The climate of today has 2x the atmospheric CO2 concentration than the climate which has for the past few hundred thousand years regularly produced ice ages
Er... no.
It's still hovering at "0.038% of the atmosphere". That is a 35% increase over ice cores from 1833 (which are around the levels for a 'normal' interglacial), not a 200% increase!
Oh look, they've re-invented the X Terminal yet again. So thin-clients are up for another go-round, are they? How long before they go out of fashion *this* time?
Never been in the military, have you? In the Navy, Preventative Maintenance (PM) is a big part of your duties as an enlisted sailor. I imagine it's the same for the Army, Air Force and Marines.
You're my kind of programmer. I've done this sort of thing at almost every job I've worked at--fixed the horrendous legacy code so it worked better, faster and was now documented. (When refactoring, also document.) I'm good at software maintenance, and tell prospective employers that at interviews.
Also, people skills. Word. It's amazing how much more cooperative people are when you're not a dick. A little humility and empathy with your neighbor goes a surprisingly long way. Politeness counts.
I saw the movie this weekend. It was better than I expected. Thanks to the trailer, I went in with very low expectations ("SciFi Channel Original with better special effects, right?"). It actually told a pretty good story, and the special effects eyecandy was AWESOME!
I was chuckling when I guessed what the story was early on, though, and the rest of the movie confirmed it. They scrubbed off the serial numbers, changed the name, changed the exact cause of the disaster, changed a few details about the escape ships, but the plot is pretty much a re-telling of the classic scifi disaster novel, "When Worlds Collide". As the guy who compared "Dungeons and Dragons" with "Lord of the Rings" noted, it helps to start with a script that doesn't suck. "When Worlds Collide" doesn't suck; it's a classic story.
The science, on the other hand, belonged to a SciFi Channel Original Movie, but hey, I expected that. The story was good.
Oh noes, the records industry might have to let the ORIGINAL CREATORS have the rights to THEIR OWN WORK again! The sky is falling, whatever shall we do? I know, let's whine to Congress that we'll die if we can't continue ripping off musicians for all eternity!/sarcasm off
So musicians are finally getting what every sensible writer has written into his contract from the get-go--rights revert to the author after X years, or Y years out-of-print? Dang, I can see where music company accountants might be feeling the pain... they might actually have to re-negotiate to pay the creators what their copyrights are worth... and now these guys are big enough they can hire agents and lawyers that negotiate less one-sided contracts.
I feel so bad for the music companies, I really do. That's why I'm laughing so hard at this. Geez, did Wired really need to publish a one-sided article obviously written by an RIAA lawyer?
Oh please. Inexactitude is *not* the same thing as not understanding why something works at all. We can build miles-long bridges *specifically* because we understand the underlying physics, and anyone who built a bridge without understanding the physics of why it stood under load would be drummed out of the industry.
I am assuming you refer to the modern physics that we are all so proud of. Let me tell you that in Europe, whenever you get a real serious flooding on a major river, only one kind of bridge survives with no bruises at all: Roman bridges. They are 2000 years old, but they're still up. The crap we're building today won't be up in 2000 years, I can bet on it. Look at the mess with the bay bridge, down twice in 50 years!!!! Ah ah ahah! Kuddos to modern engineering.
That would be because the Romans had some engineering, but not the equations we have today, so they over-engineered their bridges for safety because they knew they couldn't calculate the exact, optimal configuration for the expected loads and stresses. Over-engineering is a good thing if you don't have to account to the bean-counters. The George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River was also over-engineered because they didn't know the exact tolerances, and it has held up rather well.
I've had to maintain code originally written by people with that attitude. To put it politely, I wish they'd switched careers to something besides computer programming; it would have saved everyone a lot of work, cost overruns, budget overruns, and pissed off a lot fewer customers.
If you don't know what the hell you're doing, you're not going to do it very well. Code that "works by accident" is very fragile and breaks easily and is a triple bitch to maintain, because if you don't know what you wrote, I have to pretty much reverse engineer it from the source code to figure out what you *actually* wrote vs. what you were supposed to write--then I usually end up re-writing it from the original requirements to do what it should have been doing in the first place, because the existing code is such a mess.
You don't work for a living in the real world, USA, do you? You know, the one where accountants go to jail if they look the other way about bookkeeping shennanigans? The one where you can get sued for "contributory copyright infringement" for torrenting your personal music?
If the dude is knowingly installing pirated software, he's liable. Legally, not just morally. I for damn sure will be everyone else's conscience if their lack of ethics gets me in legal trouble.
Dude, when were you on Diego Garcia? Sounds like you were there a few years after I was. I was stationed there in 84-85, in time for the big earthquake that didn't do much.
And I thank god for the distraction that cell phone calls, radio chatter and music provide! After driving the same commute a zillion times, I'd fall asleep at the wheel from sheer boredom and kill people if I had to do nothing but pay attention to the road and drivers around me.
It's one thing to be on a strange road or in unusual conditions, but the daily commute becomes a learned, familiar habit; you know where the slow spots are, you know where to speed up, where to change lanes, what turns to make and it gets to the point you can do it completely on autopilot. It gets dangerously monotonous because it's too easy.
Then every now and then someone drops furniture in the middle of the highway and it suddenly gets more interesting.
Originally, computers were women, too. From Wikipedia, "The first use of the word "computer" was recorded in 1613, referring to a person who carried out calculations, or computations, and the word continued to be used in that sense until the middle of the 20th century."
Women were preferred for the job as they were thought to be more careful and accurate than men.
I wish Welte enabled comments on his blog so I could post this there.
However, the article summary was enough to explain everything. Netgear is using Broadcomm chips. I've worked in the embedded firmware arena before; Broadcomm does NOT release its drivers under open source. You only get to see the source if you and your company lawyers sign really nasty NDAs, perferably in blood. I'm pretty sure the specs for programming the chips are under NDA, too. Netgear does not have a choice about releasing the drivers as binary blobs if they are using Broadcomm stuff. The only way to get open-source Broadcomm drivers is to reverse engineer them, and Netgear probably isn't in the business of reverse-engineering their suppliers product. Hell, they're probably contractually forbidden to do so.
You will never get a fully open source product from a vendor that buys from Broadcomm, until Broadcomm changes its policies. Period, full stop.
Dude, you totally fail ancient history. Please go learn something about it. There are books that have been around since the late 19th century, written by white Europeans, that contradict you, let alone more modern works. (So you can drop your "revisionism" scarecrow).
I've heard all that tired old white supremacist drivel before, and dressing it up in new clothes doesn't make it any fresher or any less stupid. Please stop embarassing those of us who take history, Western Civilization, and all other civilizations seriously.
So you consider "I am a Christian" as ranking alongside "I regularly visit aliens", and invalidating everything the person said? That's rather intolerant even for militant atheists.
Effectively, that's what he said, because that's been orthodox Christian doctrine since Pelagianism was deemed a heresy. Even Jesus Christ denied that he himself was "Good". All people are sinful and fall short of the mark. We all have evil in us. Again, that's standard Christian doctrine.
It's not a bad doctrine; it reminds you that you are not perfect, and not above doing evil, stupid, harmful things if you make no effort to avoid it. It keeps you from assuming that you are "good" and therefore need take no thought about your actions and words and the harm they may do. It keeps you from seeing the evil in yourself as "not really bad" because of course you are Good, and the evil in others is of course true Evil, and they deserve neither mercy nor compassion, because they are Evil while you and people you like are Good. It also keeps check on the opposite division: believing that everyone else (particularly authority figures) are Good while you yourself are wicked and inferior.
Understanding that ALL people are evil (or capable of evil) is a great democratizer.
The "real climate" of the Bay Area latitudes is semi-arid once you get away from the coast and over a range of hills or two. It's what they call a "Mediterranean climate" -- cool rainy winters, arid hot summers, rain on the windward side of the mountains only.
No, you are wrong. Dune is most assuredly *NOT* fantasy; it is an extremely complex work of science-fiction.
The fundamental difference between fantasy and science fiction is not whether the story's world obeys the laws of physics as currently understood on planet Earth--after all, with sufficiently advanced technology you can define your own laws to suit--it is more "What is our explanation for why things are different, and where are we going from here?"
It has been observed that science fiction is progressive--the world changes, and change improves things, change is GOOD; while fantasy is conservative--we're trying to return to some lost Golden Age, or stop one from ending, and change away from that Golden Age is BAD.
You people are young enough not to remember the origins of the phrase. Back in the mid-20th century, there was a flurry of scams by shady real estate operators selling near-worthless swampland sight-unseen as "waterfront property", using faked-up pretty brochures showing beautiful beaches, palm trees, etc. People thought they were buying beachfront property amazingly cheap, when they were actually getting something much less desireable, though technically, it was near water. "60 Minutes" did exposés on it, back in the day.
Since that time, "I have waterfront property in Florida to sell you" became the modern replacement for "I have a bridge (in Brooklyn) to sell you". It also carried the connotation/lesson of "Don't put down money for property you haven't seen".
Slashdot Mirror
If it's an E-Ink display, it only consumes power when it redraws the screen, so you really do measure the battery life in page-turns, not days.
p.s. Slashdot's timeout between posts is f***ing lame.
http://www.webscription.net/ for Baen Books and several other related imprints.
The climate of today has 2x the atmospheric CO2 concentration than the climate which has for the past few hundred thousand years regularly produced ice ages
Er... no.
It's still hovering at "0.038% of the atmosphere". That is a 35% increase over ice cores from 1833 (which are around the levels for a 'normal' interglacial), not a 200% increase!
Oh look, they've re-invented the X Terminal yet again. So thin-clients are up for another go-round, are they? How long before they go out of fashion *this* time?
Never been in the military, have you? In the Navy, Preventative Maintenance (PM) is a big part of your duties as an enlisted sailor. I imagine it's the same for the Army, Air Force and Marines.
You're my kind of programmer. I've done this sort of thing at almost every job I've worked at--fixed the horrendous legacy code so it worked better, faster and was now documented. (When refactoring, also document.) I'm good at software maintenance, and tell prospective employers that at interviews.
Also, people skills. Word. It's amazing how much more cooperative people are when you're not a dick. A little humility and empathy with your neighbor goes a surprisingly long way. Politeness counts.
*tries to figure out what the 3rd Imperium has to do with 2012, then realizes you are talking about Shadowrun*
I saw the movie this weekend. It was better than I expected. Thanks to the trailer, I went in with very low expectations ("SciFi Channel Original with better special effects, right?"). It actually told a pretty good story, and the special effects eyecandy was AWESOME!
I was chuckling when I guessed what the story was early on, though, and the rest of the movie confirmed it. They scrubbed off the serial numbers, changed the name, changed the exact cause of the disaster, changed a few details about the escape ships, but the plot is pretty much a re-telling of the classic scifi disaster novel, "When Worlds Collide". As the guy who compared "Dungeons and Dragons" with "Lord of the Rings" noted, it helps to start with a script that doesn't suck. "When Worlds Collide" doesn't suck; it's a classic story.
The science, on the other hand, belonged to a SciFi Channel Original Movie, but hey, I expected that. The story was good.
Oh noes, the records industry might have to let the ORIGINAL CREATORS have the rights to THEIR OWN WORK again! The sky is falling, whatever shall we do? I know, let's whine to Congress that we'll die if we can't continue ripping off musicians for all eternity! /sarcasm off
So musicians are finally getting what every sensible writer has written into his contract from the get-go--rights revert to the author after X years, or Y years out-of-print? Dang, I can see where music company accountants might be feeling the pain... they might actually have to re-negotiate to pay the creators what their copyrights are worth... and now these guys are big enough they can hire agents and lawyers that negotiate less one-sided contracts.
I feel so bad for the music companies, I really do. That's why I'm laughing so hard at this. Geez, did Wired really need to publish a one-sided article obviously written by an RIAA lawyer?
Oh please. Inexactitude is *not* the same thing as not understanding why something works at all. We can build miles-long bridges *specifically* because we understand the underlying physics, and anyone who built a bridge without understanding the physics of why it stood under load would be drummed out of the industry.
I am assuming you refer to the modern physics that we are all so proud of. Let me tell you that in Europe, whenever you get a real serious flooding on a major river, only one kind of bridge survives with no bruises at all: Roman bridges. They are 2000 years old, but they're still up. The crap we're building today won't be up in 2000 years, I can bet on it. Look at the mess with the bay bridge, down twice in 50 years!!!! Ah ah ahah! Kuddos to modern engineering.
That would be because the Romans had some engineering, but not the equations we have today, so they over-engineered their bridges for safety because they knew they couldn't calculate the exact, optimal configuration for the expected loads and stresses. Over-engineering is a good thing if you don't have to account to the bean-counters. The George Washington Bridge across the Hudson River was also over-engineered because they didn't know the exact tolerances, and it has held up rather well.
I've had to maintain code originally written by people with that attitude. To put it politely, I wish they'd switched careers to something besides computer programming; it would have saved everyone a lot of work, cost overruns, budget overruns, and pissed off a lot fewer customers.
If you don't know what the hell you're doing, you're not going to do it very well. Code that "works by accident" is very fragile and breaks easily and is a triple bitch to maintain, because if you don't know what you wrote, I have to pretty much reverse engineer it from the source code to figure out what you *actually* wrote vs. what you were supposed to write--then I usually end up re-writing it from the original requirements to do what it should have been doing in the first place, because the existing code is such a mess.
You don't work for a living in the real world, USA, do you? You know, the one where accountants go to jail if they look the other way about bookkeeping shennanigans? The one where you can get sued for "contributory copyright infringement" for torrenting your personal music?
If the dude is knowingly installing pirated software, he's liable. Legally, not just morally. I for damn sure will be everyone else's conscience if their lack of ethics gets me in legal trouble.
Nothing but the requirements of originality, public records laws, and common sense.
Laws are even less copyrightable than the phone book.
I've known since 1979 (AD&D 1st ed) that Intelligence and Wisdom were two separate stats...
Doesn't everyone know this?
Dude, when were you on Diego Garcia? Sounds like you were there a few years after I was. I was stationed there in 84-85, in time for the big earthquake that didn't do much.
And I thank god for the distraction that cell phone calls, radio chatter and music provide! After driving the same commute a zillion times, I'd fall asleep at the wheel from sheer boredom and kill people if I had to do nothing but pay attention to the road and drivers around me.
It's one thing to be on a strange road or in unusual conditions, but the daily commute becomes a learned, familiar habit; you know where the slow spots are, you know where to speed up, where to change lanes, what turns to make and it gets to the point you can do it completely on autopilot. It gets dangerously monotonous because it's too easy.
Then every now and then someone drops furniture in the middle of the highway and it suddenly gets more interesting.
Originally, computers were women, too. From Wikipedia, "The first use of the word "computer" was recorded in 1613, referring to a person who carried out calculations, or computations, and the word continued to be used in that sense until the middle of the 20th century."
Women were preferred for the job as they were thought to be more careful and accurate than men.
I wish Welte enabled comments on his blog so I could post this there.
However, the article summary was enough to explain everything. Netgear is using Broadcomm chips. I've worked in the embedded firmware arena before; Broadcomm does NOT release its drivers under open source. You only get to see the source if you and your company lawyers sign really nasty NDAs, perferably in blood. I'm pretty sure the specs for programming the chips are under NDA, too. Netgear does not have a choice about releasing the drivers as binary blobs if they are using Broadcomm stuff. The only way to get open-source Broadcomm drivers is to reverse engineer them, and Netgear probably isn't in the business of reverse-engineering their suppliers product. Hell, they're probably contractually forbidden to do so.
You will never get a fully open source product from a vendor that buys from Broadcomm, until Broadcomm changes its policies. Period, full stop.
Dude, you totally fail ancient history. Please go learn something about it. There are books that have been around since the late 19th century, written by white Europeans, that contradict you, let alone more modern works. (So you can drop your "revisionism" scarecrow).
I've heard all that tired old white supremacist drivel before, and dressing it up in new clothes doesn't make it any fresher or any less stupid. Please stop embarassing those of us who take history, Western Civilization, and all other civilizations seriously.
Did they also edit out the tedious rants on how BDSM sex-slavery was liberating for men & women?
So you consider "I am a Christian" as ranking alongside "I regularly visit aliens", and invalidating everything the person said? That's rather intolerant even for militant atheists.
Effectively, that's what he said, because that's been orthodox Christian doctrine since Pelagianism was deemed a heresy. Even Jesus Christ denied that he himself was "Good". All people are sinful and fall short of the mark. We all have evil in us. Again, that's standard Christian doctrine.
It's not a bad doctrine; it reminds you that you are not perfect, and not above doing evil, stupid, harmful things if you make no effort to avoid it. It keeps you from assuming that you are "good" and therefore need take no thought about your actions and words and the harm they may do. It keeps you from seeing the evil in yourself as "not really bad" because of course you are Good, and the evil in others is of course true Evil, and they deserve neither mercy nor compassion, because they are Evil while you and people you like are Good. It also keeps check on the opposite division: believing that everyone else (particularly authority figures) are Good while you yourself are wicked and inferior.
Understanding that ALL people are evil (or capable of evil) is a great democratizer.
The "real climate" of the Bay Area latitudes is semi-arid once you get away from the coast and over a range of hills or two. It's what they call a "Mediterranean climate" -- cool rainy winters, arid hot summers, rain on the windward side of the mountains only.
If you want this class to be a runaway success and if you have a solid second job, give the John Norman's Gor
It's supposed to be a class in analyzing Sci-fi and fantasy, not in analyzing really bad soft-core BDSM porn... ;-)
No, you are wrong. Dune is most assuredly *NOT* fantasy; it is an extremely complex work of science-fiction.
The fundamental difference between fantasy and science fiction is not whether the story's world obeys the laws of physics as currently understood on planet Earth--after all, with sufficiently advanced technology you can define your own laws to suit--it is more "What is our explanation for why things are different, and where are we going from here?"
It has been observed that science fiction is progressive--the world changes, and change improves things, change is GOOD; while fantasy is conservative--we're trying to return to some lost Golden Age, or stop one from ending, and change away from that Golden Age is BAD.
You people are young enough not to remember the origins of the phrase. Back in the mid-20th century, there was a flurry of scams by shady real estate operators selling near-worthless swampland sight-unseen as "waterfront property", using faked-up pretty brochures showing beautiful beaches, palm trees, etc. People thought they were buying beachfront property amazingly cheap, when they were actually getting something much less desireable, though technically, it was near water. "60 Minutes" did exposés on it, back in the day.
Since that time, "I have waterfront property in Florida to sell you" became the modern replacement for "I have a bridge (in Brooklyn) to sell you". It also carried the connotation/lesson of "Don't put down money for property you haven't seen".