However, there's no denying that what's been happening in California since deregulation is more than a bit out of bandwith for what traditionally goes on in the national grid.
I'd say there's a serious California-specific problem layered on top of the congenital national problem that you have described.
> I get slight brownouts all the time that (without a UPS) are just enough to reset my computer... It really pisses me off, but a small UPS fixes it right up!
I never realized how unstable my neighborhood power was until I bought a UPS. I bought it due to frequent thunderstorm blackouts, and it's only good for about 5 minutes. But it beeps whenever it cuts in, and tips me off to micro-brownouts that don't even make the lights flicker.
I get them like clockwork on summer mornings, a little earlier each day as it gets hotter, presumably indicating when enough air conditioners are on to make the reserve capacity have to kick in. But I get them lots of other random times, too.
One thing's for sure, whether for good or ill: the deregulation movement in the USA has been set back 50 years by what's been happening in California. This is the first argument that will be brought up by anyone who wants to block a bid for deregulation.
> It is a highly rational and informative article on the difficulties, both practical and psychological, or biological warfare. The high points is that most people find such acts repulsive, and therefore will not commit them.
> Fear not; most of the concepts have prior art dating back 30 years.
Basically, MS will push something new that everyone "has to have", and chain it down with IP encumberances to keep the competition from implementing it. (Did I just say ".NET"?)
In this regard, the importance of the widespread adoption of Linux in serverspace cannot be overemphasised. If Linux (and Apache, and Samba, and others) had not shown up in the nick of time, MS's grab for server space would be almost a done deal by now, and they would be in a position to kill off the rest of Unix by leveraging proprietary protocols off their clientspace monopoly. But as things stand now, though, there are too many Linux boxes out there running people's businesses, and MS is going to have a hard sell trying to push any protocol that won't run on all those boxen.
> And what's the whole idea with using pictures anyway? Before the aliens even get to figuring out how to interpret/understand it, they've got to get displaying it right
The real tragedy is that it was received on Achernar VII, where the symbol for "=" looks like their 2/3males, the symbol for "1" looks like their 2/3females, and the symbol for "2" looks like their 1/3male1/3females, and the combination "=12" at the middle right, which uses those three symbols, looks like a carnal conjunctive configuration that is not approved by their majority religion. Worse, if they count to 12 on their fingers it leaves the hand in the shape of an obscene jesture.
We are now at war with the Achernar VIIlings. Their High Thwip has ordained 3.26 fippur lashings for every citizen of the planet that sent the foul message, as soon as his god teleports us there so he can administer them.
May our own gods postpone that day: they're really going to be offended if they discover that we don't have fippurs to receive the lashings on!
> To make an assumption based on current data, we have 1 civilization that has not managed to kill itself off, and 0 civilizations that have not.... I realize until we have at least ONE civilization that HAS killed itself off, we won't be able to do a real comparison
> The aliens must think we're really stupid and primitive with such a small prime earth record and probably don't want to talk to us.:-)
Actually, that's the Intergalactic Protocol for deciding who gets to invade whom. If you know a bigger prime than they do, you probably have a more advanced technological society, and are therefore also probably able to kick their asses.
And the neat thing about it is, it's really hard to bluff. If you just pick a big number and they know it isn' prime, then they'll know you don't know any real primes on that scale.
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> > You will just have to call MS and explain why you are doing so (basically they will be able to relicense the copy).
> will it be a 900 number? or will i be put on hold for three hours?
Well, the first step is to run to the store and buy your MS branded telephone. Then you swing by and pick up a copy of MSWINCE for Telephones. Then you go home, try to install your phone, reboot it half a dozen times, and finally get it up to the registration screen, which requires a working MS telephone to complete.
So you run to the store and buy your Ms branded telephone. Then you swing by and pick up a copy...
Your post has me fearful over what the next Slashdot poll is going to look like.
--
Not excessively old material, either.
on
Free Books Online
·
· Score: 2
I googled the three Drake titles, and got copyrights of 1997, 1998, and 1999 (not in that order).
Most of his work doesn't push my buttons, and in fact I didn't even bother finishing his overhyped Lord of the Isles, but I heartily recommend his old novel Birds of Prey. SciFi meets ancient Rome, kind of thing. That one really ought to be made into a movie.
If you like Birds of Prey, then try his Vettius and Friends, which is a collection of short stories set in ancient Rome (sans SciFi, with a couple of exceptions), including a wonderful man vs. shark story that purportedly predates Jaws.
What's the problem? Lots of XF86 users emulate three buttons with two. Just add another layer of emulation: emulate two buttons with one, and then emulate three buttons with the two.
> > So, today, eBay lost at least me as customer..
> You have to the weigh the sheer convenience of getting good money for your stuff (without going through a middleman) vs. a single irritating email.
Ah, it's good to see that there are still smart customers out there.
BTW, I just added you to the International Spam Distribution Company's mailing list. You'll be hearing about lots of bargin prices and MAKE MONEY FAST! opportunities from them, too.
This is kind of like when that Hot Babe opts out of a torrid sexual encounter at your place. You wait five minutes, quaff another brewsky, and ask again.
> Like any technique or technology, OO methods must ultimately be incoporated into a larger scheme of structured and generic programming (and perhaps one day, functional programming).
IMO, OO is just a further refinement of the traditional values of modularity, data hiding, etc.
Some authors treat it as a fourth class of language, yielding {procedural, functional, declarative, OO}, but I disagree. I get {procedural, functional, declarative}, with OO being a refinement of procedural, just like structured programming, data hiding, etc. are, rather than a new classes to themselves.
My language of choice is an OO language, but I think the big OO push is mostly hype. As far as code reuse goes, OO still has not provided additional reuse on the scale of what we already had with (say) glibc. (You do realize that linking to a library is code reuse, don't you?)
In my experience, low-level components are reasonably likely to be reused, but high-level components are rarely reused outside the program they were originally written for, or at least a very closely related program. (Here, I use "low-level" to mean things like widgets, sorters, etc., not "low-level" languages.)
OO is a useful idea, just like modularity, structured programming, data hiding, etc., but it seems to be surrounded by a disproportional amount of hype. Look at the number of development lists where people regularly suggest rewriting an existing C project over in C++, and sometimes even actually start a branch project for that sole purpose. The argument usually boils down to "because it's better". I have never seen an instance where changing the language would let the maintainers solve a problem that they couldn't solve with their current language, nor have any of the rewrite proposals that I've ever seen offered any arguments that the rewrite in an OO language would provide benefits that outweighed the cost of the rewrite. There just seems to be a widely held belief that "OO is better, so we should convert everything to OO implementations".
> I think you need to look at the definition of an "Object Oriented" language. You'll see that to be OO a language must support certain things like inheritance, polymorphism, run time binding (dynamic binding) and many other fun things that you can't do in procedural languages.
I've seen a number of different definitions of what it takes to qualify as an OO language, and as far as I can tell the various definitions exist for the sole purpose of letting people say "My language is; your language ain't."
Not to defend C; I avoid it whenever I can. But we should concern ourselves with the essence of what OO means.
So far as I can tell, the GTK+ people have caught the essence of OOness in GTK+, even though it's implemented in C.
Now they're going to ban Allied paraphernalia in neo-nazi neighborhoods?
--
Re:America's War on Drugs...
on
"Traffic"
·
· Score: 2
> For instance Marxist rebels in Columbia have found themselves pitted against a regieme supported by War on Drugs money and soldiers trained by American 'advisors'.
I thoroughly expect Columbia to be the USA's "next Vietnam". Slip-sliding, one decision at a time... Too much invested to back out now... Besides, we're just doing God's work to prevent the spread of Communism^w drug use... It's only a police action... The whole region may go unstable if we let Vietnam^w Columbia fall...
And so it goes. You've heard it all before, if you're old enough to remember.
Also notice that the "stop the spread of Communism" argument in the '60s followed the rabidly anti-Communist McCarthyism of the '50s. Initial anti-drug involvement in Columbia in the '90s followed the rabidly anti-drug whateverism of the '80s.
Now we can have "megatits", "tit compression schemes" (= corsets?), "parity tits", "titwise logical operators", "tit rotation", "tit buckets", and "128 tit encryption".
"big endian" and "little endian" will remain unchanged.
If your interests run toward utility rather than purience, you can notice that 8 tits (a "tyte"?) will store 3^8 = 6561 distinct values.
No, not a picture of a dark galaxy... a picture of a visible galaxy with a trail of material streaming off like it has just had a brush with another, though there's no other in sight.
BTW, the/. topic is typically misleading (do they do that on purpose?) -- dark matter != "nothing".
And while we're on the topic, there are several cosmology articles in the January Scientific American, which was still on the shelves 2-3 days ago.
Slashdot Mirror
> It's common.
Yes, and thank you for the informative post.
However, there's no denying that what's been happening in California since deregulation is more than a bit out of bandwith for what traditionally goes on in the national grid.
I'd say there's a serious California-specific problem layered on top of the congenital national problem that you have described.
--
> I get slight brownouts all the time that (without a UPS) are just enough to reset my computer... It really pisses me off, but a small UPS fixes it right up!
I never realized how unstable my neighborhood power was until I bought a UPS. I bought it due to frequent thunderstorm blackouts, and it's only good for about 5 minutes. But it beeps whenever it cuts in, and tips me off to micro-brownouts that don't even make the lights flicker.
I get them like clockwork on summer mornings, a little earlier each day as it gets hotter, presumably indicating when enough air conditioners are on to make the reserve capacity have to kick in. But I get them lots of other random times, too.
--
> He did not join the bandwagon to deregulate.
One thing's for sure, whether for good or ill: the deregulation movement in the USA has been set back 50 years by what's been happening in California. This is the first argument that will be brought up by anyone who wants to block a bid for deregulation.
--
> It is a highly rational and informative article on the difficulties, both practical and psychological, or biological warfare. The high points is that most people find such acts repulsive, and therefore will not commit them.
"Most" isn't good enough.
--
> Fear not; most of the concepts have prior art dating back 30 years.
Basically, MS will push something new that everyone "has to have", and chain it down with IP encumberances to keep the competition from implementing it. (Did I just say ".NET"?)
In this regard, the importance of the widespread adoption of Linux in serverspace cannot be overemphasised. If Linux (and Apache, and Samba, and others) had not shown up in the nick of time, MS's grab for server space would be almost a done deal by now, and they would be in a position to kill off the rest of Unix by leveraging proprietary protocols off their clientspace monopoly. But as things stand now, though, there are too many Linux boxes out there running people's businesses, and MS is going to have a hard sell trying to push any protocol that won't run on all those boxen.
--
> And what's the whole idea with using pictures anyway? Before the aliens even get to figuring out how to interpret/understand it, they've got to get displaying it right
The real tragedy is that it was received on Achernar VII, where the symbol for "=" looks like their 2/3males, the symbol for "1" looks like their 2/3females, and the symbol for "2" looks like their 1/3male1/3females, and the combination "=12" at the middle right, which uses those three symbols, looks like a carnal conjunctive configuration that is not approved by their majority religion. Worse, if they count to 12 on their fingers it leaves the hand in the shape of an obscene jesture.
We are now at war with the Achernar VIIlings. Their High Thwip has ordained 3.26 fippur lashings for every citizen of the planet that sent the foul message, as soon as his god teleports us there so he can administer them.
May our own gods postpone that day: they're really going to be offended if they discover that we don't have fippurs to receive the lashings on!
--
> To make an assumption based on current data, we have 1 civilization that has not managed to kill itself off, and 0 civilizations that have not. ... I realize until we have at least ONE civilization that HAS killed itself off, we won't be able to do a real comparison
What about the Dinosaurs?
--
> The aliens must think we're really stupid and primitive with such a small prime earth record and probably don't want to talk to us. :-)
Actually, that's the Intergalactic Protocol for deciding who gets to invade whom. If you know a bigger prime than they do, you probably have a more advanced technological society, and are therefore also probably able to kick their asses.
And the neat thing about it is, it's really hard to bluff. If you just pick a big number and they know it isn' prime, then they'll know you don't know any real primes on that scale.
--
--
> > You will just have to call MS and explain why you are doing so (basically they will be able to relicense the copy).
> will it be a 900 number? or will i be put on hold for three hours?
Well, the first step is to run to the store and buy your MS branded telephone. Then you swing by and pick up a copy of MSWINCE for Telephones. Then you go home, try to install your phone, reboot it half a dozen times, and finally get it up to the registration screen, which requires a working MS telephone to complete.
So you run to the store and buy your Ms branded telephone. Then you swing by and pick up a copy...
--
> Ummm, how do I 'chord' one mouse button?
Sorry; I was trying to be witty.
Slashdot need a moderation "-1, tried to be funny and wasn't".
--
Your post has me fearful over what the next Slashdot poll is going to look like.
--
I googled the three Drake titles, and got copyrights of 1997, 1998, and 1999 (not in that order).
Most of his work doesn't push my buttons, and in fact I didn't even bother finishing his overhyped Lord of the Isles, but I heartily recommend his old novel Birds of Prey. SciFi meets ancient Rome, kind of thing. That one really ought to be made into a movie.
If you like Birds of Prey, then try his Vettius and Friends, which is a collection of short stories set in ancient Rome (sans SciFi, with a couple of exceptions), including a wonderful man vs. shark story that purportedly predates Jaws.
--
If only it had 3 mouse buttons.
What's the problem? Lots of XF86 users emulate three buttons with two. Just add another layer of emulation: emulate two buttons with one, and then emulate three buttons with the two.
--
> > So, today, eBay lost at least me as customer. .
> You have to the weigh the sheer convenience of getting good money for your stuff (without going through a middleman) vs. a single irritating email.
Ah, it's good to see that there are still smart customers out there.
BTW, I just added you to the International Spam Distribution Company's mailing list. You'll be hearing about lots of bargin prices and MAKE MONEY FAST! opportunities from them, too.
--
No, the error was theirs. They meant to offerBTW, that letter was really lame. Never was there a species more bent on self justification than Humaniti.
--
This is kind of like when that Hot Babe opts out of a torrid sexual encounter at your place. You wait five minutes, quaff another brewsky, and ask again.
--
> ...what our Sun will look like in billions of years.
Thanks for sending the stock market into another dive.
--
> Like any technique or technology, OO methods must ultimately be incoporated into a larger scheme of structured and generic programming (and perhaps one day, functional programming).
IMO, OO is just a further refinement of the traditional values of modularity, data hiding, etc.
Some authors treat it as a fourth class of language, yielding {procedural, functional, declarative, OO}, but I disagree. I get {procedural, functional, declarative}, with OO being a refinement of procedural, just like structured programming, data hiding, etc. are, rather than a new classes to themselves.
My language of choice is an OO language, but I think the big OO push is mostly hype. As far as code reuse goes, OO still has not provided additional reuse on the scale of what we already had with (say) glibc. (You do realize that linking to a library is code reuse, don't you?)
In my experience, low-level components are reasonably likely to be reused, but high-level components are rarely reused outside the program they were originally written for, or at least a very closely related program. (Here, I use "low-level" to mean things like widgets, sorters, etc., not "low-level" languages.)
OO is a useful idea, just like modularity, structured programming, data hiding, etc., but it seems to be surrounded by a disproportional amount of hype. Look at the number of development lists where people regularly suggest rewriting an existing C project over in C++, and sometimes even actually start a branch project for that sole purpose. The argument usually boils down to "because it's better". I have never seen an instance where changing the language would let the maintainers solve a problem that they couldn't solve with their current language, nor have any of the rewrite proposals that I've ever seen offered any arguments that the rewrite in an OO language would provide benefits that outweighed the cost of the rewrite. There just seems to be a widely held belief that "OO is better, so we should convert everything to OO implementations".
--
> I think you need to look at the definition of an "Object Oriented" language. You'll see that to be OO a language must support certain things like inheritance, polymorphism, run time binding (dynamic binding) and many other fun things that you can't do in procedural languages.
I've seen a number of different definitions of what it takes to qualify as an OO language, and as far as I can tell the various definitions exist for the sole purpose of letting people say "My language is; your language ain't."
Not to defend C; I avoid it whenever I can. But we should concern ourselves with the essence of what OO means.
So far as I can tell, the GTK+ people have caught the essence of OOness in GTK+, even though it's implemented in C.
--
> Wouldn't a layer in an OS kernel be able to circumvent a good portion of the measures if the data does not reach the drive in its original form?
At the cost of having the OS DMCA'd as an illegal circumvention device.
--
Now they're going to ban Allied paraphernalia in neo-nazi neighborhoods?
--
> For instance Marxist rebels in Columbia have found themselves pitted against a regieme supported by War on Drugs money and soldiers trained by American 'advisors'.
I thoroughly expect Columbia to be the USA's "next Vietnam". Slip-sliding, one decision at a time... Too much invested to back out now... Besides, we're just doing God's work to prevent the spread of Communism^w drug use... It's only a police action... The whole region may go unstable if we let Vietnam^w Columbia fall...
And so it goes. You've heard it all before, if you're old enough to remember.
Also notice that the "stop the spread of Communism" argument in the '60s followed the rabidly anti-Communist McCarthyism of the '50s. Initial anti-drug involvement in Columbia in the '90s followed the rabidly anti-drug whateverism of the '80s.
The more things change....
--
binary digit ==> "bit"
ternary digit ==> "tit"
Now we can have "megatits", "tit compression schemes" (= corsets?), "parity tits", "titwise logical operators", "tit rotation", "tit buckets", and "128 tit encryption".
"big endian" and "little endian" will remain unchanged.
If your interests run toward utility rather than purience, you can notice that 8 tits (a "tyte"?) will store 3^8 = 6561 distinct values.
--
And here is a news article with a picture.
/. topic is typically misleading (do they do that on purpose?) -- dark matter != "nothing".
No, not a picture of a dark galaxy... a picture of a visible galaxy with a trail of material streaming off like it has just had a brush with another, though there's no other in sight.
BTW, the
And while we're on the topic, there are several cosmology articles in the January Scientific American, which was still on the shelves 2-3 days ago.
--