She's not going to ask you to buy her expensive things to keep the relationship going. She's not going to want to move in. She's not going to [etc., etc.] [...] Financially, a girlfriend costs a *LOT* more than a hourly girlfriend.
No, an hourly girlfriend will cost more in the long run because of the one thing that she is going to do, and that is give you something for which you will be spending many dollars on medicines and treatments, quite possibly for the rest of your life.
OTOH, to keep this post on topic, the hourly girlfriend may be more willing to let you take movies of her in situations that a long-term girlfriend may not.
Somehow the/. mentality seems to be that we should all be experts, all the time on everything that affects us.
That's because we should.
once we've made time for work, food, sleep, family and friends, there ain't a lot left
Well, there's your problem right there. Cut out the family and friends part, and you'll have plenty of time to sit in front of your computer typing annoying replies to Slashdot posts in which you are only marginally interested.
On a slightly more serious note, there is a middle ground between being an expert on a subject, and being totally ignorant about a subject. Everyone should know something about everything, and everything about something. Unfortunately, most people think they know nearly everything about nearly everything, when actually they know very little about almost nothing. Or something like that.
Wouldn't it be excellent if a new(ish) proper 3D game could pull stunts like that?!
Besides engines mentioned by other respondants to your post, the CrystalSpace game engine also supports this kind of thing. Plus, it's open source (LGPL)!
Can you imagine what the Founders would have thought of a central government which wishes [...] to effectively confine the vote to the landed gentry
While I agree with most of your post, the fact is that when our country was founded, voting was pretty much restricted to the landed gentry. As time passed, more and more types of people became enfranchised, until today every adult human non-felon has the right to vote, even the mentally retarded. (Personally, I believe that felons should have the right to vote, and that people who do not have the mental capacity of an adult should not.)
A more acurate statement would be "There should be no room for politics in science.". Unfortunately, politics plays a large part in scientific research, even that not sponsered by governments. For example, in academia, politics plays a large part in applications for and awarding of tenure, grants, etc. This is because politics and money seem to go together. Only independently wealthy individuals (and hobbyists) can ignore politics when deciding what lines of research to persue.
It's like, say, you turn into a zombie. Company A creates a gun that will blow you away, but you come back to life a few hours later. Company B creates a gun that will kill you permanently. Guess which company will sell more guns? Company B, of course! Even though their guns are more expensive because they shoot silver bullets. But since the gun only has to be used once per zombie, it's cheaper for the zombie killer and more profitable for the gun manufacturer. Everybody comes out ahead (well, except for company A and the zombies).
So it just stands to reason, a permanent cure is more profitable than temporary treatment.
Pfft! No, it's the mechanical guy from Quake 2 who shouts "Trespasser!". I was amazed; I didn't know that Strogg could speak English.
Or how about the announcer for Quake 3 Arena? His voice was so weird, like what would happen if a tape recording of the voice got stretched by 10% or so. I wonder how the actor was able to make his voice sound like that.
Or Duke Nukem 3D, where he sings "Born to be Wild" at the sushi bar? The voice actor should have been awarded an emmy for his singing ability.
But my favorite is the guy in Wolfenstein 3D who shouts "Mein Lieben!" when you shoot him. It was so funny that I wanted to go out and shoot some real Germans to see whether they sounded like that when they died. Unfortunately, I didn't have a gun and there were no Germans nearby (and, besides, World War II had recently ended, making the shooting of Germans no longer legal, for the most part), and the urge eventually passed.
I would assume London, England - not London, Ontario, Canada
Right, like I live near Atlanta, Georgia, USA. When most people refer to Atlanta, they don't mean Atlanta, New York, USA, which is a tiny village near Naples (that's Naples, New York, USA, not Naples, Italy).
OTOH, "Georgia" is ambiguous enough that you sometimes have to say "Georgia, USA" or "the country Georgia" (or "Georgia, Asia") to distinguish them, at least if you live outside the USA. (Inside the USA, most people don't even know that there is a country named Georgia.)
About how long does it take for Earth to orbit the sun?
Or how long, to the nearest minute, does it take for the Earth to complete one rotation about its axis? Or how long is a day in terms of rotations of the Earth? Even dictionaries get this wrong:
The 24-hour period during which the earth completes one rotation on its axis.
time for Earth to make a complete rotation on its axis
These definitions are, of course, incorrect; in 24 hours, the Earth completes approx. 1 + 1/365.25 rotations on its axis, and the time for Earth to make a complete rotation on its axis is slightly less than a day (by about 4 minutes).
(Note to picky people who may wish to discuss sidereal days: I know what sidereal days are. We are discussing here regular, 24-hour days. Here is proof that a day is exactly 24 hours long:
$ units 1989 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: 1 day You want: hours
* 24
/ 0.041666667 You have:
Surely there's some safeguard that prevents the scenario you describe of people lifting research from journals and patenting it?
I don't know; I am not a patent lawyer. I just remember reading somewhere that a patent could not be applied for if the idea was published over a year before the application date, which implied to me that if the idea was published within a year, that publication could not be used as prior art. I remember thinking at the time that someone could read a publication and immediately apply for a patent on it. There was nothing in the article I read that suggested that they couldn't do it. However, there may be other safeguards that I don't know about. For example, the applicant may have to show prior art him(her)self that predates the published prior art. But, as I mentioned earlier, I am not a patent lawyer, so I don't know.
Except that prior art must be shown to exist not less than one year before the patent is applied for. So if Amazon applies for a patent before 2005-07-06 (next year), your post can not be used as prior art. The one-year requirement leads to rediculous situations where some immoral person scours the literature and applies for patents based on what (s)he finds, then uses the granted patent to extract royalties from the original authors.
It must irk them on some level that all of the important technologies (cars, computers, networking, flying, you name it) come from the west.
Not all. For example, rockets were invented by the Chinese. However, I can't think of any important technology that has come from any communist country. As China becomes more and more capitalistic, I expect that we'll start seeing more and more innovations from that part of the world. As the US continues to decline, China will continue to rise, until it eventually become the next dominant world power. But that won't happen until its government gets rid of its communist ideology, the way the old USSR did.
While I agree that the American government (not its people (not all of them anyway, since I am not responsible for the government, because none of the people for whom I vote ever seem to actually get elected (on a national level, anyway (not since Carter, and that was a mistake (but I was very young, and it was my first Presidential election, and I didn't know about third parties at the time, and I thought that Ford was a buffoon (in retrospect, a harsh assessment)))))) sucks in many ways, and has done all sorts of very naughty things, I have to disagree with you on the Kyoto thing. The Kyoto protocol was based on flawed studies, and provided unrealistic goals. The world, and especially the US, has to decrease the amount of pollution it creates, but the goals have to be realistic, and the science behind them has to be scientific.
As an American citizen, I have no problems with the rest of the world bashing the American government, or even the herd of sheep that is comprised of most Americans, as long as they don't bash all Americans. Many of us are not responsible for what is happening here, because the people for whom we voted are not the people who are running things. It sucks to be a political minority.
Yes, yes, I know all of that. I was responding to the statement that allocating 8K of contiguous memory might not be possible due to memory fragmentation, and suggesting a solution to that problem.
That said, I don't really see a problem allocating memory in 8K chunks anyway. The waste is negligible in today's systems, which typically have 256 MB to 2 GB of memory, most of which is allocated in huge chunks.
None of this would be an issue if the kernel could grow the stack dynamically, or if it used paging (despite the speed issues).
The problem with 8KB stacks is that they require an "order 1" memory allocation: two pages which are contiguous in physical memory. Order 1 allocations can be very hard to satisfy once the system has been running for a while; physical memory can become so fragmented that two adjacent free pages simply do not exist.
It seems to me that this problem could be avoided simply by always allocating pages in pairs (yes, slightly more wasteful of memory, I know). Alternatively, a variable page size (assigned at boot time, before paging is turned on) could also solve the problem, but that's probably not easy to implement in hardware, and would cause additional complexity elsewhere.
Libya was suspected of supporting the bombing, but it was never proven that the Libyan government had anything to do with it. They eventually agreed to pay relatives of the victims so that the problem would go away, but they never admitted to having anything to do with the bombing itself. The "evidence" pointing to Libyan government involvement was as flimsy as the recent "evidence" pointing to WMDs in Iraq.
they were threatned by planes.
Then the most that they should have done was shot the planes down (after attempts to warn the planes off first), then lodged a protest at the UN. Note that Libya and the US disagreed what constituted "international waters". While the US claimed that they were in international waters, Libya claimed that the US fleet was in Libyan waters. The US Coast Guard routinely boards vessels that are as far off the US coast as the US fleet was off the Libyan coast. The only reason that the US fleet was there was to deliberately provoke Libya; there was no other tactical or strategic reason for the fleet to be where it was.
The Cuban missile crisis was definitely a hostile act by the Soviet Union.
The actions by the Soviet Union were a response to the placing of nuclear missles in Turkey by the US. The crisis was resolved when Kennedy agreed to remove the missles from Turkey if the USSR would remove its missles from Cuba, and that is what, in fact, happened. (I am not being an apologist for the USSR, here. I think that authoritarian communism sucks, and I am glad that the Soviet Union is no more. However, the Cold War was not all black-and-white. There was good and bad on both sides.)
And just so I'm clear on this... these invasions were illegal how???
To quote your own post:
Most of these invasions were not declared acts of war.
IOW, the US invaded other sovereign nations without any formal declaration of war. Unless sanctioned by the U.N., invading another country without declaring war on it first (or without an invitation from said country, or unless said country attacks us first) is illegal, i.e., contrary to international law.
No, in the relation between the widget and milestone n, you get "ERROR: Variables are not of the same type."
Hanh? What variables? What are you talking about?
The product, on the otherhand, is unfinished.
That's true. But this has nothing to do with the finished product. It has to do with product milestones, all of which but the last are intermediate.
Since some of you seem to be having problems with my example, let me go into it in more detail. Let's assume that by milestone 3, the widget should be able to parse HTML and produce errors for invalid HTML. There is no requirement at this point for anything to render at all. So the widget has to accept <p> and <table> tags and reject, say <blingbling> tags, but doesn't have to render anything yet. Therefore, the test suite for milestone 3 has to include <p> and <table> tags. Now, let's assume that the widget does accept HTML that includes these tags, but renders nothing. Then, in relation to milestone 3, the widget is performing as expected, and thus has zero (known) defects, even though it has problems (i.e., not rendering) that must be addressed later.
Now, say that milestone 4 requires the widget to render <p> tags, but says nothing about rendering <table> tags. If the widget renders <p> tags correctly, but does not render <table> tags at all, it still passes tests for milestone 4, and thus has zero (known) defects with respect to milestone 4. OK, so what if the widget does render <table> tags by milestone 4, but renders them incorrectly (formatted badly, in the wrong font, etc.)? Since there is no requirement for the widget to properly render <table> tags by milestone 4, then bad or "buggy" output is irrelevant, and the widget still has zero (known) defects as far as milestone 4 is concerned, even though there is an obvious bug with how it renders tables, and that bug will have to be fixed somewhere down the line (before passing the milestone that does require the widget to render tables correctly).
That is what I believe that the author of the article meant when he wrote that a program can be buggy, but still have zero defects in relation to a specific milestone.
What's actually defective is the way you're thinking about it.
Personal attacks are a sign of immaturity. (That's a joke (kind of), but I hope that you get my point.)
Of course, we all know how difficult it is to write a complete set of tests.
But the set of tests was complete for milestone n. If someone happens to put a table in a test for milestone n (in my example), and tables are not expected to render properly by milestone n, then the test is defective, even though, eventually, the widget should render tables properly. There is a difference between testing at intermediate milestones and final testing.
If the widget in question doesn't render as expected in the presence of tables
Since the rendering of tables was not required to meet the milestone, you can't say that the tables didn't render as expected. There was no expectation for tables to render at all for milestone n. Therefore, it was not a defect that tables didn't render at milestone n. Presumably, at some milestone n + i for some i > 0, the widget would be expected to render tables properly. At that point, if they didn't, then that would be a defect. But not until then.
I'm losing my patience for this type of weasel-y behavior from developers. It would not fly in the manufacturing industry. Software developers break the standard (either on purpose or out of ignorance), and then send PR people on a world-wide, media-weasel word-mincing tour in the hope that if they seriously damage the public's understanding of the issue, the public will eventually abandon its quest for answers.
This has nothing to do with internal milestones. We're not talking finished product here.
Yes. Regan deliberately placed US warships off the coast of Libya (imagine how the US government would have reacted if the Libyan navy had placed warships off the coast of the USA), and when the Libyan air force flew some planes too close to the ships, he used that as an excuse to bomb Libya. It was revenge for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which the Libyan government supposedly aided and/or abetted.
"Illegal" blockade of Cuba?
Yes. The US government took it upon itself to prevent ships from moving between two sovereign nations. Imagine how the US government would have reacted if the Soviet Union had blockaded Germany or the UK (or Turkey!) to prevent the US from installing its nuclear missiles there.
Next thing, you are going to say the illegal occupation of Germany in the late 1940s.
Germany declared war on the US. It lost. I don't remember the exact terms of surrender, but it probably included the right of the Allies to occupy the country for a time.
Also, Wounded Knee was the 19th century, not the 20th.
I was referring to the incident that occurred in the late 1960s or early 1970s. That is why I called it an "incident", and not a "massacre", which is what happened in 1890.
Also, I don't understand why my post was moderated as "flamebait". The GP wanted to know about 20th century wars that were not made into games. I listed some wars, plus some other conflicts. What's so flamebaity about that?
they should have said (perhaps they did?) that the product has zero known defects.
Actually, what he wrote was that the product had zero defects relative to a particular milestone.
Here is an example: Say that you are writing an HTML widget. Milestone n states that the widget will display paragraphs (<p> elements) correctly, but says nothing about the widget displaying tables correctly. When the widget is tested, it displays paragraphs correctly, but does not display tables at all.
The widget is not fully working. It has bugs. But, in relation to milestone n, it has zero defects, i.e., it passes all of the tests for milestone n.
While I don't agree with everything in the article, and while I am no fan of Microsoft's, I think that the whole "zero defects" thing has been taken out of context here by several posters.
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, to keep this post on topic, the hourly girlfriend may be more willing to let you take movies of her in situations that a long-term girlfriend may not.
Cut out the family and friends part, and you'll have plenty of time to sit in front of your computer typing annoying replies to Slashdot posts in which you are only marginally interested.
On a slightly more serious note, there is a middle ground between being an expert on a subject, and being totally ignorant about a subject.
Everyone should know something about everything, and everything about something.
Unfortunately, most people think they know nearly everything about nearly everything, when actually they know very little about almost nothing.
Or something like that.
Plus, it's open source (LGPL)!
As time passed, more and more types of people became enfranchised, until today every adult human non-felon has the right to vote, even the mentally retarded.
(Personally, I believe that felons should have the right to vote, and that people who do not have the mental capacity of an adult should not.)
Unfortunately, politics plays a large part in scientific research, even that not sponsered by governments.
For example, in academia, politics plays a large part in applications for and awarding of tenure, grants, etc.
This is because politics and money seem to go together.
Only independently wealthy individuals (and hobbyists) can ignore politics when deciding what lines of research to persue.
Exactly!
It's like, say, you turn into a zombie. Company A creates a gun that will blow you away, but you come back to life a few hours later. Company B creates a gun that will kill you permanently. Guess which company will sell more guns? Company B, of course! Even though their guns are more expensive because they shoot silver bullets. But since the gun only has to be used once per zombie, it's cheaper for the zombie killer and more profitable for the gun manufacturer. Everybody comes out ahead (well, except for company A and the zombies).
So it just stands to reason, a permanent cure is more profitable than temporary treatment.
I get all of the important tech news I need by reading Slashdot.
Everything else is filler.
I was amazed; I didn't know that Strogg could speak English.
Or how about the announcer for Quake 3 Arena?
His voice was so weird, like what would happen if a tape recording of the voice got stretched by 10% or so.
I wonder how the actor was able to make his voice sound like that.
Or Duke Nukem 3D, where he sings "Born to be Wild" at the sushi bar?
The voice actor should have been awarded an emmy for his singing ability.
But my favorite is the guy in Wolfenstein 3D who shouts "Mein Lieben!" when you shoot him.
It was so funny that I wanted to go out and shoot some real Germans to see whether they sounded like that when they died.
Unfortunately, I didn't have a gun and there were no Germans nearby (and, besides, World War II had recently ended, making the shooting of Germans no longer legal, for the most part), and the urge eventually passed.
When most people refer to Atlanta, they don't mean Atlanta, New York, USA, which is a tiny village near Naples (that's Naples, New York, USA, not Naples, Italy).
OTOH, "Georgia" is ambiguous enough that you sometimes have to say "Georgia, USA" or "the country Georgia" (or "Georgia, Asia") to distinguish them, at least if you live outside the USA.
(Inside the USA, most people don't even know that there is a country named Georgia.)
Or how long is a day in terms of rotations of the Earth?
Even dictionaries get this wrong:
- The 24-hour period during which the earth completes one rotation on its axis.
- time for Earth to make a complete rotation on its axis
These definitions are, of course, incorrect; in 24 hours, the Earth completes approx. 1 + 1/365.25 rotations on its axis, and the time for Earth to make a complete rotation on its axis is slightly less than a day (by about 4 minutes).(Note to picky people who may wish to discuss sidereal days: I know what sidereal days are.
We are discussing here regular, 24-hour days.
Here is proof that a day is exactly 24 hours long:)
I think that the real question is: Won't all the dead bodies jam the turbines?
I just remember reading somewhere that a patent could not be applied for if the idea was published over a year before the application date, which implied to me that if the idea was published within a year, that publication could not be used as prior art.
I remember thinking at the time that someone could read a publication and immediately apply for a patent on it.
There was nothing in the article I read that suggested that they couldn't do it.
However, there may be other safeguards that I don't know about.
For example, the applicant may have to show prior art him(her)self that predates the published prior art.
But, as I mentioned earlier, I am not a patent lawyer, so I don't know.
So if Amazon applies for a patent before 2005-07-06 (next year), your post can not be used as prior art.
The one-year requirement leads to rediculous situations where some immoral person scours the literature and applies for patents based on what (s)he finds, then uses the granted patent to extract royalties from the original authors.
For example, rockets were invented by the Chinese.
However, I can't think of any important technology that has come from any communist country.
As China becomes more and more capitalistic, I expect that we'll start seeing more and more innovations from that part of the world.
As the US continues to decline, China will continue to rise, until it eventually become the next dominant world power.
But that won't happen until its government gets rid of its communist ideology, the way the old USSR did.
The world, and especially the US, has to decrease the amount of pollution it creates, but the goals have to be realistic, and the science behind them has to be scientific.
As an American citizen, I have no problems with the rest of the world bashing the American government, or even the herd of sheep that is comprised of most Americans, as long as they don't bash all Americans.
Many of us are not responsible for what is happening here, because the people for whom we voted are not the people who are running things.
It sucks to be a political minority.
Yes, yes, I know all of that.
I was responding to the statement that allocating 8K of contiguous memory might not be possible due to memory fragmentation, and suggesting a solution to that problem.
That said, I don't really see a problem allocating memory in 8K chunks anyway.
The waste is negligible in today's systems, which typically have 256 MB to 2 GB of memory, most of which is allocated in huge chunks.
None of this would be an issue if the kernel could grow the stack dynamically, or if it used paging (despite the speed issues).
Alternatively, a variable page size (assigned at boot time, before paging is turned on) could also solve the problem, but that's probably not easy to implement in hardware, and would cause additional complexity elsewhere.
They eventually agreed to pay relatives of the victims so that the problem would go away, but they never admitted to having anything to do with the bombing itself.
The "evidence" pointing to Libyan government involvement was as flimsy as the recent "evidence" pointing to WMDs in Iraq.Then the most that they should have done was shot the planes down (after attempts to warn the planes off first), then lodged a protest at the UN.
Note that Libya and the US disagreed what constituted "international waters".
While the US claimed that they were in international waters, Libya claimed that the US fleet was in Libyan waters.
The US Coast Guard routinely boards vessels that are as far off the US coast as the US fleet was off the Libyan coast.
The only reason that the US fleet was there was to deliberately provoke Libya; there was no other tactical or strategic reason for the fleet to be where it was.The actions by the Soviet Union were a response to the placing of nuclear missles in Turkey by the US.
The crisis was resolved when Kennedy agreed to remove the missles from Turkey if the USSR would remove its missles from Cuba, and that is what, in fact, happened.
(I am not being an apologist for the USSR, here.
I think that authoritarian communism sucks, and I am glad that the Soviet Union is no more.
However, the Cold War was not all black-and-white.
There was good and bad on both sides.)
Unless sanctioned by the U.N., invading another country without declaring war on it first (or without an invitation from said country, or unless said country attacks us first) is illegal, i.e., contrary to international law.
What variables?
What are you talking about?That's true.
But this has nothing to do with the finished product.
It has to do with product milestones, all of which but the last are intermediate.
Since some of you seem to be having problems with my example, let me go into it in more detail.
Let's assume that by milestone 3, the widget should be able to parse HTML and produce errors for invalid HTML.
There is no requirement at this point for anything to render at all.
So the widget has to accept <p> and <table> tags and reject, say <blingbling> tags, but doesn't have to render anything yet.
Therefore, the test suite for milestone 3 has to include <p> and <table> tags.
Now, let's assume that the widget does accept HTML that includes these tags, but renders nothing.
Then, in relation to milestone 3, the widget is performing as expected, and thus has zero (known) defects, even though it has problems (i.e., not rendering) that must be addressed later.
Now, say that milestone 4 requires the widget to render <p> tags, but says nothing about rendering <table> tags.
If the widget renders <p> tags correctly, but does not render <table> tags at all, it still passes tests for milestone 4, and thus has zero (known) defects with respect to milestone 4.
OK, so what if the widget does render <table> tags by milestone 4, but renders them incorrectly (formatted badly, in the wrong font, etc.)?
Since there is no requirement for the widget to properly render <table> tags by milestone 4, then bad or "buggy" output is irrelevant, and the widget still has zero (known) defects as far as milestone 4 is concerned, even though there is an obvious bug with how it renders tables, and that bug will have to be fixed somewhere down the line (before passing the milestone that does require the widget to render tables correctly).
That is what I believe that the author of the article meant when he wrote that a program can be buggy, but still have zero defects in relation to a specific milestone.Personal attacks are a sign of immaturity.
(That's a joke (kind of), but I hope that you get my point.)
If someone happens to put a table in a test for milestone n (in my example), and tables are not expected to render properly by milestone n, then the test is defective, even though, eventually, the widget should render tables properly.
There is a difference between testing at intermediate milestones and final testing.
There was no expectation for tables to render at all for milestone n.
Therefore, it was not a defect that tables didn't render at milestone n.
Presumably, at some milestone n + i for some i > 0, the widget would be expected to render tables properly.
At that point, if they didn't, then that would be a defect.
But not until then.This has nothing to do with internal milestones.
We're not talking finished product here.
Regan deliberately placed US warships off the coast of Libya (imagine how the US government would have reacted if the Libyan navy had placed warships off the coast of the USA), and when the Libyan air force flew some planes too close to the ships, he used that as an excuse to bomb Libya.
It was revenge for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which the Libyan government supposedly aided and/or abetted.Yes.
The US government took it upon itself to prevent ships from moving between two sovereign nations.
Imagine how the US government would have reacted if the Soviet Union had blockaded Germany or the UK (or Turkey!) to prevent the US from installing its nuclear missiles there.Germany declared war on the US.
It lost.
I don't remember the exact terms of surrender, but it probably included the right of the Allies to occupy the country for a time.I was referring to the incident that occurred in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
That is why I called it an "incident", and not a "massacre", which is what happened in 1890.
Also, I don't understand why my post was moderated as "flamebait".
The GP wanted to know about 20th century wars that were not made into games.
I listed some wars, plus some other conflicts.
What's so flamebaity about that?
Here is an example:
Say that you are writing an HTML widget.
Milestone n states that the widget will display paragraphs (<p> elements) correctly, but says nothing about the widget displaying tables correctly.
When the widget is tested, it displays paragraphs correctly, but does not display tables at all.
The widget is not fully working.
It has bugs.
But, in relation to milestone n, it has zero defects, i.e., it passes all of the tests for milestone n.
While I don't agree with everything in the article, and while I am no fan of Microsoft's, I think that the whole "zero defects" thing has been taken out of context here by several posters.