There is a gray area where the benefit of one over the other is not as pronounced as what you happen to have more experience with. If you are equally experienced with both, you'd probably see the gray area as extremely thin. If you are more (or exclusively) experienced with one or the other, you'll probably see the gray area as an extreme case.
One factor, but not the only factor (have to weigh these things carefully, but don't dwell away the day worrying about it) in chosing the tools is to choose what you know best, especially if time is a constraint. But do try to find some time to learn something new occaisionally, or else you'll find your world is made of nails just because you're leet with hammers.
Maybe that's why so many web forms (I don't know that you meant web forms... maybe you meant app forms, but I feel like picking on web forms right now) I see out on the internet suck so much.
What happens is that when people use some application that build the site, the page, or the form, for them, they are assuming it will build it correctly and portably.
In reality I find that to be far from the case. For example a certain well known web page builder application from a very large and controversial software monop^h^h^h^h^hcompany consistently produces broken HTML.
That's probably by design.
But the end result is that people think they are saving themselves a lot of time by using... and trusting... it, but in reality they often build a lot of resentment, and end up having to do more work just to fix it up.
And when these kinds of apps use Javascript to do everything like hyperlinks (instead of using an <a href="whatever"> tag) and forms, it's even worse.
Virtually every form, and most pages, I've built are really dynamic. There are lots of static pieces, but overall it's dynamic. I've done this in C and PHP. One example is http://linuxhomepage.com/ done in PHP on the front end and C on the back end. I'm not sure how anyone would build that using all GUI tools. That's not to say that GUI tools couldn't be used for at least some of it. But being more familiar with CLI tools, I found it easier to build that site originally in half a day using CLI tools alone. And I did it in text console mode (not xterm) switching to X, or my Win98 box, to test the rendition via a few different browsers. You can peek at the PHP source here. I'm thinking out the plans for the next version of the site now, and it will be more dynamic than the first, allowing you to choose your own boxes, number of stories in each, where to lay them out, and maybe even a display theme.
Show me what a script that automates a GUI app in Windows using COM looks like. I just want to see if how they do it makes it all a POS (e.g. too complex) or if there's something real that the X Windows world forgot to do. You can put one up on a web page or ftp server and reply with a link, or if no such access, email it to me and I will (you'll have to find a rot13 app to decode my email).
A feature that exists in the major UNIX systems, but is not part of the standards, will majorly improve the performance of my project, and make it a lot easier to code up. Should I use it or not?
Of course the question is vague. I didn't state which systems and for a reason: I don't want to focus on the specifics (although I do have a specific case in mind), but rather, I want to focus on the general principle with this issue. Just how far should I go to make sure my program works on every damned UNIX out there? How much is important?
A lot of the discussion seems to be related to issues of things like programming languages and operating systems (which are important).
But what about keeping up with old formats and protocols? I think the issue is more one of what your project works with, than it is what language you choose (including the OS as part of the former).
Should a new web server support older versions of HTTP to the extent that they are not proper subsets of new versions?
Should my mail server support POP3, or can I make it do IMAP4 only?
Should my web site require every browser have cookies, Javascript, and Java enabled, or should it at least function with browsers that doesn't have these, or don't have them enabled, or have them filtered at the firewall?
Should I support ISO-8859 character sets, or can I just stick to Unicode (UTF-8 and maybe also UTF-16) to be universal?
I'm not so much looking for specific answers to the above questions, but rather, a general idea of how you think one should go about deciding those issues to come up with the best answers in some given situation.
So where does one get a box full of all these unixes? I do agree with you on that part about broad testing. But I can't afford to buy all those boxes (especially not an IBM zSeries). And finding shell accounts (especially root ones) for various testing seems to not go beyond Linux, FreeBSD, and a handful of OpenBSD and Solaris. Even the IBM mainframe accounts are available to only a few people, and then for a limited time (have you ever known an open source project to take 3 months and stop development then because it's "done"?). I do have Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on Intel, and Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris on Sparc. What else would you suggest?
As for Java... I'm waiting until environments are built that can do what I do now in C. I'm hoping gcj will let me do at least some of these things in Java. But there are some things I doubt it can ever do. You can prove me wrong by rewriting LILO and init into Java.
The actual costs of stamping out the copies is not a big part of the consumer price. There is the royalty paid to the creators (which is rather small for music, but can get to be rather large for major motion pictures). There are also costs for promotion. Pirates don't do promotion, but instead ride the back of existing promotion. While there are indeed inflated costs in the price of entertainment content that could be removed (the stock holders would suffer, so don't expect it to happen), there are costs that do get covered that pirates would not be paying for.
It's a complex problem. But more laws are not the answer. And cutting prices to the levels that pirates can sell for isn't possible to do while providing for a return on investment (contrary to the experience of some dot-com managers, businesses are supposed to produce a profit and a return to investors).
If the OS included tools to unload modules that failed to check if you were unloading the SSSCA module, that would be illegal under this proposed bill. A legal rmmod would refuse to unload the SSSCA module. Or perhaps SSSCA would be compiled into the kernel. And if you try to remove the source and recompile, a compliant compiler would add it back in. In fact, the only compliant compiler would always insert SSSCA compliant logic into everything it compiled, and insert its own inserter into compilations of compilers, including itself.
Reminds me of Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's. I've been trying to tell people that the Democrats are not nearly as much like the Communists as they are like the Nazis.
You need to be educating them about good and evil in the world, and how evil uses lies, and tries to make itself appear to be good, to fool little children and eat up their minds.
You know that Time Warner is already one of the enemies. Why do you have cable in the first place? And as for ABC... owned by Disney... boycott them, too. Let your local ABC station know how you feel.
I've been trying to tell people that the Democrat party does not, and never has had, the interests of the people at heart. Now I'm not saying the Republicans are any better. But it has come to be clear to me a couple decades ago that the Democrat party has many similarities to the National Socialist party that emerged in Germany during the early 1900's when the people were not paying attention and striving to get help from the government to recover from terrible economic conditions. This time we need to stay awake (or wake up as the case may be) and try as best we can to prevent what happened to Germany from happening to the United States of America.
Return it and tell the manager that the contents inside do not match the label on the outside, and demand that you be given contents that exactly matches the label on the outside, i.e. something that plays normally.
Someone wanted changeable files under/usr? Isn't the split between/usr and/var supposed to be so that/usr can be shared over NFS and/or mounted read-only (I prefer to keep/usr mounted read-only, although I have not tried that on OBSD), while/var is instantiated on each server and can be expected to be writeable? Why can't Theo compromise and use something like/var/local for the variable parts of ports where the static parts go in/usr/local, then we can symlink/var/qmail to/var/local/qmail or/var/spool/qmail or something like that.
But I do like that Theo is sticking to his stand on modifiability and binary distributeability. DJB is being more hardnosed than even RMS is.
BTW, I used qmail for about a year, and switched to Postfix almost a year ago. I have no thoughts of going back to qmail... or sendmail.
As you point out, bridges do FALL DOWN. Here is a list of major bridge collapses, including this one which I actually witnessed fall. And the expense of one crash tracked to an error in design can be enormous. This is area where quality is design is important, and usually is done. And given that the cost of the design work is small compared to the cost of materials, construction, and loss in the event of a crash, there is relatively little pressure to reduce costs by cutting back on the design diligence. That doesn't rule out trying to design for lower costs elsewhere, but still, that is rare due to the extreme costs of crash.
Software doesn't usually have the extreme costs of a crash. Some exceptions do exist, like airplane navigation and medical instruments (and cases of bad software there is a concern, too), but in general, the cost of a crash is low compared to the cost of design, which is often very high. That means that cost cutting measures tend to focus on the design because that's where the costs are high, even though it's only that way because the other costs are low. So pointy haired managers will do their thing and we get software that sucks to some degree.
If software did have the same cost ratios of a bridge, you can be sure the design quality would not be skimped on, and better software would result. In the sense of "if the economic model could be applied" the analogy fits. But of course reality is that the economic model is not the same at all. So I see where he is coming from with his analogy, and it makes sense, but we can't use it to solve the problem of why software sucks so much.
News flash: Venture Capitalists bail out Australia, in exchange for a 75% share of the country, majority control of the legislature, and control of all top government posts. Elections have been canceled as a cost cutting measure.
Where there is a charge, there is counter charge of the opposite polarity. The storm's lifting process spreads the charge between upper and lower parts of the storm. But that's not enough to balance things out. Counter charges exist in the earth below (and follow the storm) as well in the air far above the storm. When a lightning strike happens, the charge level drops suddenly, and the counter charges now have to go somewhere and quickly. I believe the sprites are the result of this bleed off of the charges about a strike. And yes, that would make them very powerful.
As for lightning forming life, it could happen anyway because the lightning is basically going to be energizing molecules which can then come back to gether it all sorts of ways as they cool down after the current stops. Life could result from enough of the carbon based building blocks having been put together, or later come together, in the right way to be able to reproduce the same molecules some way. The formation of life this way could be an extremely rare event. But even if it only occurs once in billions of years in our galaxy, you can bet that's where we'll end up being.
Lightning is just an artifact of existing energy fields. You could reap that energy even before there are lightning strikes (and on a large enough scale, perhaps reduce the lightning or even eliminate it). The "antenna" would basically be a bunch of very tall lightning rods. Lightning rods don't serve to attract lightning, but rather, serve to dissipate static charges that are exaggerated during a thunderstorm. That dissipation does result in a flow (amperes is a measure of electrical current, coulombs is the measure of electrical charge, and farads is the measure of the capacity to store an electrical charge). The trick to accomplishing what your suggest is to avoid the air insulation breakdown that results in a sudden flow (the lightning stroke). The problem is that unless the rods are very tall, the flow is inhibited by extreme air resistance until the breakdown occurs (which is very rapid when it happens, with rarely more than a few seconds notice, if that). I'd guess that the height needed to efficiently exploit air charges would be 1 to 5 kilometers. Once you get that high, you will get currents even without the thunderstorms.
Benjamin Franklin's key experiment supposedly didn't actually get a stroke of lightning, but got a charge fed to it that perhaps was coming close to breakdown voltage. But that charge could have developed even without the storm, although at a lower level. A charge develops in the atmosphere every day due to photon energy striking the atmosphere within a magnetic field. The air serves as an insulator, and you have a giant capacitor. Lifting in the air, which occurs more extreme during a thunderstorm, changes the dynamics of that capacitor, reducing its farad measure, and given a constant of coulombs, raises the voltage of the charge. Raise it enough and the air insulation breaks down. But the charge is there all the time. The question in science is just how much of that charge comes from various sources. Apparently the charge from sunlight isn't enough to bring about the level of lightning we actually see.
Another source of energy you can extract from a thunderstorm is lateral charge shifts from horizontal storm movement. The storm carries a concentrated charge, and to balance that out, the earth exhibits a counter charge gathered near the surface to be as close as possible to the storm. That charge moves along with the storm. This charge movement is often the source of damaging levels of electrical current in some extended wiring like rural telephone lines. I've watched the charges dance off lines miles from thunderstorms. There might be a way, given wide open spaces, to exploit that.
The lateral charge effect can also cause some interesting lighting. I once saw a lightning stroke emerge from the half way up the back side of a tall thundercloud into the clear air in its wake, and jump some 10 to 12 km back, then bend down to the ground. The earth charge hadn't followed fast enough and apparently got built up way back there somewhere.
I had another interesting experience once when taking advantage of a clear weather break in the midst of a stormy week, to do some site surveying for radio coverage when I was doing storm spotting years ago. I first noticed some strange whistling sounds in my car AM radio. It started at a high pitch and dropped down to nothing in about 1 to 4 seconds, repeating after after another 1-4 seconds. When they started coming faster I started feeling some "static bites" in my handheld 2m ham radio (KA9WGN) which was connected to an antenna on the car roof. I pulled off the antenna connector from the radio and put the tip of the BNC connector pin (which went to the actual antenna rod itself, which being a 5/8-wave style, had no loading coil) up to the keys in the car ignition switch. At about 1 cm distance, a spark jumped across. At about 3 mm distance, it sustained a spark repeating about every 2/3 second continuously. I opened the car window and looked around and up, and saw a small cloud forming directly above. It was very small, not any larger than a "partly cloudy day" kind of cloud. But I decided to drive away anyway. About 10 minutes later I was 3 miles south east and looked back northwest and saw that my little cloud had become a billowing thunderhead. 5 minutes later there were cloud to ground strokes.
Yeah, that show could have been much older. Come to think of it I saw it around 2AM, when the local PBS affiliate, KERA, often shows reruns of PBS programming. Often they will batch a bunch of related shows together, like run 6 Nova's back to back, late at night if there's no school programming to feed. Those do that on weekend afternoons, too. Beats football.
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There is a gray area where the benefit of one over the other is not as pronounced as what you happen to have more experience with. If you are equally experienced with both, you'd probably see the gray area as extremely thin. If you are more (or exclusively) experienced with one or the other, you'll probably see the gray area as an extreme case.
One factor, but not the only factor (have to weigh these things carefully, but don't dwell away the day worrying about it) in chosing the tools is to choose what you know best, especially if time is a constraint. But do try to find some time to learn something new occaisionally, or else you'll find your world is made of nails just because you're leet with hammers.
Maybe that's why so many web forms (I don't know that you meant web forms ... maybe you meant app forms, but I feel like picking on web forms right now) I see out on the internet suck so much.
What happens is that when people use some application that build the site, the page, or the form, for them, they are assuming it will build it correctly and portably.
In reality I find that to be far from the case. For example a certain well known web page builder application from a very large and controversial software monop^h^h^h^h^hcompany consistently produces broken HTML.
That's probably by design.
But the end result is that people think they are saving themselves a lot of time by using ... and trusting ... it, but in reality they often build a lot of resentment, and end up having to do more work just to fix it up.
And when these kinds of apps use Javascript to do everything like hyperlinks (instead of using an <a href="whatever"> tag) and forms, it's even worse.
Virtually every form, and most pages, I've built are really dynamic. There are lots of static pieces, but overall it's dynamic. I've done this in C and PHP. One example is http://linuxhomepage.com/ done in PHP on the front end and C on the back end. I'm not sure how anyone would build that using all GUI tools. That's not to say that GUI tools couldn't be used for at least some of it. But being more familiar with CLI tools, I found it easier to build that site originally in half a day using CLI tools alone. And I did it in text console mode (not xterm) switching to X, or my Win98 box, to test the rendition via a few different browsers. You can peek at the PHP source here. I'm thinking out the plans for the next version of the site now, and it will be more dynamic than the first, allowing you to choose your own boxes, number of stories in each, where to lay them out, and maybe even a display theme.
Show me what a script that automates a GUI app in Windows using COM looks like. I just want to see if how they do it makes it all a POS (e.g. too complex) or if there's something real that the X Windows world forgot to do. You can put one up on a web page or ftp server and reply with a link, or if no such access, email it to me and I will (you'll have to find a rot13 app to decode my email).
A feature that exists in the major UNIX systems, but is not part of the standards, will majorly improve the performance of my project, and make it a lot easier to code up. Should I use it or not?
Of course the question is vague. I didn't state which systems and for a reason: I don't want to focus on the specifics (although I do have a specific case in mind), but rather, I want to focus on the general principle with this issue. Just how far should I go to make sure my program works on every damned UNIX out there? How much is important?
Or at least to make sure that the "Hello, World" program isn't doing some sneaky copying of "The Unforgiven.mp3" which would piss off Lars.
A lot of the discussion seems to be related to issues of things like programming languages and operating systems (which are important). But what about keeping up with old formats and protocols? I think the issue is more one of what your project works with, than it is what language you choose (including the OS as part of the former).
I'm not so much looking for specific answers to the above questions, but rather, a general idea of how you think one should go about deciding those issues to come up with the best answers in some given situation.
So where does one get a box full of all these unixes? I do agree with you on that part about broad testing. But I can't afford to buy all those boxes (especially not an IBM zSeries). And finding shell accounts (especially root ones) for various testing seems to not go beyond Linux, FreeBSD, and a handful of OpenBSD and Solaris. Even the IBM mainframe accounts are available to only a few people, and then for a limited time (have you ever known an open source project to take 3 months and stop development then because it's "done"?). I do have Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD on Intel, and Linux, OpenBSD, and Solaris on Sparc. What else would you suggest?
As for Java ... I'm waiting until environments are built that can do what I do now in C. I'm hoping gcj will let me do at least some of these things in Java. But there are some things I doubt it can ever do. You can prove me wrong by rewriting LILO and init into Java.
The actual costs of stamping out the copies is not a big part of the consumer price. There is the royalty paid to the creators (which is rather small for music, but can get to be rather large for major motion pictures). There are also costs for promotion. Pirates don't do promotion, but instead ride the back of existing promotion. While there are indeed inflated costs in the price of entertainment content that could be removed (the stock holders would suffer, so don't expect it to happen), there are costs that do get covered that pirates would not be paying for.
It's a complex problem. But more laws are not the answer. And cutting prices to the levels that pirates can sell for isn't possible to do while providing for a return on investment (contrary to the experience of some dot-com managers, businesses are supposed to produce a profit and a return to investors).
If the OS included tools to unload modules that failed to check if you were unloading the SSSCA module, that would be illegal under this proposed bill. A legal rmmod would refuse to unload the SSSCA module. Or perhaps SSSCA would be compiled into the kernel. And if you try to remove the source and recompile, a compliant compiler would add it back in. In fact, the only compliant compiler would always insert SSSCA compliant logic into everything it compiled, and insert its own inserter into compilations of compilers, including itself.
Reminds me of Germany in the late 1920's and early 1930's. I've been trying to tell people that the Democrats are not nearly as much like the Communists as they are like the Nazis.
You need to be educating them about good and evil in the world, and how evil uses lies, and tries to make itself appear to be good, to fool little children and eat up their minds.
You know that Time Warner is already one of the enemies. Why do you have cable in the first place? And as for ABC ... owned by Disney ... boycott them, too. Let your local ABC station know how you feel.
Why not FORTH? This can be implemented much more efficiently than either Java or LISP. Are people just afraid of stacks?
I've been trying to tell people that the Democrat party does not, and never has had, the interests of the people at heart. Now I'm not saying the Republicans are any better. But it has come to be clear to me a couple decades ago that the Democrat party has many similarities to the National Socialist party that emerged in Germany during the early 1900's when the people were not paying attention and striving to get help from the government to recover from terrible economic conditions. This time we need to stay awake (or wake up as the case may be) and try as best we can to prevent what happened to Germany from happening to the United States of America.
Return it and tell the manager that the contents inside do not match the label on the outside, and demand that you be given contents that exactly matches the label on the outside, i.e. something that plays normally.
They also ran the IQ (Iraq) TLD as seen here. The day of the RAID, the DNS went down on the primary server. It appears to be back up now.
Someone wanted changeable files under /usr? Isn't the split between /usr and /var supposed to be so that /usr can be shared over NFS and/or mounted read-only (I prefer to keep /usr mounted read-only, although I have not tried that on OBSD), while /var is instantiated on each server and can be expected to be writeable? Why can't Theo compromise and use something like /var/local for the variable parts of ports where the static parts go in /usr/local, then we can symlink /var/qmail to /var/local/qmail or /var/spool/qmail or something like that.
But I do like that Theo is sticking to his stand on modifiability and binary distributeability. DJB is being more hardnosed than even RMS is.
BTW, I used qmail for about a year, and switched to Postfix almost a year ago. I have no thoughts of going back to qmail ... or sendmail.
There are 5 kinds of causes of bridge failures:
- Bad specification
- Bad design
- Bad construction
- Bad maintenance
- Accident or sabotage
As you point out, bridges do FALL DOWN. Here is a list of major bridge collapses, including this one which I actually witnessed fall. And the expense of one crash tracked to an error in design can be enormous. This is area where quality is design is important, and usually is done. And given that the cost of the design work is small compared to the cost of materials, construction, and loss in the event of a crash, there is relatively little pressure to reduce costs by cutting back on the design diligence. That doesn't rule out trying to design for lower costs elsewhere, but still, that is rare due to the extreme costs of crash.Software doesn't usually have the extreme costs of a crash. Some exceptions do exist, like airplane navigation and medical instruments (and cases of bad software there is a concern, too), but in general, the cost of a crash is low compared to the cost of design, which is often very high. That means that cost cutting measures tend to focus on the design because that's where the costs are high, even though it's only that way because the other costs are low. So pointy haired managers will do their thing and we get software that sucks to some degree.
If software did have the same cost ratios of a bridge, you can be sure the design quality would not be skimped on, and better software would result. In the sense of "if the economic model could be applied" the analogy fits. But of course reality is that the economic model is not the same at all. So I see where he is coming from with his analogy, and it makes sense, but we can't use it to solve the problem of why software sucks so much.
I'm switching back to my first language ... assembly.
So where do I download a free reader that runs on Linux for that file of binary garbage?
News flash: Venture Capitalists bail out Australia, in exchange for a 75% share of the country, majority control of the legislature, and control of all top government posts. Elections have been canceled as a cost cutting measure.
Where there is a charge, there is counter charge of the opposite polarity. The storm's lifting process spreads the charge between upper and lower parts of the storm. But that's not enough to balance things out. Counter charges exist in the earth below (and follow the storm) as well in the air far above the storm. When a lightning strike happens, the charge level drops suddenly, and the counter charges now have to go somewhere and quickly. I believe the sprites are the result of this bleed off of the charges about a strike. And yes, that would make them very powerful.
As for lightning forming life, it could happen anyway because the lightning is basically going to be energizing molecules which can then come back to gether it all sorts of ways as they cool down after the current stops. Life could result from enough of the carbon based building blocks having been put together, or later come together, in the right way to be able to reproduce the same molecules some way. The formation of life this way could be an extremely rare event. But even if it only occurs once in billions of years in our galaxy, you can bet that's where we'll end up being.
Lightning is just an artifact of existing energy fields. You could reap that energy even before there are lightning strikes (and on a large enough scale, perhaps reduce the lightning or even eliminate it). The "antenna" would basically be a bunch of very tall lightning rods. Lightning rods don't serve to attract lightning, but rather, serve to dissipate static charges that are exaggerated during a thunderstorm. That dissipation does result in a flow (amperes is a measure of electrical current, coulombs is the measure of electrical charge, and farads is the measure of the capacity to store an electrical charge). The trick to accomplishing what your suggest is to avoid the air insulation breakdown that results in a sudden flow (the lightning stroke). The problem is that unless the rods are very tall, the flow is inhibited by extreme air resistance until the breakdown occurs (which is very rapid when it happens, with rarely more than a few seconds notice, if that). I'd guess that the height needed to efficiently exploit air charges would be 1 to 5 kilometers. Once you get that high, you will get currents even without the thunderstorms.
Benjamin Franklin's key experiment supposedly didn't actually get a stroke of lightning, but got a charge fed to it that perhaps was coming close to breakdown voltage. But that charge could have developed even without the storm, although at a lower level. A charge develops in the atmosphere every day due to photon energy striking the atmosphere within a magnetic field. The air serves as an insulator, and you have a giant capacitor. Lifting in the air, which occurs more extreme during a thunderstorm, changes the dynamics of that capacitor, reducing its farad measure, and given a constant of coulombs, raises the voltage of the charge. Raise it enough and the air insulation breaks down. But the charge is there all the time. The question in science is just how much of that charge comes from various sources. Apparently the charge from sunlight isn't enough to bring about the level of lightning we actually see.
Another source of energy you can extract from a thunderstorm is lateral charge shifts from horizontal storm movement. The storm carries a concentrated charge, and to balance that out, the earth exhibits a counter charge gathered near the surface to be as close as possible to the storm. That charge moves along with the storm. This charge movement is often the source of damaging levels of electrical current in some extended wiring like rural telephone lines. I've watched the charges dance off lines miles from thunderstorms. There might be a way, given wide open spaces, to exploit that.
The lateral charge effect can also cause some interesting lighting. I once saw a lightning stroke emerge from the half way up the back side of a tall thundercloud into the clear air in its wake, and jump some 10 to 12 km back, then bend down to the ground. The earth charge hadn't followed fast enough and apparently got built up way back there somewhere.
I had another interesting experience once when taking advantage of a clear weather break in the midst of a stormy week, to do some site surveying for radio coverage when I was doing storm spotting years ago. I first noticed some strange whistling sounds in my car AM radio. It started at a high pitch and dropped down to nothing in about 1 to 4 seconds, repeating after after another 1-4 seconds. When they started coming faster I started feeling some "static bites" in my handheld 2m ham radio (KA9WGN) which was connected to an antenna on the car roof. I pulled off the antenna connector from the radio and put the tip of the BNC connector pin (which went to the actual antenna rod itself, which being a 5/8-wave style, had no loading coil) up to the keys in the car ignition switch. At about 1 cm distance, a spark jumped across. At about 3 mm distance, it sustained a spark repeating about every 2/3 second continuously. I opened the car window and looked around and up, and saw a small cloud forming directly above. It was very small, not any larger than a "partly cloudy day" kind of cloud. But I decided to drive away anyway. About 10 minutes later I was 3 miles south east and looked back northwest and saw that my little cloud had become a billowing thunderhead. 5 minutes later there were cloud to ground strokes.
Yeah, that show could have been much older. Come to think of it I saw it around 2AM, when the local PBS affiliate, KERA, often shows reruns of PBS programming. Often they will batch a bunch of related shows together, like run 6 Nova's back to back, late at night if there's no school programming to feed. Those do that on weekend afternoons, too. Beats football.