migrated towards vectorized content as a way to get lighter-weight graphics into mobile phones. They are cool dudes, check 'em out.
One of my pet back-burner projects is to get a red 10-liter jerrycan (you know the type that's stuck on the back of the jeeps in M.A.S.H., they're still fairly common both as 10 and 20 liter models) and stencil the Coca-Cola logo on it. Not to really keep drink in it, just as a display piece and an ironic comment on the three-liter bottles.
Hm, I'm getting a lof of pet back-burner projects stacked up, maybe it's time I actually got up and started some of them...
It just said "lawful authority", would it not at least be possible that an Australian court could recognize even the corrupt and substandard American legal system[1] as being a "lawful authority". It does not specify "lawful Australian authority only, mate".
So back off, pal.
I'm not saying that Australia didn't turn out real good - I just used that as an excuse to ship them off somewhere and Australia has a lot of outback - some of it has even already been used as a nuclear testing ground by the filthy Pommies[2]. I guess we could ship them to Greenland, but the inuits would probably be pissed.
That leaves the Arctic, the Sahara desert, Siberia and launching them in a degrading orbit around the Sun. The last is too expensive (I personally think it would be worth it) and if we poison the Polar Bears, Greenpeace will come after us with their impounded harpoons. The Sahara? Too many innocent nomadic tribes. Siberia it is, then. They have a long and distinguished record of being a penal colony for (in chronological order) the Russians, the Soviet Union and the Russians[3]. If we're lucky, we may be able to find an old camp still in working order (=no food, no heat, how difficult can it be?).
Oh and BTW, just for the record: I'm not an American imperia-/capitalist swine either[4].;-)
[1] Another torch! Feel the heat! [2] Turn it up, baby! [3] Striiiike three! [4] Off the scale!
Wouldn't the bill be considered lawful authority? If Australian law can be applied to US citizens, it's likely (though I ain't anal) that US law would apply to those same citizens.
Then again, Australia has a long and distinguished record of being a penal colony for the British, maybe it's time to reinstate that concept and ship RIAA and MPAA execs, all of Arthur Andersen, and all Fortune 500 CEOs to a remote part of the Aussie outback. We can even turn it into a spectator sport - Survivor 2.0 - broadcasting it live with free Internet feeds from ROVs orbiting the area. "Will Bill Gates eat Steve Ballmer? Tune in tomorrow on Survivor 2.0, same time, same server!"
The name BRU rang a bell, I seem to recall the backup engine under HDBackup in AmigaOS 2.x/3.x was called BRU - Backup and Recovery Utility or something like that. Any relation?
For some reason, the UoT's Zoo dept also churned out C News, the replacement for B News, later replaced by INN. There was a really good paper on the design and implementation (software design goals, profiling, performance issues and so on) of C News that taught me a lot about writing healthy code, but I have managed to forget most of it... *Google, Google* Ah, the name did ring a bell - that was Henry Spencer too, together with Geoff Collyer.
Now if only somebody could tell me why my +50 karma was replaced by "Karma: Excellent"
Mine too... I wonder what the new ranks may be; CmdrTaco, Excellent, Great, Good, Average, Below-Average, Loser, Whiner, Troll, goatse.cx and Bill Gates?:-)
If I choose to receive only spam, will my physical email box be free of physical bulkmail, then?
No, but you might get less. So far, only a few companies (AFAIK, they need to register with the Post Office) have gone for this, but it may be the same as with eInvoice (registered companies may send you an electronic invoice via your Internet bank for stuff like phone bills, utilities and insurances) that it will start to build up a momentum and then really take off as more and more senders as well as recipients get on the bandwagon. When everyone has gotten with the program, you can let birds nest in your mailbox.
Total contextual disconnection
Would this be called discontext or simply uncontextual?;-)
BTW, I see this as a strategic move for Posten - since they handle fewer and fewer paper mail messages each day and other carriers are competing with them for the package and parcel markets, they have recently closed a lot of their old post offices and are setting up shop in collaboration with gas stations, super markets and banks, separating the handling of "small" stuff like stamps and money (postal money orders, payments and so on) and "big" stuff like mail-order packages. This is just another step in that strategy - getting on the Internet train before the banks do it.
This is basically a way to downsize the mailman and replace him with sendmail.
do you feel that excessive testing hurts the development process at all?
Testing should always be a part of the development process. The wording here implies that testing somehow is considered to be outside the scope of development and I suspect this mindset is causing a lot of bugs to remain undetected.
It's just like documentation or support, those are also (or damned well should be) integral parts of the development process. Sometimes I think that most programmer's believe that the development process consists of the steps hack, compile, ship instead of the tedious iterative process of analyze, design, code, test.
So what, then, is excessive testing?
Well, as long as you find bugs doing it, it's not excessive.
If your projections predict a bug or two in a specific piece of code and your tests fail to find them, then testing (provided that the test method isn't flawed) gave you a much desired quality assessment of that piece of code - meaning that the testing still wasn't excessive.
Running the same tests over and over on the same code with the same data, now that's excessive, not to mention stupid.
The main difference is that geeks work apart from BOTH sexes. Hence the need for sexual release in the form of Tomb Raider (henceforth known as Tit Raper) and the resulting carpal tunnel syndrome. I mean hey, no one REALLY believes you get that from working a mouse, right?
Methinks it's the Cray SX-6 that's heating up the state. But if it isn't, they will have more problems keeping it cool as the ambient temperature rises - we really need to take this problem seriously!
I have installed Gentoo on a bunch of old boxen (P75-P166, 32-64MB, 1-3GB) to use as routing firewalls (throw in a few PCI NICs and they rock with iptables) and although a kernel compile takes forever and a day, you can easily do all that stuff on ANOTHER machine. My main workstation is an Athlon 1800+ with one of those removable IDE disk drive bays so when I need a new firewall I stick its drive into the workstation, boot the Gentoo CD, bootstrap and emerge what I need and then move the disk back to the P75 or whatever. Since you can tell Gentoo what CPU to compile for (i586) and what to stick in the kernel (iptables, NIC), it is not a problem to cross-install like this.
As an added bonus, the GRSecurity stuff is great and you just know that if you didn't do an emerge telnet, it's not going to be there, waiting to be exploited. The thing doesn't even have -traceroute- in the basic setup. I love it.:-)
And, the simplicity of the ebuild format (no need to re-package the entire program) makes new releases (close to 2000 supported programs last time I checked) show up much quicker here than in RPM format.
Yesterday, I installed it on my workstation (to stay, this time) and the last thing I did before leaving for home was 'emerge kde'. When I came in this morning, it was all done - not a problem.
Shortly before Microsoft bought out Sendit, I told everyone (company-wide meeting) that they could save their crap anywhere they wanted to, since a Real Man remember what he writes anyway. But I also pointed out that they would have to type everything back in on their own time. I then suggested using the new information structure on the fileserver as a good way to avoid having to work a few 28 hour days after I randomly opened and scratched their harddisks with my Leatherman tool (which I displayed).
It worked.:-)
(I also got the programmers to at least make some kind of effort in documentation after notifying them that failure to do so would make me come over with a baseball bat for a first offence. If they did it again, I'd come and sit on them. I'm fairly large.:-)
I can't argue with that, mostly since I never really tried it on those OSes (I kinda left *NIX Netscape at around 2.04) but the Win32 version of NS 4 was reasonably stable (with the inherent wobbliness of Windows accounted for, atleast I never used Win95/98/ME (I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid - I never inhale!)).
Wasn't a problem. I just DLed 1.1a, installed it and am using it now. It slurped all my old Netscape settings and it feels.. Snappier than N6.2. I just might stay with this one which is an Historical Event because I have been using Netscape since 0.98...
When I worked for TenFour (makers of TFS Gateway), I tried to insert a fair amount of levity in the manuals and user guides to make people remember the good advice (please enter your TFS post office in the cc:Mail settings or your e-mail will not be delivered, even if you put 40,000 volts through it) and entice them to read more of it. When the president of our US subsidiary happened to see this he went ballistic. I got a really serious talking-to from our Swedish prez and their argument was that is was 'not serious'. That I could prove that support incidents among new installs was way down since I introduced my little lame jokes didn't matter...
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This Claimer: I have worked part-time as a consultant for ZoomON, a producer of webified 3D Java-based software and purveyor of 3D file format converters. Lately, they have migrated towards vectorized content as a way to get lighter-weight graphics into mobile phones. They are cool dudes, check 'em out.
Is Open Source Communism? Discuss among yourselves. :-)
I betcha he'll name it I, Biblio.
Hm, I'm getting a lof of pet back-burner projects stacked up, maybe it's time I actually got up and started some of them...
So back off, pal.
I'm not saying that Australia didn't turn out real good - I just used that as an excuse to ship them off somewhere and Australia has a lot of outback - some of it has even already been used as a nuclear testing ground by the filthy Pommies[2]. I guess we could ship them to Greenland, but the inuits would probably be pissed.
That leaves the Arctic, the Sahara desert, Siberia and launching them in a degrading orbit around the Sun. The last is too expensive (I personally think it would be worth it) and if we poison the Polar Bears, Greenpeace will come after us with their impounded harpoons. The Sahara? Too many innocent nomadic tribes. Siberia it is, then. They have a long and distinguished record of being a penal colony for (in chronological order) the Russians, the Soviet Union and the Russians[3]. If we're lucky, we may be able to find an old camp still in working order (=no food, no heat, how difficult can it be?).
Oh and BTW, just for the record: I'm not an American imperia-/capitalist swine either[4]. ;-)
[1] Another torch! Feel the heat!
[2] Turn it up, baby!
[3] Striiiike three!
[4] Off the scale!
Wouldn't the bill be considered lawful authority? If Australian law can be applied to US citizens, it's likely (though I ain't anal) that US law would apply to those same citizens.
Then again, Australia has a long and distinguished record of being a penal colony for the British, maybe it's time to reinstate that concept and ship RIAA and MPAA execs, all of Arthur Andersen, and all Fortune 500 CEOs to a remote part of the Aussie outback. We can even turn it into a spectator sport - Survivor 2.0 - broadcasting it live with free Internet feeds from ROVs orbiting the area. "Will Bill Gates eat Steve Ballmer? Tune in tomorrow on Survivor 2.0, same time, same server!"
The name BRU rang a bell, I seem to recall the backup engine under HDBackup in AmigaOS 2.x/3.x was called BRU - Backup and Recovery Utility or something like that. Any relation?
For some reason, the UoT's Zoo dept also churned out C News, the replacement for B News, later replaced by INN. There was a really good paper on the design and implementation (software design goals, profiling, performance issues and so on) of C News that taught me a lot about writing healthy code, but I have managed to forget most of it... *Google, Google* Ah, the name did ring a bell - that was Henry Spencer too, together with Geoff Collyer.
That aside, I'd rather have an M5 anyday. :-)
Why isn't there a "-1 Lame joke" moderation? :-)
Mine too... I wonder what the new ranks may be; CmdrTaco, Excellent, Great, Good, Average, Below-Average, Loser, Whiner, Troll, goatse.cx and Bill Gates? :-)
Lots of dates with beautiful stars like that hot Vulcan chick in Star Trek:Enterprise. ;-)
No, but you might get less. So far, only a few companies (AFAIK, they need to register with the Post Office) have gone for this, but it may be the same as with eInvoice (registered companies may send you an electronic invoice via your Internet bank for stuff like phone bills, utilities and insurances) that it will start to build up a momentum and then really take off as more and more senders as well as recipients get on the bandwagon. When everyone has gotten with the program, you can let birds nest in your mailbox.
Total contextual disconnection
Would this be called discontext or simply uncontextual? ;-)
BTW, I see this as a strategic move for Posten - since they handle fewer and fewer paper mail messages each day and other carriers are competing with them for the package and parcel markets, they have recently closed a lot of their old post offices and are setting up shop in collaboration with gas stations, super markets and banks, separating the handling of "small" stuff like stamps and money (postal money orders, payments and so on) and "big" stuff like mail-order packages. This is just another step in that strategy - getting on the Internet train before the banks do it.
This is basically a way to downsize the mailman and replace him with sendmail.
Testing should always be a part of the development process. The wording here implies that testing somehow is considered to be outside the scope of development and I suspect this mindset is causing a lot of bugs to remain undetected.
It's just like documentation or support, those are also (or damned well should be) integral parts of the development process. Sometimes I think that most programmer's believe that the development process consists of the steps hack, compile, ship instead of the tedious iterative process of analyze, design, code, test.
So what, then, is excessive testing?
Well, as long as you find bugs doing it, it's not excessive.
If your projections predict a bug or two in a specific piece of code and your tests fail to find them, then testing (provided that the test method isn't flawed) gave you a much desired quality assessment of that piece of code - meaning that the testing still wasn't excessive.
Running the same tests over and over on the same code with the same data, now that's excessive, not to mention stupid.
Spank the monkey!
I'm partial to full-contact badminton and nude co-ed volleyball myself. :-)
Methinks it's the Cray SX-6 that's heating up the state. But if it isn't, they will have more problems keeping it cool as the ambient temperature rises - we really need to take this problem seriously!
As an added bonus, the GRSecurity stuff is great and you just know that if you didn't do an emerge telnet, it's not going to be there, waiting to be exploited. The thing doesn't even have -traceroute- in the basic setup. I love it. :-)
And, the simplicity of the ebuild format (no need to re-package the entire program) makes new releases (close to 2000 supported programs last time I checked) show up much quicker here than in RPM format.
Yesterday, I installed it on my workstation (to stay, this time) and the last thing I did before leaving for home was 'emerge kde'. When I came in this morning, it was all done - not a problem.
It worked. :-)
(I also got the programmers to at least make some kind of effort in documentation after notifying them that failure to do so would make me come over with a baseball bat for a first offence. If they did it again, I'd come and sit on them. I'm fairly large. :-)
I can't argue with that, mostly since I never really tried it on those OSes (I kinda left *NIX Netscape at around 2.04) but the Win32 version of NS 4 was reasonably stable (with the inherent wobbliness of Windows accounted for, atleast I never used Win95/98/ME (I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid - I never inhale!)).
It isn't like Netscape 6 is snappier than Netscape 4, now is it? But Mozilla sure seems to be.
Wasn't a problem. I just DLed 1.1a, installed it and am using it now. It slurped all my old Netscape settings and it feels.. Snappier than N6.2. I just might stay with this one which is an Historical Event because I have been using Netscape since 0.98...
-Oh, my goodness, is that the time? (Rik points at Mike's wristwatch)
-No, time is an abstract concept. This is a wristwatch.
But to be truly pedantic, you will have to distinguish between "What's the time?", "What's time?" and "Is it Miller time yet?". ;-)
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When I worked for TenFour (makers of TFS Gateway), I tried to insert a fair amount of levity in the manuals and user guides to make people remember the good advice (please enter your TFS post office in the cc:Mail settings or your e-mail will not be delivered, even if you put 40,000 volts through it) and entice them to read more of it. When the president of our US subsidiary happened to see this he went ballistic. I got a really serious talking-to from our Swedish prez and their argument was that is was 'not serious'. That I could prove that support incidents among new installs was way down since I introduced my little lame jokes didn't matter...