It's funny... each year in spring, the temperatures begin to rise dramatically. Of course this doesn't concern anyone, because each fall, the temperatures go back down.
Now imagine this happening over a large period of time... we have these things called ice ages which punctuate the normal warmer periods.
Imagine if the dinosaurs had had knee-jerk media, they would have been spazzing about global cooling as the ice ages approached. (You'll also note that the prevailing theories on the dinosaur extinction do not concern themselves with ice ages as a cause, anymore).
I'm too lazy to look up references, but I recall reading that the average temperature over the lifetime of the Earth is significantly warmer than it is now, and that we are currently in a "little" ice age.
All that said, I'm all for clean, efficient, and renewable energy, not dumping toxins into the environment, and so on, but the alarmist media is sort of annoying... all creatures change the environment around them (hell, beavers have a dramatic impact on their ecosystems!), species of plants come and go, and everything adapts. If mother nature doesn't like what we're doing, eventually humanity will die out, and other creatures that are more adapted to the new landscape will take our place. This doesn't really bother me terribly.
I truly believe it is arrogent to think we understand the natural world so fully based on such a short record of observation. People need to learn to be responsible with the environment based on the merits, not based on knee-jerk reactionism in the media.
Okay, apprently you aren't anything like me then. I was doing research in solid-state physics with LANL and presenting papers to the APS at seventeen, dropped physics, and became a software engineer when I was nineteen. Growing up, I was always around adults who were skeptical at first, but eventually came around to the fact that just being a kid didn't prevent me from making a serious contribution.
Just because the scripting and stories weren't always perfect doesn't take away from who the character was -- a boy who lost his father at a young age, and felt like he needed to fill those shoes, and in the process took on way more responsibility than anyone expected of him, and usually shined. "And Wesley saves the ship" may be cliche, but when was the last time you saved something?
Best thing about Wil Wheaton interviews: he posts on the interview thread while we're still asking questions... and then more later after he's answered them!
So Brent Spiner is awesome and gets cool cameos all over the place (most recently in ST:Enterprise)... you're awesome too, so when will we see you on the big screen or on TV again? You'd make a good Star Fleet Captain by now... no one would dare ask (imitating Patrick Stewart) "Why is this child on my bridge?"
--brian
(one of the many kids who looked up to Wes Crusher)
PS - why the _HELL_ is Slashdot having an applet in the ads? It freezes up my browser in Windows for a while. It's getting to be a pain. At the very least, provide some way of turning off Applet ads.
It's a browser-related issue. I e-mailed Hemos about it last night, and he's looking into it. They don't want flash or java ads any more than we do.
Why would this affect my vote for president when both major candidates are in favor of the act?
Because the members of the Supreme Court are not going to live forever, and while I have almost as little respect for Kerry as I have for Bush, I'm much more comfortable with Kerry picking Supreme Court Justices than I am with Bush.
In the end, congress is going to make knee-jerk legislation in response to a terrified middle-America. Granted the legislation is proposed by the same folks who cause the terror in the first place: the Conservative Right (though it used to be the Liberal Left, strange how things swing back and forth over the years). But who in their right mind could vote against the "PATRIOT" act? Gimme a break.
In a situation like this, we basically have to fall back on the impartiality of the Supreme Court. And I'm confident that they'll make the right decision, whether they lean left or lean right, but ONLY if they don't lean too far. And I am counting on Bush, if he is given the opportunity, to appoint judges who would be just as at home holding a Bible and preaching from a pulpit, as they would be to make decisions on the Supreme Court.
And while the Congress probably isn't going to confirm a truly radical Right-Wing Justice, you'd be surprised what might slip through.
Kerry's appointments would likely be more moderate, whatever direction they happen to lean, and therefore more likely to look at the law, the Constitution, and what's fair for everyone, rather than voting with what they learned in church on Sunday morning.
I can never seem to find a list of changes since the previous point release -- I'm at 1.7.1. What's been fixed between 1.7.1 and 1.7.3 that would make it worth my time to update? Have they fixed the stupid annoying memory leak / quick launch issues? Have they got the e-mail headers to scroll with the message body? Really, those are the only issues I have with Mozilla, and they've been there since before 1.0.
Killing a shuttle full of astronauts for purposes of some objective experimentation in space isn't worth it. Providing best-possible-safety and life preservation is what's needed at this point.
I'd just like to point out that the two major catastrophes that have happened in the Shuttle program didm't give any time for a "life boat" to do any good. We didn't really think there was anything wrong until it was too late.
As far the "worth it" factor, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. And now that I've grown up, and I understand danger and death, I would still like to be an astronaut, danger be damned, because objective experimentation in space is everything. And the people involved in the space program believe in what they do too, or they wouldn't take the risk. They're not going to put themselves wrecklessly in harms way, but they know that sometimes things go wrong.
So, I think it's a bit silly for you to tell them it isn't worth it. Also, as nearly as I can recall, we've never lost a crew in space, including prior to the shuttle program. All of the accidents have happened inside the atmosphere, at which point you're taking chances even in a regular airplane.
According to Linus' book, Linux 0.01 was released on Sept. 17, 1991. (Second to last line, Page 87, Just for Fun). So today isn't the birthday.:(
Actually, from linux10.org, you'll note they consider the birthday to be when Linus first announced the project:
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID:
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and
professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing
since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on
things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons)
among other things).
I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work.
This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and
I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions
are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them:-)
Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi)
PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.
It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never
will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have:-(.
I've been a Linux user for 10 of those years... I'm curious how many people were working with it in the first three years before I discovered it.
What I've noticed, is that the more efficient coders on the team (myself included) need to be able to look at multiple pieces of code and documentation and applications simultaneously. Therefore, we have vi and terminals set up with an 80 character limit, so we can fit two windows side-by-side on the desktop.
The more brain-dead coders don't realize that they have a windowing environment, and run with all of their windows maximized, preventing them from taking advantage of any of the benefits thereof. They produce bizarre lines that are over 150 characters wide, and they're slower than hell, because they have to cycle through all of their programs to find the docs or the other files they're working on. It's particularly hard for them when they're using a fancy schmancy editor, so they can't even Alt-Tab through their editing windows.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I know what works, and what doesn't. Over many, many years of coding, I've used dozens of IDEs and operating environments, going way back to Borland Turbo C++ for DOS, using Visual C++, and even Eclipse. After many years of experimenting, I've settled on ViM and the command line for most tasks. It's just easier and more efficient for a trained user.
I briefly forgot we were talking about reading slashdot, and I was thinking... wow, that must have been a challenging place to get it on... I see a 100' climb ahead of me -- up out of the gutter.
Provide each player with a locator and a gun. Rig the locators to let you know when an opponent (also with a locator) is within a certain range (ie. 50 yds.). Begin panicked drawing of gun and be the first to find and kill the opponent.
Sounds like Highlander, but with guns instead of swords...
Everytime I see one of those intelligence-insulting pre-movie commercials telling me that "by downloading movies off the internet I'm causing this stunt man's family to starve," I want to stand up and shout as loud as I can:
"HOLY SHIT!! You mean I can download movies for free off of the Internet??!!"
And then run out of the theater as quickly as I can.
I have a similar reaction, except I really do tend to stand up and shout as loudly as I can: "YOU MORONS, I'M FUCKING HERE IN THE THEATRE WATCHING THE DAMN MOVIE! INSULT SOMEONE ELSE!" And then I get dirty looks from all of the retards in the theatre who are allowing our government to become a totalitarian dictatorship... Okay, so perhaps I'm feeling bitter today...
As a linguistics student at George Mason University and having used this system, I know that the people who developed this project took great care to make sure that the "paragraph" represents all of the phonemes in the English language. It is therefore a good representation (maybe not perfect, but good). Furthermore, each speaker is made to repeat the phrase three times. And the audio is of sufficient quality for analysis -- at least for research in my graduate English phonetics class last year.
Okay, sure, google is written by geeks... it's cool that it has a numeric constant for 42... but it *also* knows about PI, E, and get this.... hbar... wow!
Dan Brown has definitely improved...
on
Digital Fortress
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
A couple of years ago, I picked up Digital Fortress when it first came out. It was an interesting story, though I thought the book itself could have used some improvement. There is actually a code on the very last page of the book, if you happened to notice. When I discovered it, I e-mailed Dan via his web site with the cracked code, along with some of the things I noted about the book, including a few spelling mistakes. Dan has e-mailed me several times (apparently I was one of the few people who caught the code at the time), and he even sent me snail mail thanking me for the proof-reading. If he is still graciously accepting reader feedback, then it is no wonder his books have gotten so good over the past few years. I haven't started on the Da Vinci Code, but I'm looking forward to it.
Gee, sucks to be them... some of these IPs are in blocks outside the United States -- the first one I looked up was in Egypt... glad I'm not on that list...
Hm.. well training IS expensive, but the point of paying for it from a well known company is just that. Its training by a major company.
No offence, but i've never heard of you - so why the hell would I want to go on your training?
"Ah I see Mr Jones - you are bziman accredited! Impressive! I guess you couldn't afford the Novell training though?":)
Actually, half my point was that no one who needed a Linux expert would take a Novell cert seriously, and that is why I think the price is kinda high. This cert is really only useful if you need someone who can deal with the custom Novell packages that neither I nor my employer (nor anyone else with a sane budget) would ever use. (Maybe not no one, but it's not as general purpose as the original post seems to imply...)
And anyway, I hope you don't apply for a job with me hoping to get it based soley on the well-known'd-ness of your certs... because when I see "Useless Novell Linux Certification" or "Probably Useless But Who Knows bziman Linux Certification", I'm going to grill you on Linux and find out whether you know the stuff or not.
You should be paying for quality, not just a name. The cert is for you to learn something, not to pad your resume. Unless you want to work for someone that will buy that.
Okay, for all (three) of you who don't already know Linux, and who aren't interested in the "Novell" portions of this class, I'll be teaching GNU/Linux for the bargain price of (oh, it pains be to quote a figure so high) only $1,000 for a five day course!
Step right up!
If you're a bright class we might even get to advanced topics such as systems administration or software development with GCC and vi!
but something tells me that they're just going to totally screw up the beauty of the original ending.
Dude, PJ has already said he axed the Cleansing. From what he said, they didn't even film it for the extended edition. Too bad. I'm looking forward to the "Phantom Edit" equivalent for LotR.
Does any one else feel the urge to yell "Beefcake! Beefcake!"
On the other hand, aside from the quit-your-job part, I agree completely -- in the past two weeks, I've paid off most of my debt, with a plan to get rid of the rest over the next 12 months. I'm looking at savings of over $1,000 a month. It feels good!
...At the start.rit.edu page we've coded an activex control which checks the version numbers of the RPC DCOM patched files (We compiled a list of every major windows version, every service pack, pre/post RPC DCOM patch). If the user is not patched, they are redirected to a page indicating which patches they must download/install off our server -- we also have allowed the users to access windows update through a proxy (if IE auto proxy detection is turned on)...
I'm just curious how this "solution" works with people who either don't use IE or don't even use Windows -- does this simply lock those people out, or does it understand that those people are immune to most of the problems that you're trying to prevent?
*blink* I have yet to encounter a situation where a college-level student has their home computer taken care of by a parent... quite the opposite, usually. WTF?
I'm a part-time student at GMU (and a software engineer in the real world), and the people in charge of computing have absolutely no grasp on reality whatsoever. The dumbest part about this whole mess, is that half the classes require the use of online forums to get and submit homework. The labs are going to be completely unusable until the network is turned back on. I am glad that I have 'net access at home and at work, because there won't be any access on campus for a long long time.
You'd think it would be better -- the school's president, Alan Merten, is a PhD in computer science!
Slashdot Mirror
Now imagine this happening over a large period of time... we have these things called ice ages which punctuate the normal warmer periods.
Imagine if the dinosaurs had had knee-jerk media, they would have been spazzing about global cooling as the ice ages approached. (You'll also note that the prevailing theories on the dinosaur extinction do not concern themselves with ice ages as a cause, anymore).
I'm too lazy to look up references, but I recall reading that the average temperature over the lifetime of the Earth is significantly warmer than it is now, and that we are currently in a "little" ice age.
All that said, I'm all for clean, efficient, and renewable energy, not dumping toxins into the environment, and so on, but the alarmist media is sort of annoying... all creatures change the environment around them (hell, beavers have a dramatic impact on their ecosystems!), species of plants come and go, and everything adapts. If mother nature doesn't like what we're doing, eventually humanity will die out, and other creatures that are more adapted to the new landscape will take our place. This doesn't really bother me terribly.
I truly believe it is arrogent to think we understand the natural world so fully based on such a short record of observation. People need to learn to be responsible with the environment based on the merits, not based on knee-jerk reactionism in the media.
<end-rant>Just because the scripting and stories weren't always perfect doesn't take away from who the character was -- a boy who lost his father at a young age, and felt like he needed to fill those shoes, and in the process took on way more responsibility than anyone expected of him, and usually shined. "And Wesley saves the ship" may be cliche, but when was the last time you saved something?
So Brent Spiner is awesome and gets cool cameos all over the place (most recently in ST:Enterprise)... you're awesome too, so when will we see you on the big screen or on TV again? You'd make a good Star Fleet Captain by now... no one would dare ask (imitating Patrick Stewart) "Why is this child on my bridge?"
--brian
(one of the many kids who looked up to Wes Crusher)
It's a browser-related issue. I e-mailed Hemos about it last night, and he's looking into it. They don't want flash or java ads any more than we do.
-brian
In the end, congress is going to make knee-jerk legislation in response to a terrified middle-America. Granted the legislation is proposed by the same folks who cause the terror in the first place: the Conservative Right (though it used to be the Liberal Left, strange how things swing back and forth over the years). But who in their right mind could vote against the "PATRIOT" act? Gimme a break.
In a situation like this, we basically have to fall back on the impartiality of the Supreme Court. And I'm confident that they'll make the right decision, whether they lean left or lean right, but ONLY if they don't lean too far. And I am counting on Bush, if he is given the opportunity, to appoint judges who would be just as at home holding a Bible and preaching from a pulpit, as they would be to make decisions on the Supreme Court.
And while the Congress probably isn't going to confirm a truly radical Right-Wing Justice, you'd be surprised what might slip through.
Kerry's appointments would likely be more moderate, whatever direction they happen to lean, and therefore more likely to look at the law, the Constitution, and what's fair for everyone, rather than voting with what they learned in church on Sunday morning.
--brian
--brian
-brian
I'd just like to point out that the two major catastrophes that have happened in the Shuttle program didm't give any time for a "life boat" to do any good. We didn't really think there was anything wrong until it was too late.
As far the "worth it" factor, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. And now that I've grown up, and I understand danger and death, I would still like to be an astronaut, danger be damned, because objective experimentation in space is everything. And the people involved in the space program believe in what they do too, or they wouldn't take the risk. They're not going to put themselves wrecklessly in harms way, but they know that sometimes things go wrong.
So, I think it's a bit silly for you to tell them it isn't worth it. Also, as nearly as I can recall, we've never lost a crew in space, including prior to the shuttle program. All of the accidents have happened inside the atmosphere, at which point you're taking chances even in a regular airplane.
Actually, from linux10.org, you'll note they consider the birthday to be when Linus first announced the project:
I've been a Linux user for 10 of those years... I'm curious how many people were working with it in the first three years before I discovered it.
--brian
The more brain-dead coders don't realize that they have a windowing environment, and run with all of their windows maximized, preventing them from taking advantage of any of the benefits thereof. They produce bizarre lines that are over 150 characters wide, and they're slower than hell, because they have to cycle through all of their programs to find the docs or the other files they're working on. It's particularly hard for them when they're using a fancy schmancy editor, so they can't even Alt-Tab through their editing windows.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I know what works, and what doesn't. Over many, many years of coding, I've used dozens of IDEs and operating environments, going way back to Borland Turbo C++ for DOS, using Visual C++, and even Eclipse. After many years of experimenting, I've settled on ViM and the command line for most tasks. It's just easier and more efficient for a trained user.
I briefly forgot we were talking about reading slashdot, and I was thinking... wow, that must have been a challenging place to get it on... I see a 100' climb ahead of me -- up out of the gutter.
"One of us is nearby... there can be only one!!!"
<tongue-in-cheek>On the contrary! I would argue that no one would know more about brain damage than a professor in marketing</tongue-in-cheek>
Maybe I just don't like marketing... hmmmm.
As a linguistics student at George Mason University and having used this system, I know that the people who developed this project took great care to make sure that the "paragraph" represents all of the phonemes in the English language. It is therefore a good representation (maybe not perfect, but good). Furthermore, each speaker is made to repeat the phrase three times. And the audio is of sufficient quality for analysis -- at least for research in my graduate English phonetics class last year.
Okay, sure, google is written by geeks... it's cool that it has a numeric constant for 42... but it *also* knows about PI, E, and get this.... hbar... wow!
Regards,
Brian
--brian
Actually, half my point was that no one who needed a Linux expert would take a Novell cert seriously, and that is why I think the price is kinda high. This cert is really only useful if you need someone who can deal with the custom Novell packages that neither I nor my employer (nor anyone else with a sane budget) would ever use. (Maybe not no one, but it's not as general purpose as the original post seems to imply...)
And anyway, I hope you don't apply for a job with me hoping to get it based soley on the well-known'd-ness of your certs... because when I see "Useless Novell Linux Certification" or "Probably Useless But Who Knows bziman Linux Certification", I'm going to grill you on Linux and find out whether you know the stuff or not.
You should be paying for quality, not just a name. The cert is for you to learn something, not to pad your resume. Unless you want to work for someone that will buy that.
--brian
Okay, for all (three) of you who don't already know Linux, and who aren't interested in the "Novell" portions of this class, I'll be teaching GNU/Linux for the bargain price of (oh, it pains be to quote a figure so high) only $1,000 for a five day course!
Step right up!
If you're a bright class we might even get to advanced topics such as systems administration or software development with GCC and vi!
No kidding... I searched for "fuck verisign and fuck the horse it screwed my dns with", and the first four results were from slashdot... bizarre.
On the other hand, aside from the quit-your-job part, I agree completely -- in the past two weeks, I've paid off most of my debt, with a plan to get rid of the rest over the next 12 months. I'm looking at savings of over $1,000 a month. It feels good!
You'd think it would be better -- the school's president, Alan Merten, is a PhD in computer science!