Oh great, a new way for Americans to get fat. Kill your TV and read a book or go exercise for god sake.
Reading a book really melts those pounds away.
I need to start posting more knee-jerk replies about Big Bad British Teeth.
I've never understood why fantasy and sci-fi are joined at the hip. Sure there are examples where someone crossed the lines a bit, but that's true of many genres. The fantasy genre has always struck me as the lazy man's path to fiction. I find it far more formulaic than sci-fi.
Resurrect? I have a 90MHz Pentium and several Pentium II's up and running just fine. I have an 80286 in storage which should boot up just fine, although even I'm having a hard time imagining a good reason to try it.
If the width of a Route segment is insufficient for passing, and the impeding Vehicle is moving, the passing Vehicle must wait until there is sufficient room to pass. No time credit will be given to the following Vehicle(s).
That combined with the fact that they're all started simultaneously means one poorly-operating entrant could potentially hold up ALL other entrants. At the very least, they should do staggered starts (there is a reason ALL off-road rally races use delayed one-up starts). There are other good bits in there, too, like no guarantee of GPS availability, not even at the waypoints.
I understand it's supposed to be a challenge, but if the X-Prize was designed this way, step one would involve a moon landing.
And you didn't even scratch the surface of designing, building, and actually using autonomous servicing equipment. I imagine the teams will just ignore that completely, relying instead on carrying enough fuel to travel 250 miles without servicing.
I hope this thing is televised somewhere. Even though I don't think it'll be possible to finish within the 10-hour time constraint, it would still be interesting to watch the attempts.
Outside of a work environment, I've rarely encounter anyone who keeps consistent, useful filenames, let alone metadata indexes
And if you end up in a large-enough work environment, the PHBs will implement fantastic new cost-saving processes like CMM and RUP which will then require you to use completely obtuse filenames like F0285913SDD.doc -- but wait, the obtuseness is standardized... oooo! aaahhh!
I'm starting to think that going after file traders may have been the RIAA's biggest mistake. I don't recall hearing much about retail music being overpriced until the RIAA decided to go after Napster. Of course, that means the price argument was probably just a reactionary response, but I don't think that makes it any less valid.
I used Napster as a covenient preview system. I wanted to own the CDs. In the early days, I did buy them (when I could find them, the RIAA's distribution network makes it diffcult-to-impossible to find anything even slightly non-mainstream). Sure they were expensive, but to me, it was worth it. Now, however, I've learned a lot more about how the music industry works, particularly where the money goes, and my opinions have changed dramatically. I listen to the music I already own, and I've mostly stopped looking for new music. When I do, I make a concerted effort to identify and support non-RIAA labels.
The RIAA brought this upon themselves, and I can't imagine I'm alone in this...
We farmed out a project to a company which used a ton of "elite" off-shore resources, and they sent back a project which relied heavily on XSLT. Granted it made sense on paper -- prior to their involvement, the data was already available in XML format. But the net result was a nightmare to debug, maintain, and upgrade. XSLT reminds me of the old saying about APL -- it's a "write-only" language.
Ok, I concede it's not actually as bad as APL, but it isn't nearly as easy to debug as regular old XML DOM based code, and we've done some side-by-side tests that adequately prove (to us; hey, they're our tests) that the code isn't any more concise or easy to write. We already knew it was harder to read and debug. And the current crop of parsers seem to run XSLT a LOT slower than the equivalent DOM calls. It strikes me as a solution in search of a problem...
and when they do so, it will be in a gradual process, not the catastrophic "10 million left jobless" situation the author describes.
Don't be so sure. He draws this conclusion from the fact that so many people are employed by a relatively small number of companies which are in direct competition. Once one of those companies decides to automate and drive down costs, their competitors will have no choice, and relatively quickly, that entire workforce will be displaced by automation. If McDonald's can show that automation is accepted by their customers, how long do you think Burger King and Wendy's will take to jump on that bandwagon and save a buck (or a few billion) in employee expenditures?
If you haven't noticed, when people are unemployed, they find other outlets for their time and energy, whether that's volunteer work, going back to school, or starting their own business.
From your list of alternative lifestyles, only starting your own business will put food on your table. Aside from the fact that the great majority of small businesses fail these days (something which wasn't true only about 50 years ago), the article describes a situation in which the barrier to entry is greatly increased -- e.g. you'll need robots to run a business cheaply enough to establish a product price point which competes with the established businesses which will have already switched to automation.
But try looking at it a different way. When you cut costs, you're freeing up resources for use by others.
The problem is that you're trying to look at it in a way which doesn't actually happen. It's another way, but it isn't realistic. Costs are cut to increase profit. Occasionally costs may be cut so much that prices may be reduced as a side-effect, but the reason that happens is to increase market share (e.g. deny market share to your competitors).
The only case where your revised approach might make sense is if you assume the cost reduction savings are rolled back into development or research, and this is rarely the case. In any mature organization, those overwhelmingly tend to be fixed amounts which are adjusted strictly as a matter of attaining some desired rate of growth.
They will not treat you better than they treat everyone else.
To the contrary, Microsoft has proven they treat their developer community better than everyone else. It's one of the few places where they show consistent "big wins" whenever somebody starts cataloging the pros and cons.
High speed rail would be much cheaper and much more efficient.
I'm on the fence about light rail. Given that few of our major population centers have a layout well-suited to adding it after the fact, I doubt it would ever be cheap, but in the larger cities it is undoubtedly handy.
They enjoy the highest standard of living in the world. They wear on their precious little backs clothing that is often made in sweatshops by children who have the poorest standard of living in the world.
Tell me again why it's bad that our children enjoy the highest standard of living?
And while you're at it, remind me why all those textile jobs that moved out of the US decades ago hasn't resulted in the great uplifting economic revolution that's supposed to be part of the Universal Good that will come of globalization.
I know a guy who runs a very small business and when he needs custom programming, he works a deal with a bunch of cheap Indians. I know this because typically he pays me a small fee to work out the specs for him, but the actual work is done in India. Incidentally, he has been doing this for about ten years, so he's way ahead of the trend.
Microsoft doesn't use it for its own products. If.NET is so good, why? If someone said, "I would never eat this, but here is some for you", would you take what was offered?
Office is being rewritten in.NET. In fact, just about everything Microsoft makes except Windows itself is being rewritten in.NET. This has been publicly known since.NET was first officially unveiled three years ago. Ground-up rewrites don't happen overnight, you know.
Programs written in.NET are more easily decompiled. If you discover and implement an especially good algorithm, others may be able to see what you did. Maybe that is the reason for number 1, above.
Irrelevant. This argument was old and tired when people used it on Java, and it's even more old and tired today. A suitably skilled person can read decompiled executable machine code without too much stress. (Ever heard of SoftICE?) Just about anything can be decompiled.
All the tools are proprietary. The programmer and his employer become like dogs on a leash. Their fortunes are tied to the management decisions of the proprietary vendor [most of rant deleted].
True enough, but anybody developing for Windows is rarely concerned about whether Microsoft is on the verge of going tits-up. Call me when Linux runs on even just 50% of the PCs in the world and then I'll get worked up over it.
My understanding is that the license agreement for.NET prevents a company from using.NET to compete with Microsoft in some areas. But how does a company know if software it develops will eventually compete with Microsoft?
Then you misunderstand the license. It's a standard type of thing you'll find in most commercial products oriented towards developers -- basically you can't just repackage it and call it your own.
The articles you linked to are simply irrelevant to the.NET discussion.
I love the Hybrid car philosophy, it is a step away from gas-guzzling SUV's. This is a great incentive for people to buy a Prius over another car too, and the body on the new models look alot better than the older ones. My friends dad has a Prius, and it drives fast, and it rides ALOT more smooth than a traditional car. I just don't know why this idea was never embrassed before. Also, how come we don't have cars that can drive themself on the interstate? It doesn't seem like it would be hard at all, since they could just implement sensors into an interstate quite simply since it is all managed by the government, an open standard could be created by the Govt, and all the car companies could follow.
You claim the Prius rides more smoothly than a traditional car, but I suspect your experience with cars is merely limited to low-end econoboxes. Try hopping into a decent mid-range Benz one day for a smooth ride.
The hybrid concept was not previously embraced because (1) people didn't care about that kind of thing (it doesn't come cheaply or easily), (2) the cars look awful; it is only recently that the national sense of style has been so stunted that the design of the Prius is considerd somewhat acceptable, and (3) the technology wasn't really up to the challenge until recently (in any affordably mass-producible sense). I would also question whether it's actually being "embraced" yet -- I'd say it is still something of a curiosity at best, although it is definitely gaining ground.
We don't have cars that drive themselves because this is a very complicated problem to solve. It may not seem like a hard problem to you because you probably spend too much time watching TV (an admittedly gratuitous conclusion I'm drawing at least partially based on your command of the written word). There are plenty of people doing real work on the problem (here and here are some examples).
Furthermore, "they" would be facing a mighty huge bill to "implement" these sensors you're dreaming up, and your statement that government involvement would somehow magically simplify everything only further detracts from the value of your commentary. The project you can read about here estimates 7.5 miles of highway will cost $200 million to rebuild with a sensor-based system, with 80% of that cost being borne by "them"... who are, of course, actually us, better known by the name "taxpayers".
Those early screenshots look gorgeous - their realism makes VC look like a cartoon in comparison.
Too bad the PS2 graphics mean the XBOX port will look like crap. I really wish companies would start with the XBOX then downgrade for the PS2. Incidentally, the screen shots look a lot like Need for Speed.
Scrambling:
In all portions of the championship, puzzles will be scrambled using random moves generated by computer. The same sequences of random moves will be applied to the puzzle of each competitor to ensure each competitor will be starting with the same random puzzle state. This same method of scrambling will be used during the averages or best of 3 ?- type portions of competition. These random moves will be applied by independent jury-members.
The number of random moves depends on the puzzle. See the below example for explanation.
But what I REALLY want to know is, how the hell do you solve a cube while blindfolded? Seriously, there are three categories of blindfolded competitions.
Personally, I want to hurl every time my wife is watching "Farscape" and I hear one of those idiot puppets refer to "micron" as a unit of time. I thought everybody learned their lesson after that fat clown George Lucas had his way with "parsec" in the original Star Wars. I believe Babylon 5 also had some trouble keeping distance and time units straight, although at the moment I can't recall any specific examples.
To me, these don't fall into the "suspension of disbelief" category. It's just simple ignorance. Hell, an auto mechanic occasionally works at micrometer scales, it's not like they're getting something esoteric like a particle decay sequence wrong (tau to k-muon? madness!).
Slashdot Mirror
Oh great, a new way for Americans to get fat. Kill your TV and read a book or go exercise for god sake. Reading a book really melts those pounds away. I need to start posting more knee-jerk replies about Big Bad British Teeth.
He had no style. He's a nut case. It's well documented.
It's certainly a new spelling.
I've never understood why fantasy and sci-fi are joined at the hip. Sure there are examples where someone crossed the lines a bit, but that's true of many genres. The fantasy genre has always struck me as the lazy man's path to fiction. I find it far more formulaic than sci-fi.
Resurrect? I have a 90MHz Pentium and several Pentium II's up and running just fine. I have an 80286 in storage which should boot up just fine, although even I'm having a hard time imagining a good reason to try it.
If the width of a Route segment is insufficient for passing, and the impeding Vehicle is moving, the passing Vehicle must wait until there is sufficient room to pass. No time credit will be given to the following Vehicle(s).
That combined with the fact that they're all started simultaneously means one poorly-operating entrant could potentially hold up ALL other entrants. At the very least, they should do staggered starts (there is a reason ALL off-road rally races use delayed one-up starts). There are other good bits in there, too, like no guarantee of GPS availability, not even at the waypoints.
I understand it's supposed to be a challenge, but if the X-Prize was designed this way, step one would involve a moon landing.
And you didn't even scratch the surface of designing, building, and actually using autonomous servicing equipment. I imagine the teams will just ignore that completely, relying instead on carrying enough fuel to travel 250 miles without servicing.
I hope this thing is televised somewhere. Even though I don't think it'll be possible to finish within the 10-hour time constraint, it would still be interesting to watch the attempts.
You really wanna know? On my most recent attempt, booting from a RAID drive on an Abit IT-7 MAX.
And if you end up in a large-enough work environment, the PHBs will implement fantastic new cost-saving processes like CMM and RUP which will then require you to use completely obtuse filenames like F0285913SDD.doc -- but wait, the obtuseness is standardized... oooo! aaahhh!
I used Napster as a covenient preview system. I wanted to own the CDs. In the early days, I did buy them (when I could find them, the RIAA's distribution network makes it diffcult-to-impossible to find anything even slightly non-mainstream). Sure they were expensive, but to me, it was worth it. Now, however, I've learned a lot more about how the music industry works, particularly where the money goes, and my opinions have changed dramatically. I listen to the music I already own, and I've mostly stopped looking for new music. When I do, I make a concerted effort to identify and support non-RIAA labels.
The RIAA brought this upon themselves, and I can't imagine I'm alone in this...
It sure as hell looked like Flamebait to me:
Your votes are being scammed to keep the neocon scum in power.
Face it. You were busted fair and square.
Don't get me wrong -- I *love* XPath... :)
We farmed out a project to a company which used a ton of "elite" off-shore resources, and they sent back a project which relied heavily on XSLT. Granted it made sense on paper -- prior to their involvement, the data was already available in XML format. But the net result was a nightmare to debug, maintain, and upgrade. XSLT reminds me of the old saying about APL -- it's a "write-only" language.
Ok, I concede it's not actually as bad as APL, but it isn't nearly as easy to debug as regular old XML DOM based code, and we've done some side-by-side tests that adequately prove (to us; hey, they're our tests) that the code isn't any more concise or easy to write. We already knew it was harder to read and debug. And the current crop of parsers seem to run XSLT a LOT slower than the equivalent DOM calls. It strikes me as a solution in search of a problem...
Don't be so sure. He draws this conclusion from the fact that so many people are employed by a relatively small number of companies which are in direct competition. Once one of those companies decides to automate and drive down costs, their competitors will have no choice, and relatively quickly, that entire workforce will be displaced by automation. If McDonald's can show that automation is accepted by their customers, how long do you think Burger King and Wendy's will take to jump on that bandwagon and save a buck (or a few billion) in employee expenditures?
From your list of alternative lifestyles, only starting your own business will put food on your table. Aside from the fact that the great majority of small businesses fail these days (something which wasn't true only about 50 years ago), the article describes a situation in which the barrier to entry is greatly increased -- e.g. you'll need robots to run a business cheaply enough to establish a product price point which competes with the established businesses which will have already switched to automation.
Good luck with the volunteer work.
The problem is that you're trying to look at it in a way which doesn't actually happen. It's another way, but it isn't realistic. Costs are cut to increase profit. Occasionally costs may be cut so much that prices may be reduced as a side-effect, but the reason that happens is to increase market share (e.g. deny market share to your competitors).
The only case where your revised approach might make sense is if you assume the cost reduction savings are rolled back into development or research, and this is rarely the case. In any mature organization, those overwhelmingly tend to be fixed amounts which are adjusted strictly as a matter of attaining some desired rate of growth.
To the contrary, Microsoft has proven they treat their developer community better than everyone else. It's one of the few places where they show consistent "big wins" whenever somebody starts cataloging the pros and cons.
I'm on the fence about light rail. Given that few of our major population centers have a layout well-suited to adding it after the fact, I doubt it would ever be cheap, but in the larger cities it is undoubtedly handy.
Tell me again why it's bad that our children enjoy the highest standard of living?
And while you're at it, remind me why all those textile jobs that moved out of the US decades ago hasn't resulted in the great uplifting economic revolution that's supposed to be part of the Universal Good that will come of globalization.
I know a guy who runs a very small business and when he needs custom programming, he works a deal with a bunch of cheap Indians. I know this because typically he pays me a small fee to work out the specs for him, but the actual work is done in India. Incidentally, he has been doing this for about ten years, so he's way ahead of the trend.
Office is being rewritten in .NET. In fact, just about everything Microsoft makes except Windows itself is being rewritten in .NET. This has been publicly known since .NET was first officially unveiled three years ago. Ground-up rewrites don't happen overnight, you know.
Programs written in .NET are more easily decompiled. If you discover and implement an especially good algorithm, others may be able to see what you did. Maybe that is the reason for number 1, above.
Irrelevant. This argument was old and tired when people used it on Java, and it's even more old and tired today. A suitably skilled person can read decompiled executable machine code without too much stress. (Ever heard of SoftICE?) Just about anything can be decompiled.
All the tools are proprietary. The programmer and his employer become like dogs on a leash. Their fortunes are tied to the management decisions of the proprietary vendor [most of rant deleted].
True enough, but anybody developing for Windows is rarely concerned about whether Microsoft is on the verge of going tits-up. Call me when Linux runs on even just 50% of the PCs in the world and then I'll get worked up over it.
My understanding is that the license agreement for .NET prevents a company from using .NET to compete with Microsoft in some areas. But how does a company know if software it develops will eventually compete with Microsoft?
Then you misunderstand the license. It's a standard type of thing you'll find in most commercial products oriented towards developers -- basically you can't just repackage it and call it your own.
The articles you linked to are simply irrelevant to the .NET discussion.
You claim the Prius rides more smoothly than a traditional car, but I suspect your experience with cars is merely limited to low-end econoboxes. Try hopping into a decent mid-range Benz one day for a smooth ride.
The hybrid concept was not previously embraced because (1) people didn't care about that kind of thing (it doesn't come cheaply or easily), (2) the cars look awful; it is only recently that the national sense of style has been so stunted that the design of the Prius is considerd somewhat acceptable, and (3) the technology wasn't really up to the challenge until recently (in any affordably mass-producible sense). I would also question whether it's actually being "embraced" yet -- I'd say it is still something of a curiosity at best, although it is definitely gaining ground.
We don't have cars that drive themselves because this is a very complicated problem to solve. It may not seem like a hard problem to you because you probably spend too much time watching TV (an admittedly gratuitous conclusion I'm drawing at least partially based on your command of the written word). There are plenty of people doing real work on the problem (here and here are some examples).
Furthermore, "they" would be facing a mighty huge bill to "implement" these sensors you're dreaming up, and your statement that government involvement would somehow magically simplify everything only further detracts from the value of your commentary. The project you can read about here estimates 7.5 miles of highway will cost $200 million to rebuild with a sensor-based system, with 80% of that cost being borne by "them"... who are, of course, actually us, better known by the name "taxpayers".
Too bad the PS2 graphics mean the XBOX port will look like crap. I really wish companies would start with the XBOX then downgrade for the PS2. Incidentally, the screen shots look a lot like Need for Speed.
Modded Redundant, but you were the first one to joke about this. You got screwed.
Scrambling:
In all portions of the championship, puzzles will be scrambled using random moves generated by computer. The same sequences of random moves will be applied to the puzzle of each competitor to ensure each competitor will be starting with the same random puzzle state. This same method of scrambling will be used during the averages or best of 3 ?- type portions of competition. These random moves will be applied by independent jury-members.
The number of random moves depends on the puzzle. See the below example for explanation.
Rubiks 3x3x3: 25 moves
Rubiks 4x4x4, 40 moves
Rubiks 5x5x5, other: 60 moves etc
But what I REALLY want to know is, how the hell do you solve a cube while blindfolded? Seriously, there are three categories of blindfolded competitions.
To me, these don't fall into the "suspension of disbelief" category. It's just simple ignorance. Hell, an auto mechanic occasionally works at micrometer scales, it's not like they're getting something esoteric like a particle decay sequence wrong (tau to k-muon? madness!).