When I was young, we didn't even have colleges. We just had a bit of
space in the back of an ironmonger's yard. That was hardware!
We had to get two old filing cabinets, and file the ends off them so we
could put them together to make a 19 inch wide cabinet. The get a load of
old wire and wind our own bobbins to make the power supply!
There were no ventilators, so we had to make one by fitting old desk fan
blades to a treadmill we cobbled together out of chicken-wire. To power it,
we caught a rat and a cat, and put one chasing the other in the treadmill.
We wrote the SysAdmin manual on old brown-paper bags, but Urban Studies kept
stealing them to put at the bottom of a lake.
In France, political parties cannot be funded by corporations.
They are not openly funded by corporations.
Try to catch up on recent politico-financial scandals over here; under-the-table, back-handers, Paris City Council RPR officials taking 1/2 million Francs in used notes (bills, in YankSpeak).
Oh, until recently, a large corporation could contribute to a party; i.e. set up several small subsidiaries, and get each subsidiary to give the maximum limit (I forget how much).
By the same logic, there should be a very high tax on cars capable of travelling at very high speeds.
If you buy a car capable of 140mph (224kph), you are doing so in order to be able to break the highest speed limit of 81mph (130kph).
You should therefore be made to pay a tax on the "excess capability", i.e., the difference between the car's top speed and the speed limit, this being 39mph (94kph). Let's say 1000Euros per kph excess, that makes 94000Euros.
Hmm...
I am outraged by this stupid governmental meddling!
I live in France, and I am very annoyed et the thought of being burdened
with this ridiculous tax.
I have a fair-sized CD collection, all of them originals, and I convert
them to MP3 format so I can listen to tracks in any order, without having to
change discs. I consider this to be my moral and legal right.
I will not pay
a tax levied on hard drives. I make regular trips to the UK, I'll be going
to the US in march, perhaps to Signapore next year. If the government decides
to levy a tax on ordinary hard drives, I'll buy one overseas.
I'll just buy one out of principal.
I don't even have to make a long trip... Paris to London in 3 hours by train.
Belgium, Luxemburg, Spain (Andorra!) are within reach... The Channel Islands: part of
the United Kingdom, but not part of the European Union... Those of us who have the
opportunity, and are willing to make the effort, can get round this ridiculous tax.
The same goes for CD-Roms; if I buy a digital camera,
I'll want to store the pictures somewhere, so I'll buy my blank CDs overseas, too.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a 35mm film developed, and I had the Kodak lab
digitize the negatives and write the images to a CD. Will that be subject to
this stupid tax, too? If Kodak has to stump up a 2F per disc tax, +19.6% VAT
(sales tax) that makes about 2F40; I'll bet Kodak will pass on about a 5F surcharge,
and blame the government.
I've seen an enormous number of references to blackouts and brownouts over the last few years while reading Linux UPS docs and Slashdot... and it makes me really wonder what's going on over in our former colonies that Mad George lost;-)...
The only time I've ever saw blackouts in the United Kingdom is when
there were strikes in the 1970s
heavy snow brings down power lines
So far, I think I've experienced a power-cut about three times while living in England, and twice in France.
Both times in France, it was due to storms:
once when the underground cables in Paris got flooded
once out in the forest when trees were blown over, pulling down cable
It seems to me that the Californian problem is quite simple, really. A combination of:
badly-conceived legislation that has distorted a shoddily de-regulated market
too many people trying to run too many appliances
How about a two-fold solution:
full review of the legislation to fix the distortions in the market
heavy tax on air-conditioning units
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
tee hee... I wonder that nobody posted this already!
I have a currently very small cluster of these Brain things.
The two main nodes are: Me and Wife. Then there's a third node called Son.
Me and Wife are well trained and can handle all that needs to be done.
Son is still learning. In fact, he's been learning for six months,
and he knows very little. He can visually and aurally recognize Me and Wife,
and he can signal that fact in a way that Me and Wife can interpret.
However, Son cannot yet manage light switches! Bizarre! So called hard
tasks like visual recognition are a doddle, but simple binary states like
switching a light on or off are still beyond him.
Tram systems, more correctly light railways, have been in use in Sheffield and Manchester (both in UK) for about five years (IIRR).
Grenoble (France) has had a network longer (it was the inspiration for the two UK cities cited). St Denis (Paris satellite town) got one line recently, I believe
If there's a world language of choice, it's Chinese and certainly not English.
Quel chargement de couilles;-)
Erm, what I mean is, what utter rubbish! The fact that 20% of the world's population speaks a collection of dialects that are not entirely mutually intelligible does not mean that Chinese is the "world language of choice"!
You seem to confuse choice ("the world chooses to speak Chinese" according to you) with accident!
I was born in England (Olde Englande, if you like). I was brought up to speak English (both standard and regional dialect). I did not choose this; it was an accident of birth. Along the way, through TV and cinema, I picked up OzSpeak, YankSpeak (essentially very simplified, de-formalised English with a bit of extra vocabulary of Dutch, German, Yiddish, Spanish origin).
Now, I speak French, Russian, a bit of German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian... That is choice! (No, in all modesty it's not really all that difficult, either).
I am English, living in Paris (France) and have been working for a French company for the last four years.
Our activities span the globe, and we have employees from a great many countries.
The most represented languages (roughly in order of numbers of mother-tongue speakers):
French
English
Arabic
Norwegian
Russian
Spanish
Dutch
Albanian>
German
Italian
Greek
My wife (French) works in another company with a smaller geographical and linguistic spread (mostly English, French, German).
In our work, most people have at least a working knowledge of English, but almost all the non-French nationals can speak French reasonably well. Most meetings are therefore in French, unless there are people present who speak little or no French (e.g., when Americans come over to Europe, Brits come over to the Continent) and then we all speak English.
I personally speak French almost all the time. In fact, the only times I speak English is with one English colleague and with my English family. But then, I made a conscious decision to learn French before moving to France and before getting a job. I wan't transferred here by my employer, and I don't particularly feel the need for a cosy ex-patriot `bubble'.
I suspect that some of the French people in this Silicon Valley company are trying to create for themselves a little corner of France, perhaps even unconsciously... this is a dangerous thing both for themselves and for the company.
By isolating yourself from the leitkultur, you miss out on everything you could gain from it. By isolating yourself from you colleagues, you reduce your productivity.
By all means, you should make the effort to improve your French. It is not a particularly difficult language (although the pronunciation has a few difficulties for the anglophone beginner). But if the problem is the narrow-minded ex-pat culture that sometimes pops up, then I don't really see the point. At best, you'll learn a new language and be accepted into the group as an Honorary Frog. At worst, you'll be seen as someone who wants to gatecrash the party.
Re:Thought Crime and Neural Networks
on
New Crypto-OS
·
· Score: 1
Anyway, crime is in the doing, not the thinking.
Ever heard of the crime of "Conspiracy to..."
You can be charged with planning to rob/murder/smuggle even if you're caught before you get round to doing it... of course, the police usually let you go ahead and start the robbery or murder attempt, since it's easier to prove in court if they can catch you red-handed.
Then there's the old "Going equipped..."
The police find you walking down the road wearing gloves, carrying a bag containing a crow-bar, you can be charged with "going equipped to commit burglary".
So if we're not careful, soon Mr. Police Officer might be able to knock on your door, say "Hello, hello, hello, what have we here... do you happen to have a modem, a computer, hand a haccess to the hinternet?"
"Yes orifice, er, I mean ossifer."
"The hay ham harresting you for going hequipped to distribute dirty pictures hand bomb-making recipes hon the web!"
Dead right! Give the punters the impression that their voices are being heard, even if nobody taking the decisions pays any attention...
By asking the right questions in the right way, you can get your punters to justify your policies, whatever they may be. Anybody remember `Yes, Prime Minister'?
Microsoft wants to stop bug reports, because they embarras the company, and I believe that Microsoft top brass doesn't really give a monkey's if you, I or some other poor consumer loses all his data through a security hole.
Ford/Brigestone/AnyCompany regrets having to post recall notices, but realises that it is better to look a bit stupid rather than risk the deaths of consumers and almost certain litigation.
Of course, I personally am very unlikely to lose any data through a Microsoft security hole. At home, I use only Linux, and at work I use a mix of SunOS, Irix and AIX... Colleagues using WinNT who were stupid enough to click on the LoveBug VirusBuilderScript may have lost some stuff, but then learning is often a painful experience for children.
You fall, you get a bruise, you learn to look what you're doing and you fall less often.
I didn't see the Olympic games ceremonies... in fact I don't have a TV set. Did these Airboard things really work?
I took a look at the web site, and the pictures look heavily re-touched. And the technical specs page is a real let-down!
Top speed of around 25km/h is not bad compared to an aluminium scooter, but the other stuff makes it a laughable kid's toy!
Limited to an incline of 5% (a 1 in 20 slope) and limited to 100kg payload! I weigh about 90kg already! Add a stout pair of boots, packed lunch and fishing gear, and I'd be well over that limit.
And that disclaimer:
... Airboard Pty. ltd. does not warrant that the information currently accessible is either accurate or up-to-date.
Well, I have had similar ideas about charging a "processing fee"... but most of the crap I receive doesn't come from reputable companies like the publisher of the investment magazine seems to be.
Apart from that, young Kane ought to read up on HTML a bit more, and think about closing the table... the browser won't render the table rows and cells until it encounters the </table> tag.
There's a story about this, already... I think it's by Brian Aldiss.
It's not really a theme park, but a kind of zoo, where strains of bacteria and viruses are kept (as much out of curiosity as for scientific research) once the diseases they caused have been eradicated.
"Roll up, roll up, see the worlds only remaining [smallpox,influenza,AIDS] virus!!
So, this little bacterium was sitting in a brine pocket inside a salt crystal.
It was pickled! Anyway, this makes me think back to my holiday in Chile,
when I visited the Atacama desert and went to see a salt mine. We humans have been
digging salt out of the earth for millenia. We may well have already set free countless
millions of bacteria that were sitting pickled like Bacillus permians... who knows?
A
project just as worthy as the Human Genome would be a Census Bacteriorum (forgive my
lain!) so that when scientists wash down and wake up one of these foundling bacteria,
its genetic material can be sequenced and compared to the Census database to see if has
siblings or close descendants still out there in the wild today.
Right, so you have 1024 bytes of RAM, but part of these are used for storing environment variables.
From (my chemical) memory, the ZX81 Memory map looks like this:
Decimal address 0 to 8191 ROM
Decimal address 8192 to 16383 Copy of ROM (this can be overlaid by a second add-on ROM)
Decimal addres 16384 upward is RAM.
Addresses 16384 to around 16515 (Im' guessing the figurse a bit now...) stored the environment. This means things like the lines at the bottom of the screen that are reserved for editing, the "protected lines". These don't get scrolled or cleared by a CLS command, so you can use them for stuff like status, background. Another address contains the number of TV lines before the picture starts. If you POKE a value into this address, you shift the whole display up (or down). I used this once for an earthquake effect, by vigourously drawing a skyscraper, shaking the screen, then drawing a pile of rubble (OK, I was 12 at the time).
So, you've really got less than 1024 bytes for your program and data! Oh, and the screen is memory mapped into that space, too! You had a choice, limit the amount of screen you used, or limit the size of your program. The screen works like this, each line is mapped as a series of characters, teminated by a newline character. If you never print to the screen, the screen memory stays fixed (perhaps at 1 character, a single newline). If you print
I AM AFRAID I AM GOING TO HAVE TO STOP THIS,
IT IS GETTING TOO SILLY
, you're going to gobble up 68 (if I've counted right) bytes of memory including the two newlines.
Now, the Basic keywords were part of the character set, so for example the keyword PRINT occupied only one byte. So you could economise by using these basic keywords to print text to the screen. For example, to prompt the user to type a number, you could use the keyword INPUT (1 byte) rather than ENTER (5 bytes, including the space). Big saving.
More memory could be saved by doing numerical operations on the values of strings, rather than on numbers themselves... doing (the value of letter "A" plus the value of letter "B") took up far, far fewer bytes that (64+65).
Then if you programmed directly in machine code, you could do wonderfule things... Two lads from Hull (U.K.) set up a firm called Artic; they managed to cram a game of chess into 1kB!!!!
We used to use these things at school, too. An I/O card plugged into the expansion bus, a few relays, and we could play around making traffic light systems, reading temperatures and light levels, turning on pumps to sprinkle water on the plants...
Those were the days! All you need is a bit of imagination. Oh, and it was small and ran silently, no annoyingly noisy fans and hard drives....
It ran from a 9Volt transformer, too. 700mAmps, I think. You might be able to run it off a PP3 battery...
Yes, after reading the Death Ray hoax, and the XFree86 HowTo, I dreamed up the idea of a virus that would
print something dead small in the centre of the screen so the user puts his head about 1cm from the screen,
modify the XF86Config file and drive the monitor at such a crazy frequency that it would explode.
I thought about this for so long and so hard, that the idea must be kind of out there in the noossphere now, in the world of objective contents of thoughts...
Then, when your fridge and microwave are on the Internet (IPv6, of course), I've got another one...
the virus looks in your Outlook diary, to find out when you're going away for three weeks,
the day before you leave, it order lots of pork and chicken products to be delivered to your place,
it hacks your fridge, leaving the temperature at 22C for three days, and disables the sensor that smells when food is going bad,
it starts your Kitchen Wizard, so when you get back it suggests a microwaved dish based on those MIR-Space-Fungus-Infested pork and chicken bits (just to reassure you, Kitchen Wizard tells you to cook at full power in the microwave for thirty minutes!),
it connects to your microwave, so as to cook at only "defrost" setting for about ten minutes, then it keeps you busy at your computer screen so you don't know what's going on in the kitchen.
And the recipe has so much tobasco and what-have-you, that you'll not know whether it's been cooked to a cinder or if it's still raw. In any case, it's teeming with life, and you've just been killed by a computer virus, poisoned by the Internet....
Oh, won't the future be wonderful with Outlook and IPv6 controlling you groceries...
Job adverts are often written by people who have absolutely no IT
knowledge whatsoever. In fact, the bar is set so high, that Sergei Bubka
couldn't reach it. Here in France, I regularly see job ads for the post of
"webmaster" that read along the lines of:
Wanted, Webmaster, 20-26 years old, arts graduate (preferably graphic design),
must know Photoshop and Illustrator, Flash, JavaScript and Java, C/C++,
VisualAge, Visual J++, Oracle,
VisualBasic, FrontPage and Excel. At least three years experience in a similar position.
Fluent English (Spanish and German a plus). Handwritten CV and covering letter to...
How much do you expect? Well, you'll be offered the equivalent of US$1500 per month for that.
How do these ads get written? My guess is that somebody in the company says "we need a webmaster,
get me one". The draft advert starts off like "Wanted, Webmaster"; first criterion is "must
be cheap", that explains the 20-26 age limit (that, and the fact that some suits think that the kids
love the web so much, they'll do the job just for the fun of it). Then the drafting of the ad
becomes the work of a committee (who first said "a camel is a horse designed by
a committee?)...
The committee needs to draw up the Ideal Candidate Profile or ICP [TM].
So, Web is all about having a smart-looking shop window for the company. OK, so we need a
graphic designer. Tools of the trade, photoshop, illustrator and flash. So far so good. But
somebody on the committee has heard that JavaScript add life to web pages, so that gets added
to the ICP. Right, JavaScript, that goes hand in hand with Java, right? Someone on the committee
remembers that the first chapter in Teach yourself Java in your lunchBreak and earn.bigMoney
is "How Java is like C++". So, let's add C++ to the list. Oh, and C for good measure.
Wow, the committee has just discovered that a WebMaster needs to be a programmer! So, let's
just add a random assortment of programmer-like requirements, just to be sure.
In case you haven't guessed already, recruitment is based on data extracted from the CV and analysed by the well-respected sciences of Graphology, Astrology and Numerology...
Whenever I see ad an like that, I just think, "bunch of clowns", and leave it at that. Occasionally, I reply, with a tongue-in-cheek printed letter containing a URL to my CV... Sometimes, the clowns even manage to take a look. I've even been invited to interviews! I don't think the suits quite got it...
Dead right. As soon as I read the Slashdot leader, I thought "Oh No! That machete I made so I could clear out the brushwwod in the garden has just been declared an illegal hacking tool!"
Another case of journalistic incompetence. How on earth do people with such a tenuous grasp of the English language, how do these piss-poor scribblers, manoeuvre themselves into jobs where they can communicate their drivel in a sensational manner to such large numbers of people?
I realised a long long time ago that I could save space on my Linux box's hard drive by goinf into the html documentation directories and doing a
gzip -9 `find . -name "*.html"`
.
Since I was opening these files through the file system, not via http, Netscape had no problem whatsoever opening and displaying them.
I just tried this using Netscape on an SGI with http, ( like this http://server/path/page.html.gz ) and it still works... I seem to remember that when I tried this at home with Linux, it didn't work...
I'm running a server, dishing up static HTML batch generated from source files once per month. The saving can be enormous... two HTML files of 25kB and 13kB were reduced to just 2kB each! Admittedly, the body of files only takes up 100MB, to I'm not going to run out of space anytime soon...
Now surely the server would fetch a small file off the disc faster than it could fetch a bigger file. And since I'm not compressing these files on the fly, there's no overhead on the server side. The LAN should get some benefit, too, since there is less data being whizzed around. There's going to be some overhead on the client side, as Netscape needs to gunzip the data at some point...
However, I was under the impression that analog modems already had some dedicated data compression hardware... so if you have a server grabbing gzipped data off its discs, pushing that out to an analog modem, then the hardware of the modem won't be able to compress it (much) further in any case. And if your server is generating the HTML on the fly, maybe it would be better to just push uncompressed data to the modem, and let the hardware compression take care of things.
s
errare humanum est, sed merda futare machinem necessit
This sort of stuff is everywhere. You mentionned hairdressers (most of them really do deserve to get stuck on the same world as the telephone sanitisers).
There was this really famous French chef, who recently opened a restaurant in New York (or some other town). He was running it on his reputation. Damn it, he wasn't even in the kitchen more than a couple of times a month! He reckons that if he's put up the money for it (even if that money's been borrowed from a bank or venture capitalist), interviewed the cooks, `created' the menu and recipes, and trained up the head cook, he can do whatever he wants... inluding sticking his famous name over the door and leaving it to the deputy.
OK, so I'm not entirely opposed to that way of running things... but it seems that the NewYorkers were not happy. They see the Big Man's name, they expect to see him with his sleaves rolled up, getting some work done. Or at least being there, keeping an eye on things.
Well, he wasn't. And these rich NewYorkers had who had booked tables with a three month wait heard reports from people who'd already been, found out it wasn't the "dining experience" that they'd been hoping to buy into, and started cancelling.
What does the Big Man do? Does he change his way of doing business? Does he show up more often? No. He tells the staff "whenever someone calls to book a table, you take a credit card number, you charge the sucker, er I mean esteemed client, a $150 non-returnable advance".
Slashdot Mirror
Luxury!
When I was young, we didn't even have colleges. We just had a bit of space in the back of an ironmonger's yard. That was hardware!
We had to get two old filing cabinets, and file the ends off them so we could put them together to make a 19 inch wide cabinet. The get a load of old wire and wind our own bobbins to make the power supply!
There were no ventilators, so we had to make one by fitting old desk fan blades to a treadmill we cobbled together out of chicken-wire. To power it, we caught a rat and a cat, and put one chasing the other in the treadmill.
We wrote the SysAdmin manual on old brown-paper bags, but Urban Studies kept stealing them to put at the bottom of a lake.
Babelfisch reckons it's "Computer forecasts"
Your straight throughput of "High Reckonings" is good, but most volken worse than Yoda English speak.
If you take Hoch to be Upwards, and you make it a bit latinisch, you get nearer to what is called "extrapolation"
They are not openly funded by corporations.
Try to catch up on recent politico-financial scandals over here; under-the-table, back-handers, Paris City Council RPR officials taking 1/2 million Francs in used notes (bills, in YankSpeak).
Oh, until recently, a large corporation could contribute to a party; i.e. set up several small subsidiaries, and get each subsidiary to give the maximum limit (I forget how much).
By the same logic, there should be a very high tax on cars capable of travelling at very high speeds.
If you buy a car capable of 140mph (224kph), you are doing so in order to be able to break the highest speed limit of 81mph (130kph).
You should therefore be made to pay a tax on the "excess capability", i.e., the difference between the car's top speed and the speed limit, this being 39mph (94kph). Let's say 1000Euros per kph excess, that makes 94000Euros. Hmm...
I am outraged by this stupid governmental meddling!
I live in France, and I am very annoyed et the thought of being burdened with this ridiculous tax.
I have a fair-sized CD collection, all of them originals, and I convert them to MP3 format so I can listen to tracks in any order, without having to change discs. I consider this to be my moral and legal right.
I will not pay a tax levied on hard drives. I make regular trips to the UK, I'll be going to the US in march, perhaps to Signapore next year. If the government decides to levy a tax on ordinary hard drives, I'll buy one overseas.
I'll just buy one out of principal.
I don't even have to make a long trip... Paris to London in 3 hours by train.
Belgium, Luxemburg, Spain (Andorra!) are within reach... The Channel Islands: part of the United Kingdom, but not part of the European Union... Those of us who have the opportunity, and are willing to make the effort, can get round this ridiculous tax.
The same goes for CD-Roms; if I buy a digital camera, I'll want to store the pictures somewhere, so I'll buy my blank CDs overseas, too.
A couple of weeks ago, I had a 35mm film developed, and I had the Kodak lab digitize the negatives and write the images to a CD. Will that be subject to this stupid tax, too? If Kodak has to stump up a 2F per disc tax, +19.6% VAT (sales tax) that makes about 2F40; I'll bet Kodak will pass on about a 5F surcharge, and blame the government.
I've seen an enormous number of references to blackouts and brownouts over the last few years while reading Linux UPS docs and Slashdot... and it makes me really wonder what's going on over in our former colonies that Mad George lost ;-)...
The only time I've ever saw blackouts in the United Kingdom is when
So far, I think I've experienced a power-cut about three times while living in England, and twice in France.
Both times in France, it was due to storms:
It seems to me that the Californian problem is quite simple, really. A combination of:
How about a two-fold solution:
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
tee hee... I wonder that nobody posted this already!
I have a currently very small cluster of these Brain things.
The two main nodes are: Me and Wife. Then there's a third node called Son.
Me and Wife are well trained and can handle all that needs to be done.
Son is still learning. In fact, he's been learning for six months, and he knows very little. He can visually and aurally recognize Me and Wife, and he can signal that fact in a way that Me and Wife can interpret.
However, Son cannot yet manage light switches! Bizarre! So called hard tasks like visual recognition are a doddle, but simple binary states like switching a light on or off are still beyond him.
Tram systems, more correctly light railways, have been in use in Sheffield and Manchester (both in UK) for about five years (IIRR).
Grenoble (France) has had a network longer (it was the inspiration for the two UK cities cited). St Denis (Paris satellite town) got one line recently, I believe
Quel chargement de couilles ;-)
Erm, what I mean is, what utter rubbish! The fact that 20% of the world's population speaks a collection of dialects that are not entirely mutually intelligible does not mean that Chinese is the "world language of choice"!
You seem to confuse choice ("the world chooses to speak Chinese" according to you) with accident!
I was born in England (Olde Englande, if you like). I was brought up to speak English (both standard and regional dialect). I did not choose this; it was an accident of birth. Along the way, through TV and cinema, I picked up OzSpeak, YankSpeak (essentially very simplified, de-formalised English with a bit of extra vocabulary of Dutch, German, Yiddish, Spanish origin).
Now, I speak French, Russian, a bit of German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian... That is choice! (No, in all modesty it's not really all that difficult, either).
I am English, living in Paris (France) and have been working for a French company for the last four years.
Our activities span the globe, and we have employees from a great many countries.
The most represented languages (roughly in order of numbers of mother-tongue speakers):
My wife (French) works in another company with a smaller geographical and linguistic spread (mostly English, French, German).
In our work, most people have at least a working knowledge of English, but almost all the non-French nationals can speak French reasonably well. Most meetings are therefore in French, unless there are people present who speak little or no French (e.g., when Americans come over to Europe, Brits come over to the Continent) and then we all speak English.
I personally speak French almost all the time. In fact, the only times I speak English is with one English colleague and with my English family. But then, I made a conscious decision to learn French before moving to France and before getting a job. I wan't transferred here by my employer, and I don't particularly feel the need for a cosy ex-patriot `bubble'.
I suspect that some of the French people in this Silicon Valley company are trying to create for themselves a little corner of France, perhaps even unconsciously... this is a dangerous thing both for themselves and for the company.
By isolating yourself from the leitkultur, you miss out on everything you could gain from it. By isolating yourself from you colleagues, you reduce your productivity.
By all means, you should make the effort to improve your French. It is not a particularly difficult language (although the pronunciation has a few difficulties for the anglophone beginner). But if the problem is the narrow-minded ex-pat culture that sometimes pops up, then I don't really see the point. At best, you'll learn a new language and be accepted into the group as an Honorary Frog. At worst, you'll be seen as someone who wants to gatecrash the party.
Anyway, crime is in the doing, not the thinking.
Ever heard of the crime of "Conspiracy to..."
You can be charged with planning to rob/murder/smuggle even if you're caught before you get round to doing it... of course, the police usually let you go ahead and start the robbery or murder attempt, since it's easier to prove in court if they can catch you red-handed.
Then there's the old "Going equipped..."
The police find you walking down the road wearing gloves, carrying a bag containing a crow-bar, you can be charged with "going equipped to commit burglary".
So if we're not careful, soon Mr. Police Officer might be able to knock on your door, say "Hello, hello, hello, what have we here... do you happen to have a modem, a computer, hand a haccess to the hinternet?"
"Yes orifice, er, I mean ossifer." "The hay ham harresting you for going hequipped to distribute dirty pictures hand bomb-making recipes hon the web!"
Dead right! Give the punters the impression that their voices are being heard, even if nobody taking the decisions pays any attention...
By asking the right questions in the right way, you can get your punters to justify your policies, whatever they may be. Anybody remember `Yes, Prime Minister'?
Not quite the same...
Microsoft wants to stop bug reports, because they embarras the company, and I believe that Microsoft top brass doesn't really give a monkey's if you, I or some other poor consumer loses all his data through a security hole.
Ford/Brigestone/AnyCompany regrets having to post recall notices, but realises that it is better to look a bit stupid rather than risk the deaths of consumers and almost certain litigation.
Of course, I personally am very unlikely to lose any data through a Microsoft security hole. At home, I use only Linux, and at work I use a mix of SunOS, Irix and AIX... Colleagues using WinNT who were stupid enough to click on the LoveBug VirusBuilderScript may have lost some stuff, but then learning is often a painful experience for children.
You fall, you get a bruise, you learn to look what you're doing and you fall less often.
I didn't see the Olympic games ceremonies... in fact I don't have a TV set. Did these Airboard things really work?
I took a look at the web site, and the pictures look heavily re-touched. And the technical specs page is a real let-down!
Top speed of around 25km/h is not bad compared to an aluminium scooter, but the other stuff makes it a laughable kid's toy!
Limited to an incline of 5% (a 1 in 20 slope) and limited to 100kg payload! I weigh about 90kg already! Add a stout pair of boots, packed lunch and fishing gear, and I'd be well over that limit.
And that disclaimer:
makes me think it's just a joke site.Well, I have had similar ideas about charging a "processing fee"... but most of the crap I receive doesn't come from reputable companies like the publisher of the investment magazine seems to be.
Apart from that, young Kane ought to read up on HTML a bit more, and think about closing the table... the browser won't render the table rows and cells until it encounters the </table> tag.
There's a story about this, already... I think it's by Brian Aldiss.
It's not really a theme park, but a kind of zoo, where strains of bacteria and viruses are kept (as much out of curiosity as for scientific research) once the diseases they caused have been eradicated.
"Roll up, roll up, see the worlds only remaining [smallpox,influenza,AIDS] virus!!
So, this little bacterium was sitting in a brine pocket inside a salt crystal. It was pickled! Anyway, this makes me think back to my holiday in Chile, when I visited the Atacama desert and went to see a salt mine. We humans have been digging salt out of the earth for millenia. We may well have already set free countless millions of bacteria that were sitting pickled like Bacillus permians... who knows?
A project just as worthy as the Human Genome would be a Census Bacteriorum (forgive my lain!) so that when scientists wash down and wake up one of these foundling bacteria, its genetic material can be sequenced and compared to the Census database to see if has siblings or close descendants still out there in the wild today.
I seem to remember having this conversation with my mother when I was about seven years old...
meThis cotton shirt, that's man made, right?
momYes, it was made in a factory.
meBut the label says "natural fibres"...
momYes, cotton comes from a cotton plant.
meBut the cotton thread doesn't just hang off the branches, does it?
momNo, we have to transform it.
meIn a factory?
momYes.
meSo the thread isn't natural, either.
momYes, because it comes from the plant, even if we have to work on it to turn it into thread.
meBut what about man-made fibres?
momWhat about them?
meMy teacher says the can be made from oil...
momThat's right.
meAnd the oil comes from plants that lived millions of years ago, and got buried and pressed until they became oil and coal...
momThat's right.
meSo oil and coal are natural, because they come from plants?
momAnd because they come about just like that, through the way the world works... without the intervention of Man.
meBut when Man gets the oil, and makes it into fibres, these are man-made fibres?
momYes.
meSo how is that different to getting hold of the cotton, and making it into fibres?
momI think it's time for you to go to bed. Ask your techer to explain tomorrow...
Right, so you have 1024 bytes of RAM, but part of these are used for storing environment variables.
From (my chemical) memory, the ZX81 Memory map looks like this:
Decimal address 0 to 8191 ROM
Decimal address 8192 to 16383 Copy of ROM (this can be overlaid by a second add-on ROM)
Decimal addres 16384 upward is RAM.
Addresses 16384 to around 16515 (Im' guessing the figurse a bit now...) stored the environment. This means things like the lines at the bottom of the screen that are reserved for editing, the "protected lines". These don't get scrolled or cleared by a CLS command, so you can use them for stuff like status, background. Another address contains the number of TV lines before the picture starts. If you POKE a value into this address, you shift the whole display up (or down). I used this once for an earthquake effect, by vigourously drawing a skyscraper, shaking the screen, then drawing a pile of rubble (OK, I was 12 at the time).
So, you've really got less than 1024 bytes for your program and data! Oh, and the screen is memory mapped into that space, too! You had a choice, limit the amount of screen you used, or limit the size of your program. The screen works like this, each line is mapped as a series of characters, teminated by a newline character. If you never print to the screen, the screen memory stays fixed (perhaps at 1 character, a single newline). If you print
, you're going to gobble up 68 (if I've counted right) bytes of memory including the two newlines.Now, the Basic keywords were part of the character set, so for example the keyword PRINT occupied only one byte. So you could economise by using these basic keywords to print text to the screen. For example, to prompt the user to type a number, you could use the keyword INPUT (1 byte) rather than ENTER (5 bytes, including the space). Big saving.
More memory could be saved by doing numerical operations on the values of strings, rather than on numbers themselves... doing (the value of letter "A" plus the value of letter "B") took up far, far fewer bytes that (64+65).
Then if you programmed directly in machine code, you could do wonderfule things... Two lads from Hull (U.K.) set up a firm called Artic; they managed to cram a game of chess into 1kB!!!!
We used to use these things at school, too. An I/O card plugged into the expansion bus, a few relays, and we could play around making traffic light systems, reading temperatures and light levels, turning on pumps to sprinkle water on the plants...
Those were the days! All you need is a bit of imagination. Oh, and it was small and ran silently, no annoyingly noisy fans and hard drives....
It ran from a 9Volt transformer, too. 700mAmps, I think. You might be able to run it off a PP3 battery...
Hey, prior art!
Yes, after reading the Death Ray hoax, and the XFree86 HowTo, I dreamed up the idea of a virus that would
I thought about this for so long and so hard, that the idea must be kind of out there in the noossphere now, in the world of objective contents of thoughts...
Then, when your fridge and microwave are on the Internet (IPv6, of course), I've got another one...
And the recipe has so much tobasco and what-have-you, that you'll not know whether it's been cooked to a cinder or if it's still raw. In any case, it's teeming with life, and you've just been killed by a computer virus, poisoned by the Internet....
Oh, won't the future be wonderful with Outlook and IPv6 controlling you groceries...
Job adverts are often written by people who have absolutely no IT knowledge whatsoever. In fact, the bar is set so high, that Sergei Bubka couldn't reach it. Here in France, I regularly see job ads for the post of "webmaster" that read along the lines of:
How much do you expect? Well, you'll be offered the equivalent of US$1500 per month for that.
How do these ads get written? My guess is that somebody in the company says "we need a webmaster, get me one". The draft advert starts off like "Wanted, Webmaster"; first criterion is "must be cheap", that explains the 20-26 age limit (that, and the fact that some suits think that the kids love the web so much, they'll do the job just for the fun of it). Then the drafting of the ad becomes the work of a committee (who first said "a camel is a horse designed by a committee?)...
The committee needs to draw up the Ideal Candidate Profile or ICP [TM]. So, Web is all about having a smart-looking shop window for the company. OK, so we need a graphic designer. Tools of the trade, photoshop, illustrator and flash. So far so good. But somebody on the committee has heard that JavaScript add life to web pages, so that gets added to the ICP. Right, JavaScript, that goes hand in hand with Java, right? Someone on the committee remembers that the first chapter in Teach yourself Java in your lunchBreak and earn.bigMoney is "How Java is like C++". So, let's add C++ to the list. Oh, and C for good measure.
Wow, the committee has just discovered that a WebMaster needs to be a programmer! So, let's just add a random assortment of programmer-like requirements, just to be sure.
In case you haven't guessed already, recruitment is based on data extracted from the CV and analysed by the well-respected sciences of Graphology, Astrology and Numerology...
Whenever I see ad an like that, I just think, "bunch of clowns", and leave it at that. Occasionally, I reply, with a tongue-in-cheek printed letter containing a URL to my CV... Sometimes, the clowns even manage to take a look. I've even been invited to interviews! I don't think the suits quite got it...
You might not need a 2TByte file system, but there are industries where data is getting up into the realm of the PetaByte.
Dead right. As soon as I read the Slashdot leader, I thought "Oh No! That machete I made so I could clear out the brushwwod in the garden has just been declared an illegal hacking tool!"
Another case of journalistic incompetence. How on earth do people with such a tenuous grasp of the English language, how do these piss-poor scribblers, manoeuvre themselves into jobs where they can communicate their drivel in a sensational manner to such large numbers of people?
I realised a long long time ago that I could save space on my Linux box's hard drive by goinf into the html documentation directories and doing a gzip -9 `find . -name "*.html"` .
Since I was opening these files through the file system, not via http, Netscape had no problem whatsoever opening and displaying them.
I just tried this using Netscape on an SGI with http, ( like this http://server/path/page.html.gz ) and it still works... I seem to remember that when I tried this at home with Linux, it didn't work...
I'm running a server, dishing up static HTML batch generated from source files once per month. The saving can be enormous... two HTML files of 25kB and 13kB were reduced to just 2kB each! Admittedly, the body of files only takes up 100MB, to I'm not going to run out of space anytime soon...
Now surely the server would fetch a small file off the disc faster than it could fetch a bigger file. And since I'm not compressing these files on the fly, there's no overhead on the server side. The LAN should get some benefit, too, since there is less data being whizzed around. There's going to be some overhead on the client side, as Netscape needs to gunzip the data at some point...
However, I was under the impression that analog modems already had some dedicated data compression hardware... so if you have a server grabbing gzipped data off its discs, pushing that out to an analog modem, then the hardware of the modem won't be able to compress it (much) further in any case. And if your server is generating the HTML on the fly, maybe it would be better to just push uncompressed data to the modem, and let the hardware compression take care of things.
s errare humanum est, sed merda futare machinem necessit
This sort of stuff is everywhere. You mentionned hairdressers (most of them really do deserve to get stuck on the same world as the telephone sanitisers).
There was this really famous French chef, who recently opened a restaurant in New York (or some other town). He was running it on his reputation. Damn it, he wasn't even in the kitchen more than a couple of times a month! He reckons that if he's put up the money for it (even if that money's been borrowed from a bank or venture capitalist), interviewed the cooks, `created' the menu and recipes, and trained up the head cook, he can do whatever he wants... inluding sticking his famous name over the door and leaving it to the deputy.
OK, so I'm not entirely opposed to that way of running things... but it seems that the NewYorkers were not happy. They see the Big Man's name, they expect to see him with his sleaves rolled up, getting some work done. Or at least being there, keeping an eye on things.
Well, he wasn't. And these rich NewYorkers had who had booked tables with a three month wait heard reports from people who'd already been, found out it wasn't the "dining experience" that they'd been hoping to buy into, and started cancelling.
What does the Big Man do? Does he change his way of doing business? Does he show up more often? No. He tells the staff "whenever someone calls to book a table, you take a credit card number, you charge the sucker, er I mean esteemed client, a $150 non-returnable advance".