Computer programming/hacking doesn't involve smoke, explosions, fractal 3D patterns that escape the computer monitor and chase you down corridors, and especially not jiggling bits of female anatomy.
Have you ever considered the possibility that you're just using the wrong IDE?
Edison was successful because Tesla didn't want a patent, from what I've heard. Edison was a big fan of DC, while Tesla liked AC better. Edison was an early user of FUD, with demonstrations showing AC killing elephants (I'm pretty sure I'm not making this up), while Tesla stuck to his guns of technical superiority. I've noticed that almost nobody has DC running into their house anymore, at least in North America...
Yes, but Tesla's AC model only triumphed because Westinghouse adopted it and led the charge against Edison. Tesla, for all his technical brilliance, was a complete idiot when it came to business matters. In fact, Westinghouse screwed him over on the financial side of their deal, and he died poor and neglected.
I'm sure many modern techies can sympathize with this story...
Most movies that have been hits in recent times have been silly. It's proibably because to many serious things are happening around us and we haven't been able to afford to be silly in our social lives.
Preston Sturges made this very point in his 1942 film Sullivan's Travels. A director of crowd-pleasing fluff films decides that, with the Depression on, he needs to turn toward social relevance -- but a trip among the common people convinces him that what they really need is escapism.
By the way, the title of his planned grimly realistic film was O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Nice to see that good titles get recycled...
This ZDNet story indicates that even the web porn vendors are tightening their belts. Now, wouldn't that suck -- laid off from a dot-com, no options, battle personal ethics, give in, go to work for porn site...and get laid off.
Hey, the business model of capitalizing on the unused talents of young hopeful immigrants left disappointed and frustrated by their failure to get rich in the Industry is as old as Hollywood. Using twenty-something geeks instead of teenage runaways doesn't change the basic deal much.
Right from the start, I could see this article would suck. Notice that of the three Hello World examples, the PHP one uses (pointless) variable substitution to get e.g. the title inserted at the appropriate place, while both the Perl and PHP versions are simple "print a huge static string or a bunch of small static strings and there's your web page" exercises. And this is useful for comparison purposes why?
I found it especially funny that JSP isn't covered. For the Hello World example, change the file extension from html to jsp, and you're done.:)
It's a technique similar to the Pig Latin defense against Naptser sharing control. By spelling it that way, we prevent Naptser and the RAII from finding stories about this issue, and probably suing everyone involved for some DCMA violation to be worked out later.
time_t is a type, not a variable. You can't store a value in time_t. 8-)
The terrible thing is that I'm geeky enough that I agonized over this minor quibble before posting my version. I finally convinced myself that it could be considered poetic license. So there.:-)
I dunno, but that sounds like one of the best excuses for a geek party I've ever heard.
Predicted party song:
One billion seconds are stored in time_t,
One billion seconds of time;
Decrement, post an event,
Nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine seconds are stored in time_t...
Same with Hitler - the Americans were to scared, and thought he was no threat. But Britain nobly stood alone.
Oh, please. I am of British heritage and this made me laugh out loud. Recall that England's noble stand of 1940-41 was made possible by England's pathetic capitulation to Hitler just two years earlier. And Neville Chamberlain was a Rugby graduate, too.
Big companies buying big software products from other big companies already (usually) demand that a copy of the source code be placed in escrow, to be delivered to the licensing company in the event that the provider goes under. This is considered to be necessary to protect the licensing company from having critical business apps "orphaned" and unsupportable.
For time-limited software, purchasers should similarly insist on a contractual guarantee that, if the licensing organization goes under without finding a new home for the product, an escrowed infinite-use key will be released.
But, as others have pointed out, this is an issue for "caveat emptor", not more government regulation. If you don't like the risks involved in renting software, either mitigate them contractually per my suggestion, or don't rent software.
For some reason I thought Mach was defined as the speed of sound at such a presure and humidity, analogously to c, which is constant, vs the Speed Of Light, which varies.
Nope. Mach number is defined to be relative to the speed of sound in the medium, since that's what is important to an aircraft designer (in terms of calculating stresses and the like).
As for the change in sound speed with altitude, this NASA page discusses the physics involved, and links to a neat simulator that lets you see how pressure, temperature, sound speed, and the like vary with altitude.
Ants are seriously smaller than the wavelength of your microwave and hence are pretty much unaffected by it- ant heaps can actually live in a working microwave!
Microwave ovens work by exciting molecular bonds at their resonant requencies. Notably, they pump energy into the O-H bonds in water molecules. Thus, anything containing water will be heated in a microwave oven. Ants contain water, of course...so the inside of a functioning microwave would not be a healthy place for them.
However, it should be noted that the distribution of microwave energy density inside an oven is not uniform. Designers try to focus energy in the lower-central volume, where food is most likely to be placed. What's more, the presence of food will absorb energy which might otherwise reach other parts of the oven. Therefore, ants might be able to live around the edges of the oven chamber without getting boiled internally. But this has nothing to do with their size.
A monk named Thelonius? C'mon, guys...my suspension of disbelief was sagging well before I got that far, but that snapped it entirely. It is a pretty funny hoax, though.
The real distinguishing characteristic of a high-quality database is rigid compliance to the "ACID properites" -- Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. Put very briefly, "atomicity" means that transactions either completely succeed or completely fail, with no partial changes possible; "consistency" means that rules concerning how data relates can be enforced by the db engine; "isolation" means that the db state visible to one transaction in process won't be changed by other parallel transactions; and "durability" means that changes won't disappear once they are completed successfully.
This all sounds simple enough, but producing a db that actually implements the ACID properties reliably is very, very hard. So hard that people tend to charge tens of thousands of dollars for the result.
Of course, in many circumstances you don't actually need a fully ACID-compliant db. In general, if your transactions don't involve strangers' money, and if data can be cross-checked and reacquired from external sources in the event of a problem, you can get by with a cheaper, non-ACID db server. But using a non-ACID db where you really need ACID-level reliability is asking for big-time trouble.
I don't see how these are supposed to be used. If the hardware can operate at low power and using generic components, its probably more efficient to emulate it on a general-purpose processor. And it it can't be, I doubt you can print it up on plastic with conductive ink. What techno-ecological niche does this fill?
Personally, I think the voluntary payment scheme being pioneered by Amazon makes a lot of sense. I have already kicked a few bucks each to my favorite content sites (satirewire.com, modernhumorist.com, etc.) which offer the option. It will be interesting to see how much money can be raised this way, and whether donations fall over time.
In my view, contributing to keep sites you like operating makes as much sense as giving money to street performers you enjoy. Hopefully a lot of other people out there agree, and will act accordingly.
I notice someone moderated my original comment as being a "troll". I wish whoever did that would explain their reasoning, publicly or privately. I certainly didn't intend my comments as a troll.
It is (for copyrighted materials) under our legal system, and for good reasons. Being able to control copying allows content producers to profit from their work. Nobody really questioned this arrangement until it became effortless for ordinary people to violate copyright on a massive scale, at which point suddenly everyone decided they wouldn't obey an inconvenient law.
I really wish someone would explain to me why artists and distribution companies shouldn't be allowed to control how their property is used.
Well, okay, not just silly. Also kind of funny. But there's no way this is even within shouting distance of being ethical or legal.
The argument here is akin to saying "you left your front door unlocked, so of course you were inviting me to take your stereo", or "you left the keys in your car, so of course you meant for me to take it on a joyride". Negligence does not excuse crime. In practical terms, it makes it much easier, but that's not the point.
This sort of sloppy thinking is the same as that which allows millions of people to steal music using Napster who would never dream of stealing a CD from a record store. Being intangible and trivially easy doesn't make it less of a theft.
My roommates and I take a 640kbps down line and split it 3 ways... but the way it works out is that each of us almost always gets full speed because we haven't used it all at the same time
This is a tradeoff as old as voice party lines. If your bandwidth needs are high but bursty, holding a high-bandwidth connection of your own is wasteful (= expensive).
The thing is, the telcos build out capacity based on a bursty model of individual subscriber useage. If too many people saturate their lines, the central office becomes a bottleneck. Of course, they don't tell you this when you sign up.
This is just the old telco dream of charging higher rates for digital-over-voice local connections, since they tend to tie up exchanges longer than voice calls.
if MS could have their way, they'd probably outlaw open source ASAP
Here's an interesting question -- how could open source be outlawed? If MS were allowed to write such a law, how would it be crafted? Essentially, open source consists of people volunteering their labor and sharing the results. Short of extralegal gestapo tactics, how, even in theory, could one design a law to make voluntary sharing illegal?
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever considered the possibility that you're just using the wrong IDE?
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Yes, but Tesla's AC model only triumphed because Westinghouse adopted it and led the charge against Edison. Tesla, for all his technical brilliance, was a complete idiot when it came to business matters. In fact, Westinghouse screwed him over on the financial side of their deal, and he died poor and neglected.
I'm sure many modern techies can sympathize with this story...
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Preston Sturges made this very point in his 1942 film Sullivan's Travels. A director of crowd-pleasing fluff films decides that, with the Depression on, he needs to turn toward social relevance -- but a trip among the common people convinces him that what they really need is escapism.
By the way, the title of his planned grimly realistic film was O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Nice to see that good titles get recycled...
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I guess now it's officially a recession, huh?
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I found it especially funny that JSP isn't covered. For the Hello World example, change the file extension from html to jsp, and you're done. :)
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It's a technique similar to the Pig Latin defense against Naptser sharing control. By spelling it that way, we prevent Naptser and the RAII from finding stories about this issue, and probably suing everyone involved for some DCMA violation to be worked out later.
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The terrible thing is that I'm geeky enough that I agonized over this minor quibble before posting my version. I finally convinced myself that it could be considered poetic license. So there. :-)
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Predicted party song:
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Oh, please. I am of British heritage and this made me laugh out loud. Recall that England's noble stand of 1940-41 was made possible by England's pathetic capitulation to Hitler just two years earlier. And Neville Chamberlain was a Rugby graduate, too.
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For time-limited software, purchasers should similarly insist on a contractual guarantee that, if the licensing organization goes under without finding a new home for the product, an escrowed infinite-use key will be released.
But, as others have pointed out, this is an issue for "caveat emptor", not more government regulation. If you don't like the risks involved in renting software, either mitigate them contractually per my suggestion, or don't rent software.
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Nope. Mach number is defined to be relative to the speed of sound in the medium, since that's what is important to an aircraft designer (in terms of calculating stresses and the like).
As for the change in sound speed with altitude, this NASA page discusses the physics involved, and links to a neat simulator that lets you see how pressure, temperature, sound speed, and the like vary with altitude.
--
Microwave ovens work by exciting molecular bonds at their resonant requencies. Notably, they pump energy into the O-H bonds in water molecules. Thus, anything containing water will be heated in a microwave oven. Ants contain water, of course...so the inside of a functioning microwave would not be a healthy place for them.
However, it should be noted that the distribution of microwave energy density inside an oven is not uniform. Designers try to focus energy in the lower-central volume, where food is most likely to be placed. What's more, the presence of food will absorb energy which might otherwise reach other parts of the oven. Therefore, ants might be able to live around the edges of the oven chamber without getting boiled internally. But this has nothing to do with their size.
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This all sounds simple enough, but producing a db that actually implements the ACID properties reliably is very, very hard. So hard that people tend to charge tens of thousands of dollars for the result.
Of course, in many circumstances you don't actually need a fully ACID-compliant db. In general, if your transactions don't involve strangers' money, and if data can be cross-checked and reacquired from external sources in the event of a problem, you can get by with a cheaper, non-ACID db server. But using a non-ACID db where you really need ACID-level reliability is asking for big-time trouble.
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In my view, contributing to keep sites you like operating makes as much sense as giving money to street performers you enjoy. Hopefully a lot of other people out there agree, and will act accordingly.
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It is (for copyrighted materials) under our legal system, and for good reasons. Being able to control copying allows content producers to profit from their work. Nobody really questioned this arrangement until it became effortless for ordinary people to violate copyright on a massive scale, at which point suddenly everyone decided they wouldn't obey an inconvenient law.
I really wish someone would explain to me why artists and distribution companies shouldn't be allowed to control how their property is used.
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Well, okay, not just silly. Also kind of funny. But there's no way this is even within shouting distance of being ethical or legal.
The argument here is akin to saying "you left your front door unlocked, so of course you were inviting me to take your stereo", or "you left the keys in your car, so of course you meant for me to take it on a joyride". Negligence does not excuse crime. In practical terms, it makes it much easier, but that's not the point.
This sort of sloppy thinking is the same as that which allows millions of people to steal music using Napster who would never dream of stealing a CD from a record store. Being intangible and trivially easy doesn't make it less of a theft.
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Wait a second, is this an engineering test or a dot-com business plan?
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This is a tradeoff as old as voice party lines. If your bandwidth needs are high but bursty, holding a high-bandwidth connection of your own is wasteful (= expensive).
The thing is, the telcos build out capacity based on a bursty model of individual subscriber useage. If too many people saturate their lines, the central office becomes a bottleneck. Of course, they don't tell you this when you sign up.
This is just the old telco dream of charging higher rates for digital-over-voice local connections, since they tend to tie up exchanges longer than voice calls.
--
Here's an interesting question -- how could open source be outlawed? If MS were allowed to write such a law, how would it be crafted? Essentially, open source consists of people volunteering their labor and sharing the results. Short of extralegal gestapo tactics, how, even in theory, could one design a law to make voluntary sharing illegal?