Yeah, SOGs are modular, although there aren't that many items to swap between. However they have the all-important Robertson driver.
A good Canuck like Cory should be ashamed (and unhappy) of owning a multitool without a Robertson driver. Since 90% of screws sold in Canada are Robertson, it seems like any multitool without one is useless. And don't give me any crap about the Leatherman Adapter -- if I wanted to screw with adapters and stuff like that I'd just buy a screwdriver.
I really wish you stupid Americans would stop imposing your shitty screwdrivers on the rest of the world.
To paraphrase: the first rule of The Accidental Tourist is to never travel with anything that isn't easily replaceable. If you take the opinion that you can never be sure what'll happen to you, even on a walk to the corner store, then you should never carry anything irreplaceable, ever. (And it would seem to me that someone who needs a lucky charm at all times would certainly agree with such an opinion.)
The problem is, ID cards and whatnot are actually a pain in the ass to replace. So you have people carrying photocopies of their birth certificates. What we need next is either implanted marks of the beast (so we don't have to worry about loosing them) or proxies for the things that are hard to replace like the Universal Card.
I myself also have a problem in that I'm just in this part of the world for school and, despite having been here for almost 6 years, never got around to feeling like a permanent resident. So since I am "travelling" as far as I'm concerned, I try to avoid owning irreplaceable things at all.
Okay, lets assume that we're talking about sweatshops rather than outright slavery. So no one is actually forcing these employees to work there, and indeed, many prefer their $0.05/h over sustenance farming. If we were to impose minimum wage on Third World countries, it would be depriving them of the possibility of working at all. Instead, we hope that as global productivity increases, the global standard of living will also increase.
The other worker abuses are things like the right to unionise and protection from hazardous environments, etc. All such privileges and protections can be assigned a willingness to pay, i.e.: the amount a worker would be willing to have their wage lowered in order to avoid the risk or gain the privilege. First World workers' wages are so high, that they're willing to accept a slightly lower wage for a better quality of life. However, if an employee would starve to death if their wage gets reduced at all, then they probably don't care about the quality of life.
So ultimately any standards we impose on other countries is a form of taxation of the world's poor by depriving them the right to compete. The only fair thing to do would be to pay this tax back through international welfare. Since we want the Third World to become self-sufficient, though, we shouldn't just give them handouts. Instead, the First World should subsidise the wages in the Third World to make up for the imposed rights.
Now this could all be performed by our tax-hungry governments, but since I'm a big fan of markets I'd like to at least give them a try first. So I propose that the government impose worker-condition labelling on all manufactured goods including cost-of-living adjusted wages, denied privileges, and hazards that would not be acceptable in the importing country. If consumers actually make decisions based on these labels, then companies like Nike will have to improve the conditions of foreign manufacturing, all without undue government regulation and colonialism.
Yeah, that's not a bad bet, the oil sands are certainly the easiest major oil reserve in Canada. But there is off-shore oil in Newfoundland, BC, and the Northwest Territories, as well.
Can you think of an environment where an autonomous vehicle would need to be on the ground before it could be mapped by a flying autonomous vehicle? As long as the US has space dominance, anything the DoD is paying for will have satellite photos before it sets down on the ground. And Mars is being carefully mapped as we speak...
It's just good design to divide an autonomous system into a seeing part and a moving part -- you can't see as well from the ground no matter how good your optics are.
Personally I think it's beautiful. Perhaps too efficient for mere humans to navigate, but that doesn't make it bad. Can you think of a better way of interchanging between five two-way roads that takes as little time and space? (Yes, England could be blamed for having such archaic road layout that five roads could end up converging at all, but that's a different issue.) The fact that its officially called "The Magic Roundabout" suggests that the people who made it at least acknowledge its weirdness.:)
Yes, I'm sure it's not entirely simple to navigate from the ground, but at least it's a fractal and symmetric pattern. And if you need some time to think about it, you can just sit on the inner lane of any of the roundabouts.
I'm assuming you're talking about collaborative encyclopedias like WikiPedia and E2? If you're feeling nice, you would be doing these sites a favour to alert the powers-that-be. They'd much rather have to remove an article now than face a future lawsuit if the perp continues copying stuff.
Sheeet! How are we supposed to hear about this kind of stuff?! The Debian package kernel-image-2.6 didn't say anything about it! If only/. reported something more useful than the kernel releases...
And it's really too bad, sounds from the FAQ that udev is a weak replacement for the brilliance that was devfs.:(
You might be right about the cheap oil, but Canada still has loads of expensive oil in oilsands and offshore. The thing is: when oil prices become high, that will encourage investment in extraction of this oil. That investment often takes the form of improving extraction technology, which in turn makes the oil cheaper to get at.
Canada is currently the US's biggest supplier of power -- I'm just worried that they'll decide they need to control the resources themselves like in I-raq.
I second that motion: what we should conclude from the article is not that CLIs are best for teaching newbies, but that GUIs need to adopt some of the best things from CLIs to become more user-friendly. After all, on the last page the author starts musing about adding notification areas to the terminal window and what-not.
Wizards, for example, are so popular because they use a dialog-style interface. Drag&drop is horribly underused (mostly because the things you want to drag onto are never around), but emulates verb-subject execution. Making alter windows behave is easy and I can only assume that Microsoft doesn't give users control over whether they pop on top because they hate users. I'm not sure how to emulate the CLI style of command lists, any suggestions?
If methods and tools can't make more reliable software, then what the hell can? If Engineers don't make reliable stuff because of their curriculum, then what is it that makes them do it?
The job of the chief engineer is to ensure that the product is developed properly, beyond a reasonable doubt. If that means they have to write every line of code themselves, then I guess we'll just have to write mission-critical software in high-level languages.
If I was confident in my team's abilities and used formal methods without cutting corners, you're damn right I'd accept liability -- provided I got paid the way PEngs do, at least.
Thanks: I must admit I only read the first page. But of course the fact that the same company was involved makes my point even more clear: the current punishments for writing incorrect software are not working.
Come on, Adolf, you should know more than anyone that not all men are created equal! Some "people" are just bad at everything, and they must do their best to scrape out a meager existence. Some people are good at everything and get hated by everyone else for it.
My best advice for this kid is to wear a T-shirt that says something along the lines of: "I'm smart, but I have no social skills, so rather than kick my ass, why not just appreciate your superiority to me?"
We Need Software *Engineers*
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The problem is that in every other development environment, the legal liability ultimately rests on the engineer who signed off on the quality assurance. But because software developers are not professionals and have no professional code of conduct, their signatures are meaningless. The only way software can become as reliable as other engineered products is to create the profession of software engineering*. And I'm not just talking about giving CompSci students a ring: many CompSci curriculums don't require any engineering techniques at all, and those that do usually devote less time to engineering than they do to sorting algorithms. The software industry requires fundamental changes, and legal liability is at most the catalyst.
* Yes, I know there are a couple of schools out there that offer SoftEng degrees, but until industry distinguishes them from CompScists and requires the engineering designation for key positions they are meaningless.
Obviously Reading It Does Nothing
on
Can Software Kill?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Every CompSci student I know (disclaimer: most of them are Canadian) learned about the Therac-25 in class. And I'd hope that every engineer building a software-controlled radiation machine would have at least heard of it. Yet clearly its publicity has done nothing to advance the state of software engineering, as this almost identical tragedy shows.
Big scary warnings don't effect software quality. I think we should consider whether legal liability will.
Better to choose violence than have no choice at all. Who does our society hold more pity for: the monsters who choose violence over peace or the victims who are innocent targets of violence? Worst are those, like victims of repeated abuse, who don't attempt to change the circumstances allowing violence to continue around them.
Anyone who doesn't walk out (never mind going in in the first place) of The Passion of The Christ is as weak as a battered wife or child witnessing domestic abuse.
I believe that's child abuse and it's a shame the censors were cowed by the subject matter into neglecting an NC-17 rating to stop people like you. Ultimately it is the duty of the state to compensate for parents with exceptionally poor judgement so that the rest of us don't have to live with their screwed-up children.
Looking at the page for this product, it looks like the same form-factor as a DSL or cable modem, so I'm guessing that this is not intended as a portable Internet connection. Therefore, it doesn't really matter if it doesn't work in some buildings as long as it works in yours.
Um, doesn't a 1D Christmas tree look just like all the other 1D shapes: a line? I would describe this as more like a double-sided saw. And since Yagis are so regularly encased in a tube, I think I'd just say they look like this.
The important result of this research, and almost everyone else on/. seems to be missing it, is that the plagarism is routinely being committed by the big bloggers against little bloggers. It's as if the next version of the World Book Encyclopedia's articles were verbatim copies of sixth-graders research papers.
I guess we should have guessed that these titans of the blogosphere get just too many good links for them to be discovering them legitimately, but it's sad how many eyeballs these guys get without any attribution. I always had a bad feeling about the people who run popular blogs...
Presumably part of Microsoft's desktop DashBoard-style system that they're hoping will kick Google's ass is an image search engine with image recognition. That's pretty much the only way this toy could be useful. Of course, I'll believe it when I see it working.
Maybe they all go off and become Perl programmers instead of going to grad school?
But seriously: academia has very little room for people with interests like Damian's. Academia does not encourage the kind of research that would make professors better teachers, instead the research should be as esoteric and far from undergrad subjects as possible. And grad students who like to "hack" are told to get over that impulse despite the fact that it would probably make them better teachers.
You're missing nothing: MSN is a piece of shit. The fact that so many people use it is excellent evidence of Microsoft's monopolistic practices. If it weren't bundled with XP, everyone would choose a better client.:(
This prediction neglects the theory that one of Microsoft's goals with the XBox was to test out Trusted Computing technology. If Microsoft can't make an unhackable console with a HD, how can they ever hope to make an unhackable PC? Of course maybe they figure they've gathered as much data as they're going to get from console decoys so they might as well get back to making money.
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Yeah, SOGs are modular, although there aren't that many items to swap between. However they have the all-important Robertson driver.
A good Canuck like Cory should be ashamed (and unhappy) of owning a multitool without a Robertson driver. Since 90% of screws sold in Canada are Robertson, it seems like any multitool without one is useless. And don't give me any crap about the Leatherman Adapter -- if I wanted to screw with adapters and stuff like that I'd just buy a screwdriver.
I really wish you stupid Americans would stop imposing your shitty screwdrivers on the rest of the world.
To paraphrase: the first rule of The Accidental Tourist is to never travel with anything that isn't easily replaceable. If you take the opinion that you can never be sure what'll happen to you, even on a walk to the corner store, then you should never carry anything irreplaceable, ever. (And it would seem to me that someone who needs a lucky charm at all times would certainly agree with such an opinion.)
The problem is, ID cards and whatnot are actually a pain in the ass to replace. So you have people carrying photocopies of their birth certificates. What we need next is either implanted marks of the beast (so we don't have to worry about loosing them) or proxies for the things that are hard to replace like the Universal Card.
I myself also have a problem in that I'm just in this part of the world for school and, despite having been here for almost 6 years, never got around to feeling like a permanent resident. So since I am "travelling" as far as I'm concerned, I try to avoid owning irreplaceable things at all.
Okay, lets assume that we're talking about sweatshops rather than outright slavery. So no one is actually forcing these employees to work there, and indeed, many prefer their $0.05/h over sustenance farming. If we were to impose minimum wage on Third World countries, it would be depriving them of the possibility of working at all. Instead, we hope that as global productivity increases, the global standard of living will also increase.
The other worker abuses are things like the right to unionise and protection from hazardous environments, etc. All such privileges and protections can be assigned a willingness to pay, i.e.: the amount a worker would be willing to have their wage lowered in order to avoid the risk or gain the privilege. First World workers' wages are so high, that they're willing to accept a slightly lower wage for a better quality of life. However, if an employee would starve to death if their wage gets reduced at all, then they probably don't care about the quality of life.
So ultimately any standards we impose on other countries is a form of taxation of the world's poor by depriving them the right to compete. The only fair thing to do would be to pay this tax back through international welfare. Since we want the Third World to become self-sufficient, though, we shouldn't just give them handouts. Instead, the First World should subsidise the wages in the Third World to make up for the imposed rights.
Now this could all be performed by our tax-hungry governments, but since I'm a big fan of markets I'd like to at least give them a try first. So I propose that the government impose worker-condition labelling on all manufactured goods including cost-of-living adjusted wages, denied privileges, and hazards that would not be acceptable in the importing country. If consumers actually make decisions based on these labels, then companies like Nike will have to improve the conditions of foreign manufacturing, all without undue government regulation and colonialism.
Yeah, that's not a bad bet, the oil sands are certainly the easiest major oil reserve in Canada. But there is off-shore oil in Newfoundland, BC, and the Northwest Territories, as well.
Can you think of an environment where an autonomous vehicle would need to be on the ground before it could be mapped by a flying autonomous vehicle? As long as the US has space dominance, anything the DoD is paying for will have satellite photos before it sets down on the ground. And Mars is being carefully mapped as we speak...
It's just good design to divide an autonomous system into a seeing part and a moving part -- you can't see as well from the ground no matter how good your optics are.
Personally I think it's beautiful. Perhaps too efficient for mere humans to navigate, but that doesn't make it bad. Can you think of a better way of interchanging between five two-way roads that takes as little time and space? (Yes, England could be blamed for having such archaic road layout that five roads could end up converging at all, but that's a different issue.) The fact that its officially called "The Magic Roundabout" suggests that the people who made it at least acknowledge its weirdness. :)
Yes, I'm sure it's not entirely simple to navigate from the ground, but at least it's a fractal and symmetric pattern. And if you need some time to think about it, you can just sit on the inner lane of any of the roundabouts.
I'm assuming you're talking about collaborative encyclopedias like WikiPedia and E2? If you're feeling nice, you would be doing these sites a favour to alert the powers-that-be. They'd much rather have to remove an article now than face a future lawsuit if the perp continues copying stuff.
Sheeet! How are we supposed to hear about this kind of stuff?! The Debian package kernel-image-2.6 didn't say anything about it! If only /. reported something more useful than the kernel releases...
:(
And it's really too bad, sounds from the FAQ that udev is a weak replacement for the brilliance that was devfs.
You might be right about the cheap oil, but Canada still has loads of expensive oil in oilsands and offshore. The thing is: when oil prices become high, that will encourage investment in extraction of this oil. That investment often takes the form of improving extraction technology, which in turn makes the oil cheaper to get at.
Canada is currently the US's biggest supplier of power -- I'm just worried that they'll decide they need to control the resources themselves like in I-raq.
I second that motion: what we should conclude from the article is not that CLIs are best for teaching newbies, but that GUIs need to adopt some of the best things from CLIs to become more user-friendly. After all, on the last page the author starts musing about adding notification areas to the terminal window and what-not.
Wizards, for example, are so popular because they use a dialog-style interface. Drag&drop is horribly underused (mostly because the things you want to drag onto are never around), but emulates verb-subject execution. Making alter windows behave is easy and I can only assume that Microsoft doesn't give users control over whether they pop on top because they hate users. I'm not sure how to emulate the CLI style of command lists, any suggestions?
Not bad at all, part of my prompt turns red when the last command was a failure. And it has a kick-ass clock. :)
If methods and tools can't make more reliable software, then what the hell can? If Engineers don't make reliable stuff because of their curriculum, then what is it that makes them do it?
The job of the chief engineer is to ensure that the product is developed properly, beyond a reasonable doubt. If that means they have to write every line of code themselves, then I guess we'll just have to write mission-critical software in high-level languages.
If I was confident in my team's abilities and used formal methods without cutting corners, you're damn right I'd accept liability -- provided I got paid the way PEngs do, at least.
Thanks: I must admit I only read the first page. But of course the fact that the same company was involved makes my point even more clear: the current punishments for writing incorrect software are not working.
Come on, Adolf, you should know more than anyone that not all men are created equal! Some "people" are just bad at everything, and they must do their best to scrape out a meager existence. Some people are good at everything and get hated by everyone else for it.
My best advice for this kid is to wear a T-shirt that says something along the lines of: "I'm smart, but I have no social skills, so rather than kick my ass, why not just appreciate your superiority to me?"
The problem is that in every other development environment, the legal liability ultimately rests on the engineer who signed off on the quality assurance. But because software developers are not professionals and have no professional code of conduct, their signatures are meaningless. The only way software can become as reliable as other engineered products is to create the profession of software engineering*. And I'm not just talking about giving CompSci students a ring: many CompSci curriculums don't require any engineering techniques at all, and those that do usually devote less time to engineering than they do to sorting algorithms. The software industry requires fundamental changes, and legal liability is at most the catalyst.
* Yes, I know there are a couple of schools out there that offer SoftEng degrees, but until industry distinguishes them from CompScists and requires the engineering designation for key positions they are meaningless.
Every CompSci student I know (disclaimer: most of them are Canadian) learned about the Therac-25 in class. And I'd hope that every engineer building a software-controlled radiation machine would have at least heard of it. Yet clearly its publicity has done nothing to advance the state of software engineering, as this almost identical tragedy shows.
Big scary warnings don't effect software quality. I think we should consider whether legal liability will.
Better to choose violence than have no choice at all. Who does our society hold more pity for: the monsters who choose violence over peace or the victims who are innocent targets of violence? Worst are those, like victims of repeated abuse, who don't attempt to change the circumstances allowing violence to continue around them.
Anyone who doesn't walk out (never mind going in in the first place) of The Passion of The Christ is as weak as a battered wife or child witnessing domestic abuse.
I believe that's child abuse and it's a shame the censors were cowed by the subject matter into neglecting an NC-17 rating to stop people like you. Ultimately it is the duty of the state to compensate for parents with exceptionally poor judgement so that the rest of us don't have to live with their screwed-up children.
Of course I also think it's child abuse to expose your children to any religious dogma whatsoever, so you should probably just ignore me as someone who has an extremely different viewpoint from your own.
Looking at the page for this product, it looks like the same form-factor as a DSL or cable modem, so I'm guessing that this is not intended as a portable Internet connection. Therefore, it doesn't really matter if it doesn't work in some buildings as long as it works in yours.
Um, doesn't a 1D Christmas tree look just like all the other 1D shapes: a line? I would describe this as more like a double-sided saw. And since Yagis are so regularly encased in a tube, I think I'd just say they look like this.
The important result of this research, and almost everyone else on /. seems to be missing it, is that the plagarism is routinely being committed by the big bloggers against little bloggers. It's as if the next version of the World Book Encyclopedia's articles were verbatim copies of sixth-graders research papers.
I guess we should have guessed that these titans of the blogosphere get just too many good links for them to be discovering them legitimately, but it's sad how many eyeballs these guys get without any attribution. I always had a bad feeling about the people who run popular blogs...
Presumably part of Microsoft's desktop DashBoard-style system that they're hoping will kick Google's ass is an image search engine with image recognition. That's pretty much the only way this toy could be useful. Of course, I'll believe it when I see it working.
Maybe they all go off and become Perl programmers instead of going to grad school?
But seriously: academia has very little room for people with interests like Damian's. Academia does not encourage the kind of research that would make professors better teachers, instead the research should be as esoteric and far from undergrad subjects as possible. And grad students who like to "hack" are told to get over that impulse despite the fact that it would probably make them better teachers.
You're missing nothing: MSN is a piece of shit. The fact that so many people use it is excellent evidence of Microsoft's monopolistic practices. If it weren't bundled with XP, everyone would choose a better client. :(
This prediction neglects the theory that one of Microsoft's goals with the XBox was to test out Trusted Computing technology. If Microsoft can't make an unhackable console with a HD, how can they ever hope to make an unhackable PC? Of course maybe they figure they've gathered as much data as they're going to get from console decoys so they might as well get back to making money.