So many words yet so irrelevant... We're talking about a bolt that's holding down a power supply, not a freaking engine head. It doesn't have to hold it down with a particular force in order to guarantee performance of the head gasket, for crying out loud. It's a bolt that ensures that the power supply stays in more-or-less in place, with all the connectors fastened and not moving enough to cause wear and eventual contact failure. The only thing this bolt needs to do is stay put and not unscrew itself in presence of thermal cycles. It sees minimal dynamic loads otherwise, the space station is not a fighter jet. Geez.
A bunch of magnets taken from dead hard drives. I'm serious. I have a cantilevered shelf attached using a couple dozen of those. You take it off the wall by having two adults hang off the end (about 1300N total). Dead simple. If you didn't have gravity to help you out, you could add a leverage point and use a breaker bar to pull it off.
I don't think anyone bothers to call dlopen() directly anymore if a decent framework is available. Look at Qt Creator. It's all plugins, about as many as the number of components in your application. Writing modular applications in C++ is not hard.
I'd pick Go too, but that's a bit technically risky it seems. C++ has solid multivendor support.
Re:I Guess This Is What Happens When I Don't Watch
on
The Case Against DNA
·
· Score: 2
Eyewitness accounts are yes, traditional, and about just as bad/good as DNA is. They can't stand on their own. Eyewitnesses routinely lie, and not necessarily because they intend to, but because people are horrible at accurate recall. We imagine we're much better than we really are. Think about it like this: you supposedly remember down to the last detail what happened at some time and place. Yet, how easy it is for most of us to learn at school? Do you read a book once and go to the exam with total recall (where recall is called for, vs. analytic skills)? Then why the heck do we expect mostly uninterested parties to offer what amounts to total recall of stuff they witnessed?
Due to hotspot, Java is faster than any other non-JITted implementation of any programming platform, so perhaps comparing it to Python or Ruby is a bit unfair. As for C++, I'm sure it could have been done. Do you utilize runtime code generation anywhere? Because that's the only thing where Java really wins, it can't be trivially done in C++ other than writing out some code to a pipe or file and running it through the compiler to generate a dynamically linkable library (bleh). Other than that, I don't see anything architecturally that would make Java all that much better. You can do garbage collection, even non-conservative garbage collection, just fine in C++. Sure it won't collect arbitrary classes, but as long as you keep your object tree rooted and only use boxed types as generic types, you can have non-conservative GC in C++ or even C. I'd argue that being able to do manual memory management in C/C++ when you need it for performance is a plus.
C++/MFC/Win32 in combination is a massive clusterfuck and I'm not surprised at all that your competitors couldn't get anything done right, because doing it "right" would imply pretty much maintaining a fork of MFC and bringing it in line with lessons that have since been learned in C++. Qt is a reasonable example of how to do a portable application development framework in C++. It has some rough edges, but they are nothing compared to MFC, and IMHO even nothing compared to any other popular C++ framework out there.
I guess I'll rephrase myself: If an organization (anyone in it) handles credit cards, the conservative presumption is that personnel will treat them like anything else, and that's against the rules. They'll end up in word files in company- or department-wide shared directories (for convenience, of course), they'll email them, they'll fax them (with faxes ending up on one or more servers within the organization), etc. It's a given that those servers will get compromised at one point or another. Thus the deal is to limit the scope by training and auditing: everyone must know what not to do, be periodically reminded, and there should be a process (either manual spot checks or automated file scan) that looks for CC numbers in emails, documents, faxes, etc.
But if you properly implement things, train your personnel, and audit stuff, then email can be otherwise irrelevant to PCI, as should be normal server-routed faxes (CC stuff goes through a dedicated non-networked machine), and pretty much everything else. Things get hairy real quick if, say, your stand-alone, non-networked fax used for receiving CC numbers is routed across a PC-based PBX. Or if people phone in CC orders and you are using a PC-based PBX. Or you use your networked copier-printer to copy CC order papers. And so on. So I was, in a way, wrong saying that email is irrelevant by default. It isn't, it only is when you do things properly (setup, training, retraining and audit).
Why would anyone want to electrolyse water on Mars? Do you expect it to electrolyse in any other fashion than here on Earth, except costing 8 orders of magnitude more? Water is per se useless for a robotic mission, if we know it's there from orbiter imagery you don't need to send a rover to confirm, duh. The only useful thing would be to sample it and see if there are any microorganisms there. No electrolysis involved. Test filtering?! You can test filtering it here on Earth just fine.
As for cold war technologies for Mars rovers: sorry but no. Rovers depend on high capacity computing, storage and imaging -- things that most definitely did not exist back in the 70s or even 80s. There was no megapixel+ image sensors like on Curiosity's cameras, no gigabyte memory buffers for those, definitely no rad-hardened computers capable enough to pull off the radar terrain recognition to target the landing zone, etc. Heck, in the early 80s there were not even COTS single-chip CPUs that could do what Curiosity's landing called for, never mind rad-hard.
So, I assume your parents did not pull your foreskin back every day to stretch it when you were a little kid, and did not educate you on doing that yourself later on? That's the only reason I can see for tightness of foreskin. It's stretchy, it's not supposed to bother you if you take care of it when young.
PCI? Email is supposed to be isolated, and if people email credit card numbers, it's their own problem. As long as you're not telling your customers to email CC numbers, and as long as your employees are educated not to ever key in, write down or fax CC numbers, things are fine (except perhaps in whatever order fulfillment / commerce system you have)... PCI is pretty much out irrelevant to email, then.
macports installs packages only into/opt. About the only things that could "break" XCode would be that non-apple gcc was selected as a default. That's what ports defaults system is for. I install macports on every mac I own and I'm yet to see such breakage. Sure individual things were often broken for a good while (wxwidgets, I'm looking at you), but overall it wasn't that bad. Sure not as smooth as with RedHat -- and I too was using redhat since even earlier than 5.2. I think I first used version 3 on a 486 machine that previously had NT 4 installed:)
One can control STDs simply by, you know, keeping one partner and having him/her tested before you starting making out
completely unrealistic for the vast majority of people. Almost as unrealistic as expecting some to always where condoms.
Then the vast majority can decide to get circumcised, once they get old enough. For the rest, who can keep their dick under control, no, thank you. BTW, what I mean about keeping it under control is having partners who are serious about life n' shit, you know. This does not imply celibacy nor monogamy.
basically helps when you do stupid shit.
OR when yuo partner does stupid shit you don't know about.
Yup, circumcision as a stand-in for selection of a good partner. My partner may well do stupid shit, but she'll gladly tell me about it, and vice versa.
I'd think fluid intake and timely urination would help
wow, didn't tkae long for you to jump right into psuedoscience land, did it?
Some people get UTIs. Some other don't. For those who do, managing fluids often has to take part in dealing with the problem. What's pseudoscience about that?
The problem is that while their findings are true, they don't universally apply. One can control STDs simply by, you know, keeping one partner and having him/her tested before you starting making out. That one's easy, and deletes most of the benefit. The lower rate of urinary tract infections and penile cancer is the only leftover benefit then. It's such a small change in UTIs that it's not clear that lifestyle changes alone won't have a way bigger effect. I'd think fluid intake and timely urination would help, as would making sure you go pee right after having sex (and drink fluids beforehand). As for penile cancer, I'd want to see that dissected a bit more to make sure there are no lifestyle changes that would improve one's chances there as well.
All in all -- yes, if you average on a big population that has varied habits and takes what amounts to STD risks, then sure, circumcision helps. For those of us who are otherwise sane, I don't think it helps at all, or at least the benefit is so small as to be hard to measure. Basically the average hides the fact that individual subjects have a lot of control over their health, and circumcision basically helps when you do stupid shit. That's nice and all, but I think it's not enough to convince me that infant boys are to be circumcised. I'll tell my son as he grows up about this study, and any follow-up studies sure to come out by then, and it'll be his decision -- if he'll decide to be a ladies' man, it'll probably make sense.
I doubt it's truly possible to "set aside those beliefs". By the usual religious self-admitted statements, it seems like isn't. Purity of the soul is supposedly a good thing, but it admits that setting things aside, compartmentalizing them, just doesn't work. Your thoughts must be pure. Yeah, you'd like to do that nice girl you just saw, and it's a bad thought to have in spite of you never ever having touched a girl, for example. That means, to me, that one can't set the beliefs aside, and that religious people self-admittedly are simply broken in a way that makes them to an extent unfit to do science.
At least with car insurance I can opt out (don't drive a car; walk. Or use a horse. Or take the train).
Indeed. And when it comes to health, when you have an emergency you can just die!
Of course, it whooshes above pro-lifers' heads all the time, so they got used to the sound and don't notice anymore. Most of them are pro-war, too. The mind just boggles.
As far as I would be concerned, were I to care about such things, the "relegation to God" and "explanation by God" almost seems to me like calling God's name in vain. It presupposes that our current level of understanding is final, and that we know enough to surely and squarely decide, "oh, God willed it so", or "that's a miracle!". Heck, the whole spiel seems utterly pointless. If you presuppose that God made everything and is running the show, so to speak, why the heck repeat oneself? One often sees signs proclaiming "let God into your life" on billboards. Look, doofuses, either you believe God is already there, or you're just so thoroughly confused it's no wonder people look down on those of any faith. Learn to form a self-consistent sentence, or a bunch, to begin with.
The biggest problem in the belief in the creator is that it's useless. Evolution is testable, it makes predictions that turn out to be true. Creationism offers nothing of the sort.
And what a waste of resources they were and are, lest we forget that little nasty detail. Well, they are not wasteful in the sense that people need entertainment and nourishment of the "soul" of a varied kind, and some people find such in churches and such. Alas, sacral architecture is no better and no worse than a gladiator arena would be. The pretenses differ, the outcome is the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever water is in that soap, it will evaporate very quickly. It's vacuum out there.
Didn't hear of that one. Must try it!
Once you develop to IEC 61508, UL 1998 or the like, I'd call it proper software engineering :)
So many words yet so irrelevant... We're talking about a bolt that's holding down a power supply, not a freaking engine head. It doesn't have to hold it down with a particular force in order to guarantee performance of the head gasket, for crying out loud. It's a bolt that ensures that the power supply stays in more-or-less in place, with all the connectors fastened and not moving enough to cause wear and eventual contact failure. The only thing this bolt needs to do is stay put and not unscrew itself in presence of thermal cycles. It sees minimal dynamic loads otherwise, the space station is not a fighter jet. Geez.
A bunch of magnets taken from dead hard drives. I'm serious. I have a cantilevered shelf attached using a couple dozen of those. You take it off the wall by having two adults hang off the end (about 1300N total). Dead simple. If you didn't have gravity to help you out, you could add a leverage point and use a breaker bar to pull it off.
Please do, and I do appreciate any time you'll spend writing it up.
I don't think anyone bothers to call dlopen() directly anymore if a decent framework is available. Look at Qt Creator. It's all plugins, about as many as the number of components in your application. Writing modular applications in C++ is not hard.
I'd pick Go too, but that's a bit technically risky it seems. C++ has solid multivendor support.
Eyewitness accounts are yes, traditional, and about just as bad/good as DNA is. They can't stand on their own. Eyewitnesses routinely lie, and not necessarily because they intend to, but because people are horrible at accurate recall. We imagine we're much better than we really are. Think about it like this: you supposedly remember down to the last detail what happened at some time and place. Yet, how easy it is for most of us to learn at school? Do you read a book once and go to the exam with total recall (where recall is called for, vs. analytic skills)? Then why the heck do we expect mostly uninterested parties to offer what amounts to total recall of stuff they witnessed?
The conclusion is that the language/VM doesn't matter. The architecture, data model and communication medium does.
Ergo, it could have been done in C++ ;)
As far as I can tell from your description, it is a cool system. Is there a whitepaper about it somewhere? I'd like to learn some new tricks.
Amen.
Due to hotspot, Java is faster than any other non-JITted implementation of any programming platform, so perhaps comparing it to Python or Ruby is a bit unfair. As for C++, I'm sure it could have been done. Do you utilize runtime code generation anywhere? Because that's the only thing where Java really wins, it can't be trivially done in C++ other than writing out some code to a pipe or file and running it through the compiler to generate a dynamically linkable library (bleh). Other than that, I don't see anything architecturally that would make Java all that much better. You can do garbage collection, even non-conservative garbage collection, just fine in C++. Sure it won't collect arbitrary classes, but as long as you keep your object tree rooted and only use boxed types as generic types, you can have non-conservative GC in C++ or even C. I'd argue that being able to do manual memory management in C/C++ when you need it for performance is a plus.
C++/MFC/Win32 in combination is a massive clusterfuck and I'm not surprised at all that your competitors couldn't get anything done right, because doing it "right" would imply pretty much maintaining a fork of MFC and bringing it in line with lessons that have since been learned in C++. Qt is a reasonable example of how to do a portable application development framework in C++. It has some rough edges, but they are nothing compared to MFC, and IMHO even nothing compared to any other popular C++ framework out there.
I guess I'll rephrase myself: If an organization (anyone in it) handles credit cards, the conservative presumption is that personnel will treat them like anything else, and that's against the rules. They'll end up in word files in company- or department-wide shared directories (for convenience, of course), they'll email them, they'll fax them (with faxes ending up on one or more servers within the organization), etc. It's a given that those servers will get compromised at one point or another. Thus the deal is to limit the scope by training and auditing: everyone must know what not to do, be periodically reminded, and there should be a process (either manual spot checks or automated file scan) that looks for CC numbers in emails, documents, faxes, etc.
But if you properly implement things, train your personnel, and audit stuff, then email can be otherwise irrelevant to PCI, as should be normal server-routed faxes (CC stuff goes through a dedicated non-networked machine), and pretty much everything else. Things get hairy real quick if, say, your stand-alone, non-networked fax used for receiving CC numbers is routed across a PC-based PBX. Or if people phone in CC orders and you are using a PC-based PBX. Or you use your networked copier-printer to copy CC order papers. And so on. So I was, in a way, wrong saying that email is irrelevant by default. It isn't, it only is when you do things properly (setup, training, retraining and audit).
Why would anyone want to electrolyse water on Mars? Do you expect it to electrolyse in any other fashion than here on Earth, except costing 8 orders of magnitude more? Water is per se useless for a robotic mission, if we know it's there from orbiter imagery you don't need to send a rover to confirm, duh. The only useful thing would be to sample it and see if there are any microorganisms there. No electrolysis involved. Test filtering?! You can test filtering it here on Earth just fine.
As for cold war technologies for Mars rovers: sorry but no. Rovers depend on high capacity computing, storage and imaging -- things that most definitely did not exist back in the 70s or even 80s. There was no megapixel+ image sensors like on Curiosity's cameras, no gigabyte memory buffers for those, definitely no rad-hardened computers capable enough to pull off the radar terrain recognition to target the landing zone, etc. Heck, in the early 80s there were not even COTS single-chip CPUs that could do what Curiosity's landing called for, never mind rad-hard.
Sorry, you don't know that, no one knows that.
So, I assume your parents did not pull your foreskin back every day to stretch it when you were a little kid, and did not educate you on doing that yourself later on? That's the only reason I can see for tightness of foreskin. It's stretchy, it's not supposed to bother you if you take care of it when young.
PCI? Email is supposed to be isolated, and if people email credit card numbers, it's their own problem. As long as you're not telling your customers to email CC numbers, and as long as your employees are educated not to ever key in, write down or fax CC numbers, things are fine (except perhaps in whatever order fulfillment / commerce system you have) ... PCI is pretty much out irrelevant to email, then.
macports installs packages only into /opt. About the only things that could "break" XCode would be that non-apple gcc was selected as a default. That's what ports defaults system is for. I install macports on every mac I own and I'm yet to see such breakage. Sure individual things were often broken for a good while (wxwidgets, I'm looking at you), but overall it wasn't that bad. Sure not as smooth as with RedHat -- and I too was using redhat since even earlier than 5.2. I think I first used version 3 on a 486 machine that previously had NT 4 installed :)
One can control STDs simply by, you know, keeping one partner and having him/her tested before you starting making out
completely unrealistic for the vast majority of people. Almost as unrealistic as expecting some to always where condoms.
Then the vast majority can decide to get circumcised, once they get old enough. For the rest, who can keep their dick under control, no, thank you. BTW, what I mean about keeping it under control is having partners who are serious about life n' shit, you know. This does not imply celibacy nor monogamy.
basically helps when you do stupid shit.
OR when yuo partner does stupid shit you don't know about.
Yup, circumcision as a stand-in for selection of a good partner. My partner may well do stupid shit, but she'll gladly tell me about it, and vice versa.
I'd think fluid intake and timely urination would help
wow, didn't tkae long for you to jump right into psuedoscience land, did it?
Some people get UTIs. Some other don't. For those who do, managing fluids often has to take part in dealing with the problem. What's pseudoscience about that?
The problem is that while their findings are true, they don't universally apply. One can control STDs simply by, you know, keeping one partner and having him/her tested before you starting making out. That one's easy, and deletes most of the benefit. The lower rate of urinary tract infections and penile cancer is the only leftover benefit then. It's such a small change in UTIs that it's not clear that lifestyle changes alone won't have a way bigger effect. I'd think fluid intake and timely urination would help, as would making sure you go pee right after having sex (and drink fluids beforehand). As for penile cancer, I'd want to see that dissected a bit more to make sure there are no lifestyle changes that would improve one's chances there as well.
All in all -- yes, if you average on a big population that has varied habits and takes what amounts to STD risks, then sure, circumcision helps. For those of us who are otherwise sane, I don't think it helps at all, or at least the benefit is so small as to be hard to measure. Basically the average hides the fact that individual subjects have a lot of control over their health, and circumcision basically helps when you do stupid shit. That's nice and all, but I think it's not enough to convince me that infant boys are to be circumcised. I'll tell my son as he grows up about this study, and any follow-up studies sure to come out by then, and it'll be his decision -- if he'll decide to be a ladies' man, it'll probably make sense.
I doubt it's truly possible to "set aside those beliefs". By the usual religious self-admitted statements, it seems like isn't. Purity of the soul is supposedly a good thing, but it admits that setting things aside, compartmentalizing them, just doesn't work. Your thoughts must be pure. Yeah, you'd like to do that nice girl you just saw, and it's a bad thought to have in spite of you never ever having touched a girl, for example. That means, to me, that one can't set the beliefs aside, and that religious people self-admittedly are simply broken in a way that makes them to an extent unfit to do science.
At least with car insurance I can opt out (don't drive a car; walk. Or use a horse. Or take the train).
Indeed. And when it comes to health, when you have an emergency you can just die!
Of course, it whooshes above pro-lifers' heads all the time, so they got used to the sound and don't notice anymore. Most of them are pro-war, too. The mind just boggles.
As far as I would be concerned, were I to care about such things, the "relegation to God" and "explanation by God" almost seems to me like calling God's name in vain. It presupposes that our current level of understanding is final, and that we know enough to surely and squarely decide, "oh, God willed it so", or "that's a miracle!". Heck, the whole spiel seems utterly pointless. If you presuppose that God made everything and is running the show, so to speak, why the heck repeat oneself? One often sees signs proclaiming "let God into your life" on billboards. Look, doofuses, either you believe God is already there, or you're just so thoroughly confused it's no wonder people look down on those of any faith. Learn to form a self-consistent sentence, or a bunch, to begin with.
The biggest problem in the belief in the creator is that it's useless. Evolution is testable, it makes predictions that turn out to be true. Creationism offers nothing of the sort.
Doesn't seem so. They were just jerks who burned others at stakes and such. Jerks win, in the short run.
And what a waste of resources they were and are, lest we forget that little nasty detail. Well, they are not wasteful in the sense that people need entertainment and nourishment of the "soul" of a varied kind, and some people find such in churches and such. Alas, sacral architecture is no better and no worse than a gladiator arena would be. The pretenses differ, the outcome is the same.