Yeah, he should have just plucked out a few eyeballs, set someone on fire, and had the hero end up with the girl and be done with it. Writing Are Eezy!
But I must credit the man with having a better grasp of the craft of writing in the English language than Dan Brown.
How many times have we designed things that are supposed to be unsinkable or infallible and then had them sink or fail? If there is a radioactive material being used in the plant, then there is a chance that some of it will leak out.
See, it's fucking dimwits like you that talk about 7-sigma events as if they're 3-sigma events that keep us using fucking coal, with its 100% probability of continuously releasing radioactive materials into the atmosphere. Get a fucking education, or failing that, go die in a fucking fire, you goddamn Luddite.
Oh no, to get the equivalent of their high end stuff, lamp cord won't do. You have to buy 12v outdoor lighting cable (12ga 2-cdr stranded) at 49 cents a foot!
DVD's. I mean, what were they thinking? Something with barely double the resolution of VHS and less than a quarter of the resolution of standard film.
DVD resolution is purely a function of the technology available. DVDs hard a hard capacity limit, which when combined with being stuck with MPEG2 as the best compression available, limited them to what they used. It's not like they decided 1/4 the resolution of film was "good enough". That was the best they could do.
And then, Howard went batshit crazy, and the company went downhill. Hughes still does some pretty cool stuff, but it's nothing like that it used to be.
Hughes doesn't do anything anymore. Hughes no longer exists. My father worked for Hughes Aircraft from college graduation to retirement. The decline of Hughes Aircraft Co. had little to do with Howard going nuts. Hughes was still going full bore in the defense industry when HH died in '76. They continued to succeed until 1985, when the seeds of their destruction were sown. That's when the Feds ruled that Hughes Medical Institute, a non-profit research foundation which was essentially the "heir" to the HH fortune and owned Hughes Aircraft, had to divest themselves of the hugely profitable subsidiary to keep its non-profit status. That's when General Motors bought them and merged them with Delco Electronics to form the GM-Hughes Electronics division. At this point, Hughes was making everything from radar systems, to missiles, to satellites, to communications systems.
At any rate, GM being run by a bunch of fools and clowns, it was inevitable that the party would end. The collapse of the Soviet Union hit the defense industry pretty hard, and GM acquired General Dynamics' missile division and rolled it into Hughes. The inevitable decline was delayed by the fact that Hughes launched a profitable commercial business in '94, a satellite television business called "DirecTV"--- perhaps you've heard of it. None of this helped in the long run, though. GM was no better at operating a business sensibly then than it is now. Eventually the realized they were out of their league, and sold off the Hughes Aircraft portion of Hughes Electronics to Raytheo. The DirecTV division was sold to Rupert Murdoch. The Hughes Space and Communications division was sold to Boeing.
My father worked the last 3 years of his career as a Raytheon employee because of this. Raytheon is a company run by shitbag assholes. For decades Hughes was forced by the DoD to "second source" critical components from Raytheon. My father had years worth of stories about how the shit they'd manufacture was sloppy and not made to specs, and how it caused them interminable problems with Raytheon parts failing. When they acquired Hughes, they basically turned it into "more Raytheon". Employees were treated like shit, benefits cut to nothing, and retirees who were previously allowed to buy health insurance as part of the Hughes group plan were told to "suck it". Perhaps the world was no longer a place where a company like Hughes could exist. Perhaps only "McRaytheon" type companies can make money nowadays. All I know is that Raytheon tolerates a lot more incompetence than Hughes did, and as a result of them buying Hughes, they are now the only manufacturer of missiles in the US, and it's all done to "Raytheon qwality". Just as well, I guess. Not much air combat anymore.
So no, it really was GM that put Hughes on the chopping block, and Raytheon that finally swung the axe. The problem may have started with HH not having a will, but a bunch of Oldsmobile salesmen in $200 suits are what really killed them.
I would be embarrassed too.. but I think what we're seeing is money grubbing heirs and "content owners" crying about copyright terms, not the original creators.
Your POTS phone will stop working if your local switching station is digital and the power goes out there for a longer period of time than their backup power lasts.
Thank you captain obvious. Now, can you tell me how long the backup power will last at the CO? Didn't think so. Because if you could, you wouldn't have bothered to make the comment. Backup power at the CO is measured in days. They have generators on site, and contingency plans for refueling during extended power outages that exceed the unattended backup time. It's not a little 7Ah lead-acid gel cell like you get in the FiOS terminal in your basement, which has a usage measured in hours.... unless it's over 2 years old, in which case it's minutes.
Your rationale ignores the reality that tuning a radio is nothing compared to changing modulation methods. It's not as big a deal to have a single GSM module that can be tuned to whichever frequencies are necessary, as the demodulation and processing further down the pipe is identical. Working with CDMA2000 or whatever requires completely different handling beyond the receiver--- basically, you can't do it without shoehorning in a different radio, and monkeying with the OS to get it to work with a different system.
How do you map the last few branches of the tree, when tax rates do not map to anything less complicated than the lat/lon coordinates corresponding to the delivery address? Are counties/cities going to provide that insane GIS data set?
Smugly focusing on the data structure rather than the real problem, which is the selection process shows how poorly you understand the problem.
It's literary convention to italicize words in a foreign language, so as to avoid confusion. "Au contraire" is obviously French, but other phrases can parse oddly.
the bbc are British, therfore they should be considered a plural noun, as per British usage.
Linguistically, no. If you're American you say "the BBC is". If you're British you say "the BBC are". The usage has everything to do with the local dialect and nothing at all to do with the subject matter being discussed. Americans speak American English, Brits speak British English. That's the entirety of it.
Re:And now for something completely obvious
on
The Nuking of Duke Nukem
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeesh. Sounds like my job, only without the profit sharing OR the strippers.
Unless Wi-Fi is blacked out for the driver, the safety implications of this development are worrisome.
Seriously, kdawson, WTF is the above supposed to mean? WiFi is a wireless connection system. How the FUCK is the driver going to be distracted by a 2400mHz radio signal? This isn't like a TV on the dashboard, or a GPS full of fiddly touch screens, it's a bloody network standard. Even assuming that WiFi to the driver is somehow distracting (maybe a netbook balanced on the steering wheel) how the hell do you suggest they "[black it] out for the driver"? Magic radio curtains? A WEP key that randomly scrambles when you put the car in gear and appears somewhere the driver can't see it?
Give up the attempts at clever editorializing. You don't have the gray matter for it.
So, the lieutenant should stay out of the way, but Sarge needs to be there.
That's the military way to succeed, yes. The sergeants keep house internally, and the officers interface with the command structure above. The trouble with the civilian world is that there's no clear delineation between NCOs and commissioned officers. You just have generic "bosses", "managers", and "supervisors". They're usually doing a bit of BOTH jobs, and as such probably tend towards one end of the spectrum or the other. Really how it should be is that team leaders should be "working sergeants", and managers above them should act like officers.
My favorite was when my manager would ask "on a scale of 0-100%, where are we on (x)?" One of my coworkers working on the installation scripting got fed up with it and answered:
"It's at 0% because it doesn't fucking work. It will remain at 0% until I work all the bugs out of it. When I get that last bug fixed, it'll magically jump to 100%. Let me be so I can finish it!"
I'm generally against pizza. It isn't the healthiest thing in the world to eat.
Patently untrue. Even pepperoni pizza is better for you than a hamburger from any place you can name, and a quality vegetarian pizza from a decent independent pizza place is probably one of the healthiest convenience foods you can eat. What's unhealthy about tomatoes, cheese, and bread?
Quit spreading baseless charges against the world's most delicious food!
Re:Eh, you give the answer. Food
on
A Requiem For Saab
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Compare an american pizza with an italian one.
The best pizza I ever had was in Amsterdam, actually. The second best was in New York City. Italian pizza is, sad to say, largely unimpressive. It was, however still better than american pizza from a chain like Dominos.
A real hamburger with anything from any american restaurant.
I can direct you to no less than six unbelievable hamburgers within 20 miles of where I currently sit in the US, as can anyone else in a medium or large sized city here. What you won't get is directions to a chain restaurant like McDonald's or Burger King.
American beer?
I have to agree with you there. Beer here is terrible.
Coffee?
I can direct you to no less than a dozen good coffee places here where I live... What you won't get is directions to a chain coffee place like Starbucks.
Are you picking up on the pattern? There's nothing wrong with our pizza, hamburgers, or coffee. The trouble is that franchised chains that specialize in these products do not make good stuff.
Ah yes.... because car makers have some inexplicable oath of fealty to the status quo that prevents them from marketing (say) a car with the fabled 100mpg carburetor and driving their competitors out of business overnight.
I drive a rear-engine Volkswagen. Back in their heyday, they had a reputation for ridiculous reliability (with proper maintenance) at low cost. At a VW show a couple years ago I was talking to an old VW engineer who worked on those early designs. His opinion was that the current equivalent of VW then, is Hyundai and their subsidiary Kia. From what I've seen, it's true. My boss drives a 2007 Kia Rio 150 miles round trip, 5 days a week. The crazy thing gets 42mpg consistently, and with the exception of a punctured AC condenser from road debris, has nothing wrong with it. I rented an 08 Kia Rio last year, and the thing was amazing. Headroom, the car actually had headroom! If I wasn't too stupid to stop driving an out of date VW, I'd be driving a Hyundai or Kia.
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Yeah, he should have just plucked out a few eyeballs, set someone on fire, and had the hero end up with the girl and be done with it. Writing Are Eezy!
But I must credit the man with having a better grasp of the craft of writing in the English language than Dan Brown.
How many times have we designed things that are supposed to be unsinkable or infallible and then had them sink or fail? If there is a radioactive material being used in the plant, then there is a chance that some of it will leak out.
See, it's fucking dimwits like you that talk about 7-sigma events as if they're 3-sigma events that keep us using fucking coal, with its 100% probability of continuously releasing radioactive materials into the atmosphere. Get a fucking education, or failing that, go die in a fucking fire, you goddamn Luddite.
Oh no, to get the equivalent of their high end stuff, lamp cord won't do. You have to buy 12v outdoor lighting cable (12ga 2-cdr stranded) at 49 cents a foot!
DVD's. I mean, what were they thinking? Something with barely double the resolution of VHS and less than a quarter of the resolution of standard film.
DVD resolution is purely a function of the technology available. DVDs hard a hard capacity limit, which when combined with being stuck with MPEG2 as the best compression available, limited them to what they used. It's not like they decided 1/4 the resolution of film was "good enough". That was the best they could do.
AIDS laxatives doesn't qualify because its name was co-opted for a disease, not volunteered.
1) It was Ayds
2) it was an appetite suppressant, not a laxative
Ugh. I used to love Radio Shack. Need an opto-isolator and a 100K linear taper pot? Bam! hey had 'em.
Now, it's "you got questions, we got cellphones!"
And then, Howard went batshit crazy, and the company went downhill. Hughes still does some pretty cool stuff, but it's nothing like that it used to be.
Hughes doesn't do anything anymore. Hughes no longer exists. My father worked for Hughes Aircraft from college graduation to retirement. The decline of Hughes Aircraft Co. had little to do with Howard going nuts. Hughes was still going full bore in the defense industry when HH died in '76. They continued to succeed until 1985, when the seeds of their destruction were sown. That's when the Feds ruled that Hughes Medical Institute, a non-profit research foundation which was essentially the "heir" to the HH fortune and owned Hughes Aircraft, had to divest themselves of the hugely profitable subsidiary to keep its non-profit status. That's when General Motors bought them and merged them with Delco Electronics to form the GM-Hughes Electronics division. At this point, Hughes was making everything from radar systems, to missiles, to satellites, to communications systems.
At any rate, GM being run by a bunch of fools and clowns, it was inevitable that the party would end. The collapse of the Soviet Union hit the defense industry pretty hard, and GM acquired General Dynamics' missile division and rolled it into Hughes. The inevitable decline was delayed by the fact that Hughes launched a profitable commercial business in '94, a satellite television business called "DirecTV"--- perhaps you've heard of it. None of this helped in the long run, though. GM was no better at operating a business sensibly then than it is now. Eventually the realized they were out of their league, and sold off the Hughes Aircraft portion of Hughes Electronics to Raytheo. The DirecTV division was sold to Rupert Murdoch. The Hughes Space and Communications division was sold to Boeing.
My father worked the last 3 years of his career as a Raytheon employee because of this. Raytheon is a company run by shitbag assholes. For decades Hughes was forced by the DoD to "second source" critical components from Raytheon. My father had years worth of stories about how the shit they'd manufacture was sloppy and not made to specs, and how it caused them interminable problems with Raytheon parts failing. When they acquired Hughes, they basically turned it into "more Raytheon". Employees were treated like shit, benefits cut to nothing, and retirees who were previously allowed to buy health insurance as part of the Hughes group plan were told to "suck it". Perhaps the world was no longer a place where a company like Hughes could exist. Perhaps only "McRaytheon" type companies can make money nowadays. All I know is that Raytheon tolerates a lot more incompetence than Hughes did, and as a result of them buying Hughes, they are now the only manufacturer of missiles in the US, and it's all done to "Raytheon qwality". Just as well, I guess. Not much air combat anymore.
So no, it really was GM that put Hughes on the chopping block, and Raytheon that finally swung the axe. The problem may have started with HH not having a will, but a bunch of Oldsmobile salesmen in $200 suits are what really killed them.
I would be embarrassed too.. but I think what we're seeing is money grubbing heirs and "content owners" crying about copyright terms, not the original creators.
Yes, because every book you'd ever want to read, no matter how obscure, is going to be available at every library.
Your POTS phone will stop working if your local switching station is digital and the power goes out there for a longer period of time than their backup power lasts.
Thank you captain obvious. Now, can you tell me how long the backup power will last at the CO? Didn't think so. Because if you could, you wouldn't have bothered to make the comment. Backup power at the CO is measured in days. They have generators on site, and contingency plans for refueling during extended power outages that exceed the unattended backup time. It's not a little 7Ah lead-acid gel cell like you get in the FiOS terminal in your basement, which has a usage measured in hours.... unless it's over 2 years old, in which case it's minutes.
Your rationale ignores the reality that tuning a radio is nothing compared to changing modulation methods. It's not as big a deal to have a single GSM module that can be tuned to whichever frequencies are necessary, as the demodulation and processing further down the pipe is identical. Working with CDMA2000 or whatever requires completely different handling beyond the receiver--- basically, you can't do it without shoehorning in a different radio, and monkeying with the OS to get it to work with a different system.
....to put your entire damned thought into the post body, where it belongs?
How do you map the last few branches of the tree, when tax rates do not map to anything less complicated than the lat/lon coordinates corresponding to the delivery address? Are counties/cities going to provide that insane GIS data set?
Smugly focusing on the data structure rather than the real problem, which is the selection process shows how poorly you understand the problem.
It's literary convention to italicize words in a foreign language, so as to avoid confusion. "Au contraire" is obviously French, but other phrases can parse oddly.
the bbc are British, therfore they should be considered a plural noun, as per British usage.
Linguistically, no. If you're American you say "the BBC is". If you're British you say "the BBC are". The usage has everything to do with the local dialect and nothing at all to do with the subject matter being discussed. Americans speak American English, Brits speak British English. That's the entirety of it.
Yeesh. Sounds like my job, only without the profit sharing OR the strippers.
Unless Wi-Fi is blacked out for the driver, the safety implications of this development are worrisome.
Seriously, kdawson, WTF is the above supposed to mean? WiFi is a wireless connection system. How the FUCK is the driver going to be distracted by a 2400mHz radio signal? This isn't like a TV on the dashboard, or a GPS full of fiddly touch screens, it's a bloody network standard. Even assuming that WiFi to the driver is somehow distracting (maybe a netbook balanced on the steering wheel) how the hell do you suggest they "[black it] out for the driver"? Magic radio curtains? A WEP key that randomly scrambles when you put the car in gear and appears somewhere the driver can't see it?
Give up the attempts at clever editorializing. You don't have the gray matter for it.
It's hard for me to stomach Vitalism injected into sci-fi, since I find the idea incredibly unimaginative.
Thing is, Star Wars isn't hard sci-fi. It's just another iteration of [Mystic|Samurai|Kung-fu] Heroes vs. Evil Warlord, set in space.
Next you're probably going to tell me that the Mongol hoards didn't like to horde their treasure..... (or should that be "there treasure"?)
So, the lieutenant should stay out of the way, but Sarge needs to be there.
That's the military way to succeed, yes. The sergeants keep house internally, and the officers interface with the command structure above. The trouble with the civilian world is that there's no clear delineation between NCOs and commissioned officers. You just have generic "bosses", "managers", and "supervisors". They're usually doing a bit of BOTH jobs, and as such probably tend towards one end of the spectrum or the other. Really how it should be is that team leaders should be "working sergeants", and managers above them should act like officers.
My favorite was when my manager would ask "on a scale of 0-100%, where are we on (x)?" One of my coworkers working on the installation scripting got fed up with it and answered:
"It's at 0% because it doesn't fucking work. It will remain at 0% until I work all the bugs out of it. When I get that last bug fixed, it'll magically jump to 100%. Let me be so I can finish it!"
I'm generally against pizza. It isn't the healthiest thing in the world to eat.
Patently untrue. Even pepperoni pizza is better for you than a hamburger from any place you can name, and a quality vegetarian pizza from a decent independent pizza place is probably one of the healthiest convenience foods you can eat. What's unhealthy about tomatoes, cheese, and bread?
Quit spreading baseless charges against the world's most delicious food!
Compare an american pizza with an italian one.
The best pizza I ever had was in Amsterdam, actually. The second best was in New York City. Italian pizza is, sad to say, largely unimpressive. It was, however still better than american pizza from a chain like Dominos.
A real hamburger with anything from any american restaurant.
I can direct you to no less than six unbelievable hamburgers within 20 miles of where I currently sit in the US, as can anyone else in a medium or large sized city here. What you won't get is directions to a chain restaurant like McDonald's or Burger King.
American beer?
I have to agree with you there. Beer here is terrible.
Coffee?
I can direct you to no less than a dozen good coffee places here where I live... What you won't get is directions to a chain coffee place like Starbucks.
Are you picking up on the pattern? There's nothing wrong with our pizza, hamburgers, or coffee. The trouble is that franchised chains that specialize in these products do not make good stuff.
Ah yes.... because car makers have some inexplicable oath of fealty to the status quo that prevents them from marketing (say) a car with the fabled 100mpg carburetor and driving their competitors out of business overnight.
I drive a rear-engine Volkswagen. Back in their heyday, they had a reputation for ridiculous reliability (with proper maintenance) at low cost. At a VW show a couple years ago I was talking to an old VW engineer who worked on those early designs. His opinion was that the current equivalent of VW then, is Hyundai and their subsidiary Kia. From what I've seen, it's true. My boss drives a 2007 Kia Rio 150 miles round trip, 5 days a week. The crazy thing gets 42mpg consistently, and with the exception of a punctured AC condenser from road debris, has nothing wrong with it. I rented an 08 Kia Rio last year, and the thing was amazing. Headroom, the car actually had headroom! If I wasn't too stupid to stop driving an out of date VW, I'd be driving a Hyundai or Kia.