You dial the wrong number on your phone and look for "undo". When you don't find it, you grumble about how primitive the phones are.
My cordless phone and my cell phone both have buttons to delete a digit or erase the entire number.
You complain that your alarm clock is "inflexible" and "worthless" because it can't sync with your calendar and automatically know when to wake you up.
Alarm clock functions are handled by the house computer.
(Perhaps You Haven't Been Hacking Long Enough...):)
I have one word for you: beachfront. We've had a lot of this happening in Florida. People whom many slashdotters would probably classify as "rich" have had their beachfront property -- extremely expensive pieces of land -- stolen by local governments for private development purposes (typically codos or hotels). In fact, this pseudo-eminent-domain chicanery has been running rampant throughout the past several years, it just doesn't get much coverage in the press.
And for things that are difficult to do, ArcGIS 9 has much easier scripting with python...thanks to the integration of Microsoft COM.
And the grandparent poster was correct, they do have the upgrade treadmill thing going on -- if I'm not mistakened, the very next version ditches the new COM/VBA base and moves to.NET. (Or is it two versions out? I forget...)
Cool for programmers. Not cool for GIS shops with a lot of code. I'm presently making a lot of money on the side helping some local GIS folks port their old Avenue stuff (an awful language) to VBA macros/forms/scripts (a mostly-awful language). And yeah, they're planning to pay me to do it all over again when the.NET version is finally popular enough with their client base. Despite that, I'm still no fan of the upgrade treadmill -- I'd really rather be writing new stuff.
I used to do GIS for FEMA and can tell you some of the most private data comes from the Mapping and Analysis Center (MAC). Teleregistration data is one of those data sets. With this ruling now anyone can find out how much you made in the past 7 years, whether you were turned down for an SBA loan, how much assistance you did get and what type, any medical assistance you got, etc...
I'm having a very difficult time imagining why the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs to know my income history, or any of the other types of data you've listed.
Not that I'm surprised they track it. I've found them to be very untrustworthy, even as federal agencies go. I had a run-in with them a few years back: they erroneously decided the lower floor of my new $350K house wasn't properly "ventilated" and threatened to condemn it and have it demolished; attempting to comply with a bunch of rules that turned out to not even apply to me resulted in signifcant loss of value in my home and $10K in cash sucked out of my wallet. Given the way they operate, I'd rather have my emergencies managed locally, thanks.
More importantly, many geeks, myself included, endure great suffering in order to educate regular people about how much AOL sucks. It's pretty great when a computer novice has that "Eureka moment" and suddenly understands why I've been telling them to ditch AOL for the past several years.
Plus, I think it's healthy for the geeks to interact with computer users who are operating at the total-neophyte level of understanding. I was reminded of this recently when I realized a good friend (car buddy, has almost no interest in computers except hot rod websites) truly wasn't grasping the differences between "AOL" and "the Internet" and "the web". The phoenomenon wasn't new to me, but the fact that such information was still a mystery to somebody who got online daily was a bit of an eye-opener.
Just to play the devil's advocate for a moment, with regard to racing games, I find it is NOT inherently obvious to people with no gaming experience that crashing is generally OK (ignoring the obvious annoyance factor in multiplayer, etc), and more specifically, driving games virtually never "kill" you.
These are two other obvious, ingrained pieces of knowledge which are entirely counter-intuitive. I find they actually take quite awhile to "unlearn" for someone whose first videogame experience is a driving game. (I tend to spend most of my time on driving games, so that's what most of my non-gaming friends end up playing first.)
Also, I find newbie gamers have a really difficult time with the concept of time-limited races. They also have a hard time with the highly limited "viewport" into the 3D game world -- an interesting situation because it's essentially a situation where the player encounters problems because the game too accurately reflects the familiar (e.g. you won't see people fighting the urge to turn their head left-and-right in a top-down "Spy Hunter" arcade game).
I still absolutely agree that driving games are probably one of the most intuitive genres of games out there, but it isn't necessarily as cut-and-dried as it might first appear. (And by the way, personally I thought the PGR Kudos system was cool: at least they were trying something new.)
Wow, talk about replying to the wrong post... Admittedly, at first I thought, "Maybe the 'local pancake structure' reference is some kind of complex food-related pun I'm just not getting..."
And by the way, Hell Yes I would eat vat-grown steaks. In a pinch I will occasionally eat the weird shit McDonald's sells. A little vat veal couldn't be any worse.
I might agree with you in theory, but in fact, when a company decides to whack 5,000 IT staff, they often really aren't giving a lot of thought to who goes. It's usually more of a "lose everybody in Department X" type of decision. There are definitely exceptions -- my own company (which shedded 25,000 wage earners in the past few years) had rounds of layoffs (er, "RIFFs") which were handled both ways.
From the way it was written, I assumed the parent was referring to writing new software. Otherwise, what's the point of comparing it to those other languages and environments which weren't even available back then?
They really take the scenario to the extremes, and the focus is self-replicating nanotechnology rather than robotics, but it's a very interesting read.
Of course, that same code also runs on today's hardware, which leads to the obvious question, why run it on the old slow equipment at all? I own a lot of somewhat old computers (the oldest being one of the first TRS-80 Color Computers) but I'd never make the claim that they're especially useful.
Replace "mysterious & bizarre" with "nonsensical" and you'll almost Get It.
Someone like me refuses to believe in those things until presented with solid evidence simply because the assertions are so incredibly unreasonable. By contrast, the things you present as evidence of my inconsistency -- the things I do or accept without requiring proof -- are very mundane by comparison.
I don't require proof that a rock will sink to the bottom of a lake in order to believe that this will happen. I know from experience that this is highly likely.
I DO require proof that some first-century carpenter-turned-mystic won't sink to the bottom of that lake for exactly the same reason -- I know from experience that this is also highly likely.
You also leap to an unreasonable conclusion (and confuse "belief" with "faith") when you state that "a posteriori" people feel that anything which is not explainable by science "can't be true". This is false. There are plenty of things which we can't presently explain which a person like me will happily agree are nonetheless real. However, those things can be observed or demonstrated in some fashion. The examples you reference are based entirely upon anecodotal accounts from unreliable sources. Show me a man walking on water (in the Jesus sense, of course), and I'll happily believe it's possible even though no known science can explain it. However, I have no faith in the truth of the single account of this event, and I do not believe that it is possible because it is an unreasonable claim.
Furthermore, any such amazing feat would invite a scientific explanation, whereas "the faithful" (or if you prefer, the "a priori"-minded) actively reject attempts to demystify miraculous events. Fortuantely it is no longer considered acceptable to outright kill people who dare question such things, so real progress is being made.
The really sad part is that the real world is full of truly interesting and bizarre things that don't need pre-medieval storytellers to dream them up. Contemplate wave/particle duality from a simple high school physics one-slit experiment. Some neurotic clown stomping around outside a city for seven days makes for a pretty crappy story by comparison.
RTFA. Nobody is contesting their right to the name, but the entire first page of comments (and thanks to the miracle of slashcode, the same comments on the next few pages) is a bunch of speculation and whining about their new name, or who is suing whom, etc.
In fact, the article title is crap. They don't face "trademark issues", Debian just doesn't like the Moz trademark policy.
And for the record, that included things like misspellings in help files (which alone would sink any Linux distro I've ever seen), non-standard user interface issues (e.g. one of those weird dialogs where Yes/No buttons are used for non-yes/no questions) and many other things which aren't crashes or the other kinds of problems most people think about when they hear the word "bug".
Given those considerations with regard to the size and scope of Win2K, 63,000 isn't actually that bad. Firefox has more than 7300 open bugs reported, more than 10% of that number, and clearly it isn't even close to 10% of the complexity of Win2K.
Make the same comparison on a large screen and you'll change your mind. Then turn on 480p or 720p in the Xbox games and you'll wish slashdot had UBB-style "Delete My Post" capabilities.:)
Seriously, we have a 68" rear-projection TV in one room and a DLP front projector shooting a 92" picture in the HT room and PS2 games just look awful by comparison.
You're right, but you're overlooking an important point. Xbox developers basically didn't think DX/D3D compatibility was especially important. It was a selling feature that Microsoft hoped would score big, but that didn't happen. The 360 apparently has an all-new 3D API which was created in concert with some of the largest Xbox developers.
Anybody with even a little 3D programming experience will tell you that it isn't too difficult to learn a new API. They all deal with essentially the same concepts.
but without the Russians, the ISS probably wouldn't have gotten built
You appear to have accidentally submitted your comment before adding the word "late". The Russians were the primary reason the ISS went so far overbudget and why the schedule was completely thrown out the window. Heck, they even tell you that on the ISS tours at the various NASA facilities, although I get my complaining from an ex-co-worker who still sends me e-mails about Cool NASA Stuff from time to time.
The best thing the US could do is ditch the "International" part.
I agree that a lot of boxcar graffiti is interesting and well-executed, but the rest of your post ignores certain realities, all of which come to mind because I happen to know a guy who works for a train company (in the gruesome role of on-scene train wreck investigations)...
1. The rail companies don't paint over them because repainting boxcars is extremely expensive.
2. Repainting boxcars takes those boxcars out of circulation, which means they're not profitable.
3. The rail companies have no incentive to "legitimize the scene" by making boxcars available for "art". See #2.
There are 428 cities with more than a million people, and 59 with more than five million. A mere half-million isn't even worth listing; there are thousands.
Slashdot Mirror
They did, Einstein.
PYHBHLE.
:)
You dial the wrong number on your phone and look for "undo". When you don't find it, you grumble about how primitive the phones are.
My cordless phone and my cell phone both have buttons to delete a digit or erase the entire number.
You complain that your alarm clock is "inflexible" and "worthless" because it can't sync with your calendar and automatically know when to wake you up.
Alarm clock functions are handled by the house computer.
(Perhaps You Haven't Been Hacking Long Enough...)
The word is "except" not "accept".
I have one word for you: beachfront. We've had a lot of this happening in Florida. People whom many slashdotters would probably classify as "rich" have had their beachfront property -- extremely expensive pieces of land -- stolen by local governments for private development purposes (typically codos or hotels). In fact, this pseudo-eminent-domain chicanery has been running rampant throughout the past several years, it just doesn't get much coverage in the press.
And for things that are difficult to do, ArcGIS 9 has much easier scripting with python ...thanks to the integration of Microsoft COM.
.NET. (Or is it two versions out? I forget...)
.NET version is finally popular enough with their client base. Despite that, I'm still no fan of the upgrade treadmill -- I'd really rather be writing new stuff.
And the grandparent poster was correct, they do have the upgrade treadmill thing going on -- if I'm not mistakened, the very next version ditches the new COM/VBA base and moves to
Cool for programmers. Not cool for GIS shops with a lot of code. I'm presently making a lot of money on the side helping some local GIS folks port their old Avenue stuff (an awful language) to VBA macros/forms/scripts (a mostly-awful language). And yeah, they're planning to pay me to do it all over again when the
I used to do GIS for FEMA and can tell you some of the most private data comes from the Mapping and Analysis Center (MAC). Teleregistration data is one of those data sets. With this ruling now anyone can find out how much you made in the past 7 years, whether you were turned down for an SBA loan, how much assistance you did get and what type, any medical assistance you got, etc...
I'm having a very difficult time imagining why the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs to know my income history, or any of the other types of data you've listed.
Not that I'm surprised they track it. I've found them to be very untrustworthy, even as federal agencies go. I had a run-in with them a few years back: they erroneously decided the lower floor of my new $350K house wasn't properly "ventilated" and threatened to condemn it and have it demolished; attempting to comply with a bunch of rules that turned out to not even apply to me resulted in signifcant loss of value in my home and $10K in cash sucked out of my wallet. Given the way they operate, I'd rather have my emergencies managed locally, thanks.
More importantly, many geeks, myself included, endure great suffering in order to educate regular people about how much AOL sucks. It's pretty great when a computer novice has that "Eureka moment" and suddenly understands why I've been telling them to ditch AOL for the past several years.
Plus, I think it's healthy for the geeks to interact with computer users who are operating at the total-neophyte level of understanding. I was reminded of this recently when I realized a good friend (car buddy, has almost no interest in computers except hot rod websites) truly wasn't grasping the differences between "AOL" and "the Internet" and "the web". The phoenomenon wasn't new to me, but the fact that such information was still a mystery to somebody who got online daily was a bit of an eye-opener.
Just to play the devil's advocate for a moment, with regard to racing games, I find it is NOT inherently obvious to people with no gaming experience that crashing is generally OK (ignoring the obvious annoyance factor in multiplayer, etc), and more specifically, driving games virtually never "kill" you.
These are two other obvious, ingrained pieces of knowledge which are entirely counter-intuitive. I find they actually take quite awhile to "unlearn" for someone whose first videogame experience is a driving game. (I tend to spend most of my time on driving games, so that's what most of my non-gaming friends end up playing first.)
Also, I find newbie gamers have a really difficult time with the concept of time-limited races. They also have a hard time with the highly limited "viewport" into the 3D game world -- an interesting situation because it's essentially a situation where the player encounters problems because the game too accurately reflects the familiar (e.g. you won't see people fighting the urge to turn their head left-and-right in a top-down "Spy Hunter" arcade game).
I still absolutely agree that driving games are probably one of the most intuitive genres of games out there, but it isn't necessarily as cut-and-dried as it might first appear. (And by the way, personally I thought the PGR Kudos system was cool: at least they were trying something new.)
Wow, talk about replying to the wrong post... Admittedly, at first I thought, "Maybe the 'local pancake structure' reference is some kind of complex food-related pun I'm just not getting..."
And by the way, Hell Yes I would eat vat-grown steaks. In a pinch I will occasionally eat the weird shit McDonald's sells. A little vat veal couldn't be any worse.
I might agree with you in theory, but in fact, when a company decides to whack 5,000 IT staff, they often really aren't giving a lot of thought to who goes. It's usually more of a "lose everybody in Department X" type of decision. There are definitely exceptions -- my own company (which shedded 25,000 wage earners in the past few years) had rounds of layoffs (er, "RIFFs") which were handled both ways.
From the way it was written, I assumed the parent was referring to writing new software. Otherwise, what's the point of comparing it to those other languages and environments which weren't even available back then?
Good point.
They really take the scenario to the extremes, and the focus is self-replicating nanotechnology rather than robotics, but it's a very interesting read.
Advanced Automation for Space Missions
Here is a good synopsis (the study itself is rather lengthy).
There are people as good as or better than you who'll do your job for less.
In my considerable experience with the matter, "as good or better" is almost never a consideration. It is entirely a cost-driven decision.
Of course, that same code also runs on today's hardware, which leads to the obvious question, why run it on the old slow equipment at all? I own a lot of somewhat old computers (the oldest being one of the first TRS-80 Color Computers) but I'd never make the claim that they're especially useful.
Precisely because they seek to EXPLAIN...
Replace "mysterious & bizarre" with "nonsensical" and you'll almost Get It.
Someone like me refuses to believe in those things until presented with solid evidence simply because the assertions are so incredibly unreasonable. By contrast, the things you present as evidence of my inconsistency -- the things I do or accept without requiring proof -- are very mundane by comparison.
I don't require proof that a rock will sink to the bottom of a lake in order to believe that this will happen. I know from experience that this is highly likely.
I DO require proof that some first-century carpenter-turned-mystic won't sink to the bottom of that lake for exactly the same reason -- I know from experience that this is also highly likely.
You also leap to an unreasonable conclusion (and confuse "belief" with "faith") when you state that "a posteriori" people feel that anything which is not explainable by science "can't be true". This is false. There are plenty of things which we can't presently explain which a person like me will happily agree are nonetheless real. However, those things can be observed or demonstrated in some fashion. The examples you reference are based entirely upon anecodotal accounts from unreliable sources. Show me a man walking on water (in the Jesus sense, of course), and I'll happily believe it's possible even though no known science can explain it. However, I have no faith in the truth of the single account of this event, and I do not believe that it is possible because it is an unreasonable claim.
Furthermore, any such amazing feat would invite a scientific explanation, whereas "the faithful" (or if you prefer, the "a priori"-minded) actively reject attempts to demystify miraculous events. Fortuantely it is no longer considered acceptable to outright kill people who dare question such things, so real progress is being made.
The really sad part is that the real world is full of truly interesting and bizarre things that don't need pre-medieval storytellers to dream them up. Contemplate wave/particle duality from a simple high school physics one-slit experiment. Some neurotic clown stomping around outside a city for seven days makes for a pretty crappy story by comparison.
Permit me to revise a bit:
Free state:
1. Suspicion/reason for inquery
2. Get court order
3. Gather evidence
4. Prosecute
5. Trial
Police state:
1. Gather massive profile
2. Get court order*
3. Review profile for suspicious behavior
4. Persecute
5. Convict
RTFA. Nobody is contesting their right to the name, but the entire first page of comments (and thanks to the miracle of slashcode, the same comments on the next few pages) is a bunch of speculation and whining about their new name, or who is suing whom, etc.
In fact, the article title is crap. They don't face "trademark issues", Debian just doesn't like the Moz trademark policy.
The number Microsoft admitted to was 63,000.
And for the record, that included things like misspellings in help files (which alone would sink any Linux distro I've ever seen), non-standard user interface issues (e.g. one of those weird dialogs where Yes/No buttons are used for non-yes/no questions) and many other things which aren't crashes or the other kinds of problems most people think about when they hear the word "bug".
Given those considerations with regard to the size and scope of Win2K, 63,000 isn't actually that bad. Firefox has more than 7300 open bugs reported, more than 10% of that number, and clearly it isn't even close to 10% of the complexity of Win2K.
Heck, how many open Linux bug reports are there?
Hmm... you just slashdotted your logs. :)
Make the same comparison on a large screen and you'll change your mind. Then turn on 480p or 720p in the Xbox games and you'll wish slashdot had UBB-style "Delete My Post" capabilities. :)
Seriously, we have a 68" rear-projection TV in one room and a DLP front projector shooting a 92" picture in the HT room and PS2 games just look awful by comparison.
You're right, but you're overlooking an important point. Xbox developers basically didn't think DX/D3D compatibility was especially important. It was a selling feature that Microsoft hoped would score big, but that didn't happen. The 360 apparently has an all-new 3D API which was created in concert with some of the largest Xbox developers.
Anybody with even a little 3D programming experience will tell you that it isn't too difficult to learn a new API. They all deal with essentially the same concepts.
but without the Russians, the ISS probably wouldn't have gotten built
You appear to have accidentally submitted your comment before adding the word "late". The Russians were the primary reason the ISS went so far overbudget and why the schedule was completely thrown out the window. Heck, they even tell you that on the ISS tours at the various NASA facilities, although I get my complaining from an ex-co-worker who still sends me e-mails about Cool NASA Stuff from time to time.
The best thing the US could do is ditch the "International" part.
I agree that a lot of boxcar graffiti is interesting and well-executed, but the rest of your post ignores certain realities, all of which come to mind because I happen to know a guy who works for a train company (in the gruesome role of on-scene train wreck investigations)...
:)
1. The rail companies don't paint over them because repainting boxcars is extremely expensive.
2. Repainting boxcars takes those boxcars out of circulation, which means they're not profitable.
3. The rail companies have no incentive to "legitimize the scene" by making boxcars available for "art". See #2.
See the trend?
There are 428 cities with more than a million people, and 59 with more than five million. A mere half-million isn't even worth listing; there are thousands.
http://www.citypopulation.de/World.html