Thanks for that. So little brain, so much to keep track of. When they came out, each in turn, I thought the Transputer and Connection Machine were the best tech since at-the-time-unrealized memristor.
...the software asks you to enter your name and, instead, you feed it data which causes a buffer overrun...
Am I missing something? Who publishes software which does not check input and trap errors ? Yikes, we did this stuff as a matter of course thirty years ago on 8-bit machines with all of 32k of usable RAM, whether for work or play. (The last commercial program I did, fully a third of the code was "idiot-proofing." When my fumbling didn't break it, and my DP pro friends and their children couldn't break it, I figured it was safe enough to pass on to the customer - with, of course, my own CYA caveats.)
Some years back I thought that software liability might could be useful towards security, but as other commenters point out, there seems to be no limits on idiocy - and lawyers who'll sue on behalf of it and juries that'll go along.
market shift? Yeah, maybe some. Those with excess disposable income want some toys to be cool, maybe try a tablet, spring for a spiffy laptop. Presuming no cooling issues, the latter is prime for more RAM and bigger HDD, maybe a better burner.
Age-related? I don't doubt it. I find that I spend more time clicking on something to do what I want rather than poking around in OS and application innards. I haven't compiled anything in almost five years. I've never overclocked, although I'm a bit tempted to see if I can goose the 1090T I got in June, I just don't have the patience to plow through a mess of reboots to tune stuff, and trying to swot up on memory timings makes my head hurt.
The laptop I got in December is loaned out to a friend for her business, so I'm "stuck" with my DIY tower I put together in '09. I'm saving up to build a new rig next year. Since I'm not all that mobile these days, and receiving minimal Social Security, it's something to look forward to. I still help people out with their Window boxes, mostly doing malware removal, re-installs, backup, and data recovery.
So I'm thinking it's several things going on, some shifts in needs, desires, and usage, mostly related to both age and income.
Meanwhile, unless I find a particular thing I need elsewhere (I bought a set of dust filters from Demciflex,) Newegg gets all my business, however little that may be.
DHS is marginally yet effectively competent in advancing Big Brother. While not completely explicit in their charter, I suspect it's the mission, Too much of the rest is standard your-government-loves-you bureaucratic bullshit: building fiefdoms, rice bowls, revolving doors; an employment program for intellectual and moral drones; a new repository of, and for, those with nothing better to do in life than increase their power over others.
Of course it's also possible that at this late hour my viewpoint is skewed thus my cynicism is showing.
Ok. I scanned the patent submission - scanned, because I found the entire proposal odious. From the first paragraph my first reaction was "this is a scam." Everything I read - scanned/quick read/slowed down to read/tried to analyze - only reinforced my first impression. This entire thing is, to my mind, a wondrous new way to screw people: business owners, for ostensible fame and fortune; travellers to get sucked into paying the higher prices for goods or services due to costs of doing business being passed on to them - not to mention a thorough-going perversion of the utility of GPS trip planning and a great way of increasing the personal and societal BTU cost of motoring. This thing is a mental goatse. It can't be unread.
The only profit I can see accrues to the amoral scalliwag who sells this "service."
(Btw, way back when, during the ten years I partook of marijuana, I never got high seeking, nor whilst high sought, ways to screw over anyone. It's certainly not that I'm some paragon of virtue, it's simply that fucking with people was not part of the fabric of "high.")
To submit this proposal to a fellow human is at best pathologically arrogant. It's too much to hope, but perhaps IBM will pull their head out from where the Sun doesn't shine, maybe slough it off to Watson having a bad-voltage moment.
I've seen some damn-fool stuff so far, the past sixty-some years, including looking in the mirror, but this pretty much takes the cake.
Missing from this article, and the one on John Stapp (don't know his rank(s) while he was doing this) was mention of a great article in Life magazine I read at the time. After one briefing, on the way to lunch before an early-afternoon run, Stapp asked the doctor if there was anything he should avoid eating. The response was "Not really. Just don't eat anything that'll scratch on the way up."
The article on Stapp is worthing reading. Interesting fellow.
You can maybe find the original in rec.humor.funny from circa '90; it may also be in the classics section at http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/
If memory serves, it's:
When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like my Grandfather. Not screaming, like the passengers in his car.
I read this back then, about three in the morning, from feed excerpts provided by Darlah on the ST-RT at GEnie. For the next few hours, as I moseyed about in the RT, I chortled every time I though of it. To this day, when I tell it to someone, it's a struggle not to burst out laughing before the end. YMMV
I had classes where slide-rules were not allowed. You had to show your work to demonstrate you'd understood the stuff. Some classes let you use log tables during tests, though.
Doesn't matter so much, the devices; what matters is demonstrating the understanding.
Same in English - diagramming a sentence at the blackboard in front of class shows what you got.
All the rest is either crap or rote, with the exception of practice. Writing pages of the alphabet in print and cursive teaches muscle memory and mind memory. Pages of arithmetic, ditto.
At least in older times, with real chemicals and apparatus, labs could be... Darwinian. [grin]
No reason not to build on ferro-cement pontoons; well-made they're durable (a century or three) and no reason one couldn't have enough room and flotation for all kinds plants and critters. (If you've got submerged metal fittings, you'd need zincs; you'd also need anti-fouling coating and/or a cleaning routine.) It'd put a crimp on burden but they could be built as boat hulls; worse gets to worst, one could unhook from neighbors and utilities, up mast, and sail away.
Interesting thought, but maybe it's not collusion - I suspect separate things going on.
AMD needs Bulldozer on the desktop (and servers) _now_ - the K10s have been milked. They're holding their own, sorta, on servers, for the nonce, while Intel can afford to slide for nigh a year on brand name alone, even if for no other reason.
[I admit to being prejucided towards AMD, ever since reading a lengthy article in Byte circa '91 on Intel, AMD, and Cyrix, AMD's engineering philosophy and realization impressed me, even in light of all the great research done at Intel. That said, I think one of the larger errors in computing was the 68k family getting sidelined; we've been saddled with a host of unhappy consequences since continuing with x86.]
"Thanks for letting us know that typing is a useful skill, I guess."
Not typing, but _touch typing_. Different things.
Having read the article and many of the comments at time of post, I note that for many it's simply a matter of how one has learned to do keyboard input. Newer devices and their interfaces complicate things - no, change them completely. The simple point is that touch typing on a regular keyboard overall affords more speed - thus more efficient (and more comfortable.)
Seems to me the better way to approach this is to use the more effective method for a given interface. For a reasonably regular "standard keyboard," touch typing cannot be beaten, without recourse to exceptional motor skills and lots of bennies.
I admit I'm biased. While it's been many years since I've written for fun and profit, I learned to type in high school my senior year. Olivetti, Underwood, three or four other brands that slip my mind - still can't remember the one I scored highest using. I have to admit that watching anyone "typing" on a so-called smart phone reminds me of a young monkey learning how to peel a banana. (For correctness sake, many primates don't bother to peel 'em.)
Yes, and I'm glad of it. I noted circa '91 that three companies making that stuff were, within two years of startup, taking in a combined billion bucks.... How'd your friends make out?
Have you noticed than there seems to be a point in time when something is ready to be made and it's done nigh simultaneously in several places? In history, airplane, internal combustion engine, telephone, etc.
Jesus wept, they're handing out patents for childish crap like that?
[I really shoulda patented that noise-cancelling tech I had on paper back in '72; it had real detail - circuits, formulae, and some engineering detail. Ah, well.]
Yup, good shows all. Each had a blend of story, characters, writing that made them worth watching.
Hollywood, distro channels, networks, all run on the feedback loop of Nielson/ad revenue/scheduling. Strictly bottom-line Friday kind of stuff. It's a wonder that a decent show lasts even a season. Compounded by networks going head-to-head against a show on another network competing for the same general demographic. Sucks, man.
Easily half the shows I've watched this past decade have been made in Canada. Must be the water, eh?
Oh - and if Blade Runner II gets made, it may be a 'commercial success' but even with Ridley, I misdoubt it'll be much in the way of a good flick.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that. So little brain, so much to keep track of. When they came out, each in turn, I thought the Transputer and Connection Machine were the best tech since at-the-time-unrealized memristor.
But you can?
...the software asks you to enter your name and, instead, you feed it data which causes a buffer overrun...
Am I missing something? Who publishes software which does not check input and trap errors ? Yikes, we did this stuff as a matter of course thirty years ago on 8-bit machines with all of 32k of usable RAM, whether for work or play. (The last commercial program I did, fully a third of the code was "idiot-proofing." When my fumbling didn't break it, and my DP pro friends and their children couldn't break it, I figured it was safe enough to pass on to the customer - with, of course, my own CYA caveats.)
Some years back I thought that software liability might could be useful towards security, but as other commenters point out, there seems to be no limits on idiocy - and lawyers who'll sue on behalf of it and juries that'll go along.
market shift? Yeah, maybe some. Those with excess disposable income want some toys to be cool, maybe try a tablet, spring for a spiffy laptop. Presuming no cooling issues, the latter is prime for more RAM and bigger HDD, maybe a better burner.
Age-related? I don't doubt it. I find that I spend more time clicking on something to do what I want rather than poking around in OS and application innards. I haven't compiled anything in almost five years. I've never overclocked, although I'm a bit tempted to see if I can goose the 1090T I got in June, I just don't have the patience to plow through a mess of reboots to tune stuff, and trying to swot up on memory timings makes my head hurt.
The laptop I got in December is loaned out to a friend for her business, so I'm "stuck" with my DIY tower I put together in '09. I'm saving up to build a new rig next year. Since I'm not all that mobile these days, and receiving minimal Social Security, it's something to look forward to. I still help people out with their Window boxes, mostly doing malware removal, re-installs, backup, and data recovery.
So I'm thinking it's several things going on, some shifts in needs, desires, and usage, mostly related to both age and income.
Meanwhile, unless I find a particular thing I need elsewhere (I bought a set of dust filters from Demciflex,) Newegg gets all my business, however little that may be.
DHS is marginally yet effectively competent in advancing Big Brother. While not completely explicit in their charter, I suspect it's the mission, Too much of the rest is standard your-government-loves-you bureaucratic bullshit: building fiefdoms, rice bowls, revolving doors; an employment program for intellectual and moral drones; a new repository of, and for, those with nothing better to do in life than increase their power over others.
Of course it's also possible that at this late hour my viewpoint is skewed thus my cynicism is showing.
Yup, I can dig it, some of the ideas get wonderfully Rube Goldberg, aina?
Ok. I scanned the patent submission - scanned, because I found the entire proposal odious. From the first paragraph my first reaction was "this is a scam." Everything I read - scanned/quick read/slowed down to read/tried to analyze - only reinforced my first impression. This entire thing is, to my mind, a wondrous new way to screw people: business owners, for ostensible fame and fortune; travellers to get sucked into paying the higher prices for goods or services due to costs of doing business being passed on to them - not to mention a thorough-going perversion of the utility of GPS trip planning and a great way of increasing the personal and societal BTU cost of motoring. This thing is a mental goatse. It can't be unread.
The only profit I can see accrues to the amoral scalliwag who sells this "service."
(Btw, way back when, during the ten years I partook of marijuana, I never got high seeking, nor whilst high sought, ways to screw over anyone. It's certainly not that I'm some paragon of virtue, it's simply that fucking with people was not part of the fabric of "high.")
To submit this proposal to a fellow human is at best pathologically arrogant. It's too much to hope, but perhaps IBM will pull their head out from where the Sun doesn't shine, maybe slough it off to Watson having a bad-voltage moment.
I've seen some damn-fool stuff so far, the past sixty-some years, including looking in the mirror, but this pretty much takes the cake.
Found the link: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/93q1/carwreck.html
Missing from this article, and the one on John Stapp (don't know his rank(s) while he was doing this) was mention of a great article in Life magazine I read at the time. After one briefing, on the way to lunch before an early-afternoon run, Stapp asked the doctor if there was anything he should avoid eating. The response was "Not really. Just don't eat anything that'll scratch on the way up."
The article on Stapp is worthing reading. Interesting fellow.
You can maybe find the original in rec.humor.funny from circa '90; it may also be in the classics section at http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/
If memory serves, it's:
When I die, I want to go peacefully, in my sleep, like my Grandfather.
Not screaming, like the passengers in his car.
I read this back then, about three in the morning, from feed excerpts provided by Darlah on the ST-RT at GEnie. For the next few hours, as I moseyed about in the RT, I chortled every time I though of it. To this day, when I tell it to someone, it's a struggle not to burst out laughing before the end. YMMV
Interesting paper, worth reading. Thanks.
I had classes where slide-rules were not allowed. You had to show your work to demonstrate you'd understood the stuff. Some classes let you use log tables during tests, though.
Doesn't matter so much, the devices; what matters is demonstrating the understanding.
Same in English - diagramming a sentence at the blackboard in front of class shows what you got.
All the rest is either crap or rote, with the exception of practice. Writing pages of the alphabet in print and cursive teaches muscle memory and mind memory. Pages of arithmetic, ditto.
At least in older times, with real chemicals and apparatus, labs could be... Darwinian. [grin]
First good laugh today. Thanks!
No reason not to build on ferro-cement pontoons; well-made they're durable (a century or three) and no reason one couldn't have enough room and flotation for all kinds plants and critters. (If you've got submerged metal fittings, you'd need zincs; you'd also need anti-fouling coating and/or a cleaning routine.) It'd put a crimp on burden but they could be built as boat hulls; worse gets to worst, one could unhook from neighbors and utilities, up mast, and sail away.
Interesting thought, but maybe it's not collusion - I suspect separate things going on.
AMD needs Bulldozer on the desktop (and servers) _now_ - the K10s have been milked. They're holding their own, sorta, on servers, for the nonce, while Intel can afford to slide for nigh a year on brand name alone, even if for no other reason.
[I admit to being prejucided towards AMD, ever since reading a lengthy article in Byte circa '91 on Intel, AMD, and Cyrix, AMD's engineering philosophy and realization impressed me, even in light of all the great research done at Intel. That said, I think one of the larger errors in computing was the 68k family getting sidelined; we've been saddled with a host of unhappy consequences since continuing with x86.]
"Thanks for letting us know that typing is a useful skill, I guess."
Not typing, but _touch typing_. Different things.
Having read the article and many of the comments at time of post, I note that for many it's simply a matter of how one has learned to do keyboard input. Newer devices and their interfaces complicate things - no, change them completely. The simple point is that touch typing on a regular keyboard overall affords more speed - thus more efficient (and more comfortable.)
Seems to me the better way to approach this is to use the more effective method for a given interface. For a reasonably regular "standard keyboard," touch typing cannot be beaten, without recourse to exceptional motor skills and lots of bennies.
I admit I'm biased. While it's been many years since I've written for fun and profit, I learned to type in high school my senior year. Olivetti, Underwood, three or four other brands that slip my mind - still can't remember the one I scored highest using. I have to admit that watching anyone "typing" on a so-called smart phone reminds me of a young monkey learning how to peel a banana. (For correctness sake, many primates don't bother to peel 'em.)
Bingo. I've used it for years. Free, fast, and when used with unlocker, you can move most anything.
That said, best file utility for my needs was from Codehead Technologies for the Atari ST.
Yes, and I'm glad of it. I noted circa '91 that three companies making that stuff were, within two years of startup, taking in a combined billion bucks.... How'd your friends make out?
Have you noticed than there seems to be a point in time when something is ready to be made and it's done nigh simultaneously in several places? In history, airplane, internal combustion engine, telephone, etc.
Thanks for that link. I clicked. I read.
Jesus wept, they're handing out patents for childish crap like that?
[I really shoulda patented that noise-cancelling tech I had on paper back in '72; it had real detail - circuits, formulae, and some engineering detail. Ah, well.]
Seems a natural enough idea for something useful.
If memory serves, there's a tectonic plate or two thereabouts, so I'd expect some interesting engineering as well.
Hmm. One planet, one dominant species (apologies to e. coli et al), one future - so to me it makes sense to plan for some of the better parts of it.
for those interested, here's a link to an updated forum thread with prices and status at many on-line and physical stores:
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3220862
HT-2 managed ~three minutes of controlled flight at _Mach 20_. THAT'S the pudding. The rest is washing up.
Yup, good shows all. Each had a blend of story, characters, writing that made them worth watching.
Hollywood, distro channels, networks, all run on the feedback loop of Nielson/ad revenue/scheduling. Strictly bottom-line Friday kind of stuff. It's a wonder that a decent show lasts even a season. Compounded by networks going head-to-head against a show on another network competing for the same general demographic. Sucks, man.
Easily half the shows I've watched this past decade have been made in Canada. Must be the water, eh?
Oh - and if Blade Runner II gets made, it may be a 'commercial success' but even with Ridley, I misdoubt it'll be much in the way of a good flick.
Why is Mr. Snyder using the future tense?
Much of which he speaks is happening and has happened. The extrapolated trend seems.... obvious - just as so many patents do.
....money is root of all evil....
Um, no. It's "....the _love of_ money is the root of all evil." Using the proper concept changes the meaning and the equation, yes?