Anyone who has ever installed an HP scanner or All-in-one knows that the consumerware/bloatware that HP deliberately installs is truly awful. The print monitor behaves strangely, faceless apps hang and get respawned without the existing processes being killed, all kinds of crap is installed that is difficult to remove, and et cetera. If you don't seek out and install the thin "enterprise driver," and find alternative helper apps, you wind up with all this junk.
So I don't see what the big deal with shipping some more malware is. It's HP. *shrug*
Gawking in my window from the public street is legal. Gawking in my window from my driveway/lawn/whatever is not. The difference? I own my driveway. The problem here is that Google employed an idiot driver who blindly followed the GPS, which apparently indicated that the street terminated around the garage. They *should have* recognized a clear property line at the concrete drive.
While it's true that you can control whether people can take photographs while on your property, or enter your property for any reason, unless the property is clearly posted "NO TRESPASSING," someone on a readily accessible part of the property isn't considered to be trespassing. Exactly how this works varies depending upon state law. Pennsylvania state law will not consider entering and turning around in a driveway trespassing unless the driveway is marked as private or is gated or otherwise enclosed in a manner that is designed to secure it from intruders. See http://members.aol.com/StatutesPA/18.Cp.35.html. So there was no criminal or civil offense committed.
As to the status of the photographs, they clearly do not violate the privacy of the homeowners, because the area photographed was publicly visible anyway. It would be difficult to imagine a situation in which a court would provide any remedy other than ordering that the photographs be taken down.
Just to make this clear - the fact that photographs are taken on private property does not in any way automatically constitute a violation of privacy or automatically assign ownership of the photos to anyone other than the photographer. You can take photographs of whatever you want from private property as long as you are not instructed not to do so. The issue is what happens afterward - what use do you make of them. Invasion of privacy, copyrighted works visible in photographs, espionage, commercial exploitation, trespass, and so on, are separate issues.
Why continue to spend money on probes that are already in place and working reliably, when that money could be spent getting more probes... possibly... built and... possibly... there?
That must be the question that was answered with "out with the old, in with the new."
Just for the record, for some reason you seem to think that Perl6 is a rewrite Perl5. This is laughable. Perl6 is completely unrelated to Perl5 other than the name and certain superficial syntax features. Perl5 continues to be refactored and updated on a (probable) daily basis.
Perl6 might be an example of lots of things (such as the danger of design by committee) but it's really not an example of rewriting a successful project.
When the name of the product changes from "Foo X" to "Foo X+1" it's safe to assume that the intent is at least a recognizable evolution. In fact, initially, Perl 6 was supposed to be a recognizable evolution of Perl 5. And as you can see by the quote above, the motivation of the rewrite and redesign was not that Perl was useless, but that it had become difficult to maintain and evolve. The fact that Perl 6 is now only superficially related to Perl 5 is another indication of how far adrift the project has gone from its original moorings. Meanwhile, it's evident that Perl 5 is both maintainable and evolvable; my point is that the resources spent on the Perl 6 class project would have been much better spent rewriting Perl 5 internals - at least from the standpoint of users and Perl 5 developers.
Dramatic evolutionary rewrites of internals are certainly possible. PostgreSQL is the best example of this that I can come up with. And g++.
I'd like to focus on the author's comments about rewriting vs. refactoring. From July 25, 2000:
Last Monday, nobody knew that anything unusual was about to happen. On Tuesday, the Perl 6 project started. On Wednesday, Larry announced it at his "State of the Onion" address at the Perl conference.
It's one thing to decide to rewrite rather than refactor a product that is losing market share because it is not performing as well as its competitors. (E.g. Netscape.) It's another thing to decide to rewrite (and redesign) rather than refactor a wildly successful and popular product because its continued development has become difficult. Just shy of eight years later, Perl 5 is still creaking along nicely, and Perl 6 (White Elephant Service Pack) is still under design as much as development.
Is Perl 5 so hard to refactor that a determined effort couldn't have made progress, or been completed twice over, in 8 years? Along the way, a lot of the cruft and inelegance in the language could have been removed, and more elegant features inserted.
It happens over and over again - developers, even experienced ones, can't see the impracticality of what they're getting into, and can't see that they're doing work that isn't needed.
When you read these articles, please remember that the well known studies that discuss the efficacy of SSRIs vs. placebo are in relation to unipolar depression. Bipolar disorder (mania or hypomania alternating with depression) is a very different condition, and is usually treated with a combination of mood stabilizers (lithium, Depakote, Lamictal, etc.) and antidepressants (SSRIs, Wellbutrin, etc.).
SSRI withdrawal is no fun, and why you did that, I have no idea. Regardless of what effect SSRIs have for you when you take them, they have definite side effects if you don't taper off the drug at an appropriate rate. (On the order of 2-4 weeks.) That "sinking feeling," just like vertigo and a number of other common effects, is likely a product of abrupt withdrawal.
Due to an unexpected error, the following item(s) you have ordered were incorrectly priced at the time of your order.
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We're sorry, but we are unable to offer this item for the incorrect price. The correct price is $499.98. We have canceled your order for this item. If you would like to order this item at the correct price, please visit Target.com and reorder.
Despite our best efforts, a small number of items on our site are occasionally mis-priced. We do, however, verify prices as part of our shipping procedures. If we discover that an item's correct price is higher than our stated price, we will either contact you for instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of the cancellation. This pricing policy is posted in the Help section on Target.com.
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I know these kinds of things aren't supposed to happen, but sometimes they do. The worst part for the company itself is not the backlash they receive...it's the fact that nothing they do and nothing they say will fix it.
It's one thing if you have angry customers over something you have control over. It's another thing entirely if your customers are angry at you AND there isn't a single solitary thing you can do. That said, I hope that they are more careful in the future...
Well, I hope the next time I get on an airplane, the pilot checks to see if the ailerons are working before he takes off. It would be "unfortunate" if we fell out of the sky.
Perl 6: The Language of the Future (... Forever)
on
State of the Onion 11
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Every year Larry talks about what interesting things have been going on with Perl 6. These interesting things never include "release."
Rarely do I have a listening environment these days where I can hear any difference between a half decent 128-160 kbps MP3 and something better. Ogg's fine, but it would be swell if there were more players. Like, you know, iTunes. (Without some Quicktime hack.)
Not really. "Octet" is just one of those ITU-T neologisms that is designed to carry with it no preexisting meaning. The term was invented as part of the process of writing telecommunications standards documents. "Octet" specifically does mean "eight bits," but it does in no way mean that the word "byte" doesn't also mean "eight bits." Practically speaking, in 2007, as well as in 1997, and 1987, and 1977, "byte" was still "eight bits." Aggregations of bits in funny non power of two formats were usually called "words" (along with larger grouping of bytes).
It's not that you can't find exceptions to this rule, but as a practical matter, they don't exist.
ITU-T is the International Telecommunications Union - a standards organization belonging to the United Nations.
In particular, ECC turns things into convenient non power of size two lumps like, for example (from Wikipedia):
- A standard 74 min CD contains 333,000 blocks or sectors. - Each sector is 2352 bytes, and contains 2048 bytes of PC (MODE1) Data, 2336 bytes of PSX/VCD (MODE2) Data, or 2352 bytes of AUDIO.
When you factor in all the error correction, physical limitations of the media and hardware, and so on, the only place that powers of two really come into play is at the I/O block level, and at some point in the logical (but not physical) structure of the disk. This applies to absolutely everything that spins and holds readable data.
I understand that a "gigabyte" of RAM is 2^30 bytes, but that's just because memory addresses come in powers of two. I don't expect bytes on a hard disk to be counted in powers of two, because there is no need for them to be counted that way. But apparently there are some bargain-hunters and their lawyers who have a more self-serving style of counting.
Actually I started off in school as a EE and worked on signal processing software for several years before and after getting a CS degree. (Also, before that, I learned to spell.)
Welcome to the world of $4000 oxygen-free cables, where people claim that Soviet manufactured vacuum tubes sound better than active electronics, refrigerator-size ribbon speakers sound better than carefully designed waist-high speakers with 12" woofers, and vinyl, yes, that stuff that goes snap crackle pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, BRRRRRRRPPPPP, sounds better than CDs.
I knew a mutant dude who in his 20s could hear 20 kHz. So vinyl was a good thing for him, at least until he hit his 30s. But aside from the ability to make sounds only dogs and cats and mutant humans can hear, vinyl is shit. So are those goddamn Russian vacuum tubes.
Have the standards for morons slipped drastically while I wasn't paying attention? Or is it just that the ganja from the vinyl section is way, way better.
What heavy bomber were you thinking of that has defensive weaponry? Hello? Anybody home?
The B-2 flies high and fast and has a vastly longer range than intercept fighters, as do all nearly all heavy bombers (save the B-1, which is designed to allow low level near supersonic penetration flight). Unless a radar could somehow detect a B-2 while it was approaching, it would be impossible to get a fighter in the air that could even theoretically catch it, assuming the fighter could see it or find it on radar, which of course it couldn't.
The B-2 is invisible to the eye because it flies at night over hostile areas... of course. Even during daytime, planes at 50,000 feet are normally invisible unless they are leaving contrails.
I'm sure it's part of the problem. I wish Firefox's JS implementation were as fast as Opera's, or even IE's. Its GC makes it jerky as all hell. Like, just now, as I type into this dialog box.
Let me get this straight. A compiler that has been production-quality for over 15 years, compiles everything on every architecture, and has been continuously improved every minute of its existence needs to be replaced by... Son of pcc? Because of a license?
Sure, I prefer BSD-style licenses, and so do some other people, but what drives gcc development is the GNU license. I think I'll stick to the compiler that's debugged. Oh, that's right, I forgot, it comes with a debugger too. If you like that sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who has ever installed an HP scanner or All-in-one knows that the consumerware/bloatware that HP deliberately installs is truly awful. The print monitor behaves strangely, faceless apps hang and get respawned without the existing processes being killed, all kinds of crap is installed that is difficult to remove, and et cetera. If you don't seek out and install the thin "enterprise driver," and find alternative helper apps, you wind up with all this junk.
So I don't see what the big deal with shipping some more malware is. It's HP. *shrug*
Gawking in my window from the public street is legal. Gawking in my window from my driveway/lawn/whatever is not. The difference? I own my driveway. The problem here is that Google employed an idiot driver who blindly followed the GPS, which apparently indicated that the street terminated around the garage. They *should have* recognized a clear property line at the concrete drive.
While it's true that you can control whether people can take photographs while on your property, or enter your property for any reason, unless the property is clearly posted "NO TRESPASSING," someone on a readily accessible part of the property isn't considered to be trespassing. Exactly how this works varies depending upon state law. Pennsylvania state law will not consider entering and turning around in a driveway trespassing unless the driveway is marked as private or is gated or otherwise enclosed in a manner that is designed to secure it from intruders. See http://members.aol.com/StatutesPA/18.Cp.35.html. So there was no criminal or civil offense committed.
As to the status of the photographs, they clearly do not violate the privacy of the homeowners, because the area photographed was publicly visible anyway. It would be difficult to imagine a situation in which a court would provide any remedy other than ordering that the photographs be taken down.
Just to make this clear - the fact that photographs are taken on private property does not in any way automatically constitute a violation of privacy or automatically assign ownership of the photos to anyone other than the photographer. You can take photographs of whatever you want from private property as long as you are not instructed not to do so. The issue is what happens afterward - what use do you make of them. Invasion of privacy, copyrighted works visible in photographs, espionage, commercial exploitation, trespass, and so on, are separate issues.
Why continue to spend money on probes that are already in place and working reliably, when that money could be spent getting more probes ... possibly ... built and ... possibly ... there?
That must be the question that was answered with "out with the old, in with the new."
Just for the record, for some reason you seem to think that Perl6 is a rewrite Perl5. This is laughable. Perl6 is completely unrelated to Perl5 other than the name and certain superficial syntax features. Perl5 continues to be refactored and updated on a (probable) daily basis.
Perl6 might be an example of lots of things (such as the danger of design by committee) but it's really not an example of rewriting a successful project.
When the name of the product changes from "Foo X" to "Foo X+1" it's safe to assume that the intent is at least a recognizable evolution. In fact, initially, Perl 6 was supposed to be a recognizable evolution of Perl 5. And as you can see by the quote above, the motivation of the rewrite and redesign was not that Perl was useless, but that it had become difficult to maintain and evolve. The fact that Perl 6 is now only superficially related to Perl 5 is another indication of how far adrift the project has gone from its original moorings. Meanwhile, it's evident that Perl 5 is both maintainable and evolvable; my point is that the resources spent on the Perl 6 class project would have been much better spent rewriting Perl 5 internals - at least from the standpoint of users and Perl 5 developers.
Dramatic evolutionary rewrites of internals are certainly possible. PostgreSQL is the best example of this that I can come up with. And g++.
It's one thing to decide to rewrite rather than refactor a product that is losing market share because it is not performing as well as its competitors. (E.g. Netscape.) It's another thing to decide to rewrite (and redesign) rather than refactor a wildly successful and popular product because its continued development has become difficult. Just shy of eight years later, Perl 5 is still creaking along nicely, and Perl 6 (White Elephant Service Pack) is still under design as much as development.
Is Perl 5 so hard to refactor that a determined effort couldn't have made progress, or been completed twice over, in 8 years? Along the way, a lot of the cruft and inelegance in the language could have been removed, and more elegant features inserted.
It happens over and over again - developers, even experienced ones, can't see the impracticality of what they're getting into, and can't see that they're doing work that isn't needed.
Not really sure what to say. GOOD WORK MY MAN.
When you read these articles, please remember that the well known studies that discuss the efficacy of SSRIs vs. placebo are in relation to unipolar depression. Bipolar disorder (mania or hypomania alternating with depression) is a very different condition, and is usually treated with a combination of mood stabilizers (lithium, Depakote, Lamictal, etc.) and antidepressants (SSRIs, Wellbutrin, etc.).
A few days after I'd quit the pills cold turkey
SSRI withdrawal is no fun, and why you did that, I have no idea. Regardless of what effect SSRIs have for you when you take them, they have definite side effects if you don't taper off the drug at an appropriate rate. (On the order of 2-4 weeks.) That "sinking feeling," just like vertigo and a number of other common effects, is likely a product of abrupt withdrawal.
This agrees with my observations here too. I guess it's a feature, because more bandwidth is always a feature.
They could be on to something. I think it goes well with SNMP, SNMP, SFTP, SMPTE, SNES ...
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Due to an unexpected error, the following item(s) you have ordered
were incorrectly priced at the time of your order.
'Jazz in Paris'
We're sorry, but we are unable to offer this item for the incorrect
price. The correct price is $499.98. We have canceled your order for
this item. If you would like to order this item at the correct price,
please visit Target.com and reorder.
Despite our best efforts, a small number of items on our site are
occasionally mis-priced. We do, however, verify prices as part of our
shipping procedures. If we discover that an item's correct price is
higher than our stated price, we will either contact you for
instructions before shipping or cancel your order and notify you of
the cancellation. This pricing policy is posted in the Help section
on Target.com.
Again, we're sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused
you. Thank you for being our valued guest.
I know these kinds of things aren't supposed to happen, but sometimes they do. The worst part for the company itself is not the backlash they receive...it's the fact that nothing they do and nothing they say will fix it.
It's one thing if you have angry customers over something you have control over. It's another thing entirely if your customers are angry at you AND there isn't a single solitary thing you can do. That said, I hope that they are more careful in the future...
Well, I hope the next time I get on an airplane, the pilot checks to see if the ailerons are working before he takes off. It would be "unfortunate" if we fell out of the sky.
Every year Larry talks about what interesting things have been going on with Perl 6. These interesting things never include "release."
Rarely do I have a listening environment these days where I can hear any difference between a half decent 128-160 kbps MP3 and something better. Ogg's fine, but it would be swell if there were more players. Like, you know, iTunes. (Without some Quicktime hack.)
Not really. "Octet" is just one of those ITU-T neologisms that is designed to carry with it no preexisting meaning. The term was invented as part of the process of writing telecommunications standards documents. "Octet" specifically does mean "eight bits," but it does in no way mean that the word "byte" doesn't also mean "eight bits." Practically speaking, in 2007, as well as in 1997, and 1987, and 1977, "byte" was still "eight bits." Aggregations of bits in funny non power of two formats were usually called "words" (along with larger grouping of bytes).
It's not that you can't find exceptions to this rule, but as a practical matter, they don't exist.
ITU-T is the International Telecommunications Union - a standards organization belonging to the United Nations.
Yo, what he said.
In particular, ECC turns things into convenient non power of size two lumps like, for example (from Wikipedia):
- A standard 74 min CD contains 333,000 blocks or sectors.
- Each sector is 2352 bytes, and contains 2048 bytes of PC (MODE1) Data, 2336 bytes of PSX/VCD (MODE2) Data, or 2352 bytes of AUDIO.
When you factor in all the error correction, physical limitations of the media and hardware, and so on, the only place that powers of two really come into play is at the I/O block level, and at some point in the logical (but not physical) structure of the disk. This applies to absolutely everything that spins and holds readable data.
I understand that a "gigabyte" of RAM is 2^30 bytes, but that's just because memory addresses come in powers of two. I don't expect bytes on a hard disk to be counted in powers of two, because there is no need for them to be counted that way. But apparently there are some bargain-hunters and their lawyers who have a more self-serving style of counting.
Oh well.
Actually I started off in school as a EE and worked on signal processing software for several years before and after getting a CS degree. (Also, before that, I learned to spell.)
Welcome to the world of $4000 oxygen-free cables, where people claim that Soviet manufactured vacuum tubes sound better than active electronics, refrigerator-size ribbon speakers sound better than carefully designed waist-high speakers with 12" woofers, and vinyl, yes, that stuff that goes snap crackle pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, shick pop, BRRRRRRRPPPPP, sounds better than CDs.
I knew a mutant dude who in his 20s could hear 20 kHz. So vinyl was a good thing for him, at least until he hit his 30s. But aside from the ability to make sounds only dogs and cats and mutant humans can hear, vinyl is shit. So are those goddamn Russian vacuum tubes.
Have the standards for morons slipped drastically while I wasn't paying attention? Or is it just that the ganja from the vinyl section is way, way better.
The one I forward all my mail from - IMAP enabled.
The one I forward all my mail to - no IMAP.
Oh well.
What heavy bomber were you thinking of that has defensive weaponry? Hello? Anybody home?
... of course. Even during daytime, planes at 50,000 feet are normally invisible unless they are leaving contrails.
The B-2 flies high and fast and has a vastly longer range than intercept fighters, as do all nearly all heavy bombers (save the B-1, which is designed to allow low level near supersonic penetration flight). Unless a radar could somehow detect a B-2 while it was approaching, it would be impossible to get a fighter in the air that could even theoretically catch it, assuming the fighter could see it or find it on radar, which of course it couldn't.
The B-2 is invisible to the eye because it flies at night over hostile areas
By any aircraft from any country? In the next 20 years? Are you kidding?
No enemy aircraft in the sky now or in the next couple of decades will ever see an F-22. Other specs don't really matter.
I'm sure it's part of the problem. I wish Firefox's JS implementation were as fast as Opera's, or even IE's. Its GC makes it jerky as all hell. Like, just now, as I type into this dialog box.
What exactly are we going to do about it? Stop whining, dude.
Let me get this straight. A compiler that has been production-quality for over 15 years, compiles everything on every architecture, and has been continuously improved every minute of its existence needs to be replaced by ... Son of pcc? Because of a license?
Sure, I prefer BSD-style licenses, and so do some other people, but what drives gcc development is the GNU license. I think I'll stick to the compiler that's debugged. Oh, that's right, I forgot, it comes with a debugger too. If you like that sort of thing.