...did anyone else remember the MicroJ-11, a PDP11-on-TWO-chips implementation in a single DIP? Two chips wired together on one carrier. (IIRC the floating-point unit was one chip and everything else was on the other.) It got used in cluster storage controllers (HSC70/90) and all sorts of interesting gadgets.
While I'm all for education, and knowing what your tools do, it is arguable that we don't really need a million monkeys writing web pages on the bare metal. Let them have Dreamweaver. As long as the few who can really make HTML/HTTP dance and sing can find the information they need, we'll still have useful innovations and a cadre of experts who can handle the tough questions.
See Asimov's story "Olympiad" for an interesting take on this notion. It's all economics, man.
(Yes, I am trying to make some of the "million monkeys" mad enough to learn something new.:-)
"they are immutable. a book doesn't 404 you suddenly"
Nor do they mysteriously change, sometimes radically, every time the author has a new idea and hacks his text again.
And don't forget:
5. It's easy to lay out a book on my desk, alongside the six other books I'm referring to concurrently, and see them all at the same time. <hubris>If one book can tell you everything you need to know about your project, what you are doing is too small to be called a "project".</hubris>
"...had Shiflett given up on the newcomer and given the developer greater depth...."
Talk to the editors. They seem to think everything should be For Dummies nowadays. "Lauguage X for People who Already Know How to Program" books are rare gems indeed.
OTOH I think that a lot of those fat books on the store shelves spend *too much* space on sample code. Many of them seen to be primarily code libraries on an eccentric distribution medium, and I often find myself wondering why they didn't just publish the code as files on a CDROM with the little threads of text tucked into the top of each directory. I do understand that it's hard to lead the reader through a program of useful size in book format, but it still bothers me.
...Ginny's comment to her boyfriend in that Doonesbury strip from some years ago: "Just what you need: a $30,000 car to drive to Burger King in." [Adjusted for inflation]
Oh, good. So, not only are avionic systems improperly designed for the realities of the 21st century*, but apparently the people who designed the cell software didn't think of the obvious either. Shouldn't we *fix the broken equipment*?
----------- * if laptops etc. can disrupt them then they are insufficiently hardened.
Yes, thank you for pointing out that my model is nonsense. There's a very nice explanation with diagram that I should have dug up before spouting.
It still looks like the nearest Earth/Sol point ought to be several million miles away, but then I've already proven that I don't know beans about orbital mechanics....
I like the bit about "nearby Lagrange points." Wouldn't L1 and L5 be about 90 million miles away?
(Too lazy to look it up, I *assume* that the Lagrange points are the vertices of a hexagon inscribed in the planet's orbit, which is treated as circular for simplicity's sake. Since the circumference of a circle is 2*pi*R, and our R is 93mmi, and pi is a bit more than 3, that makes the circumferential distance a bit more than (2*3*93,000,000)/6 or R+epsilon. The straight-line distance (which wouldn't matter since spacecraft don't go in straight lines within a gravity well) is a chord which makes it a bit less, so I moosh all the estimates together and make it 90mmi. Simple!)
Wow, write a program to recognize something that even highly educated humans have trouble unambiguously recognizing. Sounds like fun, I wish I had several lifetimes to devote to it.
"If you're a business doing, say, $1000 of sales a day on the web to customers in PA, and they accidentally block you, what do you do when sales all of the sudden drop by that amount. You wouldn't know anything about your server's IP address being blocked by ISP's, nobody would have told you. Then it takes 2-3 days to find out. Goodbye $3000. A few more days to get a court order to unban, $2000. Then all the ISP's have to go back and un-ban your server, another $1000-5000. There's a possibility of $10,000 of lost sales there, not to mention lost customers who took their purchase elsewhere when they couldn't reach you."
Uhhuh. And then you sue the State of Pennsylvania for $10,000 in lost sales, plus $5000 to cover those lost customers, plus court costs and attorney fees. Meanwhile a hundred other businesses are doing the same. The AG's office is going to have plenty of work to do....
Yeah, while reading this I began recalling an article in _Mad_ from years ago: "Changing Meanings for Fun and Profit." _Mad_ was funnier.
Re:Instant Cryptanalysis
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 1
"...instead of encrypting the conversation and then employing ECC, the GSM does it the other way...."
Well, that answers my question about whether the standard writers had their design reviewed by someone who understands cryptography. *sigh*
"The GSM association is not happy."
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Perhaps if they'd paid more attention to security and less to cutesy-poo interchangeable faceplates, they wouldn't be unhappy now. Did they have their design checked out by someone who understands cryptography?
Huh? We *had* videophones. Nobody wanted them. There's a Picturephone(tm) in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It's the only one I ever saw in person.
Duuh, surely they are going to offer to go easy on him if he can give useful information that might lead them to the original perp. That's one reason you arrest small fish: to extract information on the bigger fish. After all, he got the source from *somewhere*.
Certainly someone witnessing a crime in progress is required to assist to the extent that it doesn't put him in unreasonable danger. Shouting, "Hey, you, stop! POLICE!!! POLICE!!!" would probably be enough to make a bludgeoner run away. If the crime actually takes place in your presence, aren't you required to report what you saw, and to summon LE if possible?
(Note to the touchy: yes, this is US-centric. I've not left the country except for one overnight stay in Canada and cannot comment on others' laws.)
Exactly. There is no request too big to do; there are only projects that the customer decided he didn't want to pay for. "We can do that. It'll take five years and $3million. It sounds like fun -- when can we get started? Why are you looking at me like that?" Just be sure these are honest estimates.
Besides, if they go for it and the big bosses approve, you get five years and three million dollars to play with. You can't lose!
Also, when there are not enough resources to do everything in the time requested, get bigger fish to decide which things are more important. Prioritize!
I never heard of Eolas until this. How big could they be? We could pass the hat and buy them out, then place the patented methods in the public domain. End of problem.
Or we could just let them get away with it, and give up on using active objects in web pages. Most of the ones I remember are just silly or annoying anyway, and could be done better by other means. Anything that cuts down on the amount of Shockwave/Flash gunk I have to wade through will win my praises.:-/
There's a fundamental split between people who want to understand their tools and use them in innovative ways, and people who want the tools to tell them what is possible. The developer and professional computerist market is composed largely of the former, the mass market mostly of the latter. Microsoft and many Linux promoters are making the same mistake by trying to crowd the entire user base into one mold or the other. No matter which way you go, some of us won't fit. Let the distro.s each first decide whether they want to be consumer-grade or professional-grade. Then the consumer-grade distro.s can get together and settle on one default environment, and the pro-grade distro.s can continue giving the pros the control that they demand. This is a selling point against Windows, where important and useful choices are frowned upon while trivial choices are lavished with attention.
Remember that a lot of Linux instances are in server racks and don't really need a GUI at all. This is a selling point against Windows, which can't live without its memory- and performance-sucking GUI. Some of them don't have display hardware at all; they're run over a serial port or via ssh. "None" is also a choice.
Windows has the advantage that, while I'm sure there were competing models within Microsoft, they never gave us a choice; only one became a product. There's long been a choice on Linux and all choices now have their fierce adherents who will raise a ruckus if their choice is deprecated.
Slashdot Mirror
...did anyone else remember the MicroJ-11, a PDP11-on-TWO-chips implementation in a single DIP? Two chips wired together on one carrier. (IIRC the floating-point unit was one chip and everything else was on the other.) It got used in cluster storage controllers (HSC70/90) and all sorts of interesting gadgets.
"Of course, we have those that think by knowing how to spell and conjugate verbs make them literate, but that not necessarily the case."
:-}
Try:
Of course, we have those who think that knowing how to spell, and to conjugate verbs, makes them literate, but that is not necessarily the case.
An understanding of usage, and of the principles underlying the construction of a proper sentence, are important too.
While I'm all for education, and knowing what your tools do, it is arguable that we don't really need a million monkeys writing web pages on the bare metal. Let them have Dreamweaver. As long as the few who can really make HTML/HTTP dance and sing can find the information they need, we'll still have useful innovations and a cadre of experts who can handle the tough questions.
:-)
See Asimov's story "Olympiad" for an interesting take on this notion. It's all economics, man.
(Yes, I am trying to make some of the "million monkeys" mad enough to learn something new.
"they are immutable. a book doesn't 404 you suddenly"
Nor do they mysteriously change, sometimes radically, every time the author has a new idea and hacks his text again.
And don't forget:
5. It's easy to lay out a book on my desk, alongside the six other books I'm referring to concurrently, and see them all at the same time. <hubris>If one book can tell you everything you need to know about your project, what you are doing is too small to be called a "project".</hubris>
"...had Shiflett given up on the newcomer and given the developer greater depth...."
Talk to the editors. They seem to think everything should be For Dummies nowadays. "Lauguage X for People who Already Know How to Program" books are rare gems indeed.
OTOH I think that a lot of those fat books on the store shelves spend *too much* space on sample code. Many of them seen to be primarily code libraries on an eccentric distribution medium, and I often find myself wondering why they didn't just publish the code as files on a CDROM with the little threads of text tucked into the top of each directory. I do understand that it's hard to lead the reader through a program of useful size in book format, but it still bothers me.
Winding up at *any* MSN page *is* an error message!
...do they connect me to the SalesOMatic 9000 AI to chat with me about my domain needs?
Brilliant idea, guys'n'gals. NOT.
...Ginny's comment to her boyfriend in that Doonesbury strip from some years ago: "Just what you need: a $30,000 car to drive to Burger King in." [Adjusted for inflation]
Oh, good. So, not only are avionic systems improperly designed for the realities of the 21st century*, but apparently the people who designed the cell software didn't think of the obvious either. Shouldn't we *fix the broken equipment*?
-----------
* if laptops etc. can disrupt them then they are insufficiently hardened.
Yes, thank you for pointing out that my model is nonsense. There's a very nice explanation with diagram that I should have dug up before spouting.
It still looks like the nearest Earth/Sol point ought to be several million miles away, but then I've already proven that I don't know beans about orbital mechanics....
...is the absurdly low standards some organizations apparently have for saying that they "identified" someone.
I like the bit about "nearby Lagrange points." Wouldn't L1 and L5 be about 90 million miles away?
(Too lazy to look it up, I *assume* that the Lagrange points are the vertices of a hexagon inscribed in the planet's orbit, which is treated as circular for simplicity's sake. Since the circumference of a circle is 2*pi*R, and our R is 93mmi, and pi is a bit more than 3, that makes the circumferential distance a bit more than (2*3*93,000,000)/6 or R+epsilon. The straight-line distance (which wouldn't matter since spacecraft don't go in straight lines within a gravity well) is a chord which makes it a bit less, so I moosh all the estimates together and make it 90mmi. Simple!)
Wow, write a program to recognize something that even highly educated humans have trouble unambiguously recognizing. Sounds like fun, I wish I had several lifetimes to devote to it.
"If you're a business doing, say, $1000 of sales a day on the web to customers in PA, and they accidentally block you, what do you do when sales all of the sudden drop by that amount. You wouldn't know anything about your server's IP address being blocked by ISP's, nobody would have told you. Then it takes 2-3 days to find out. Goodbye $3000. A few more days to get a court order to unban, $2000. Then all the ISP's have to go back and un-ban your server, another $1000-5000. There's a possibility of $10,000 of lost sales there, not to mention lost customers who took their purchase elsewhere when they couldn't reach you."
Uhhuh. And then you sue the State of Pennsylvania for $10,000 in lost sales, plus $5000 to cover those lost customers, plus court costs and attorney fees. Meanwhile a hundred other businesses are doing the same. The AG's office is going to have plenty of work to do....
CDT? Does Keith Laumer know about this? :-)
Yeah, while reading this I began recalling an article in _Mad_ from years ago: "Changing Meanings for Fun and Profit." _Mad_ was funnier.
"...instead of encrypting the conversation and then employing ECC, the GSM does it the other way...."
Well, that answers my question about whether the standard writers had their design reviewed by someone who understands cryptography. *sigh*
Perhaps if they'd paid more attention to security and less to cutesy-poo interchangeable faceplates, they wouldn't be unhappy now. Did they have their design checked out by someone who understands cryptography?
Huh? We *had* videophones. Nobody wanted them. There's a Picturephone(tm) in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. It's the only one I ever saw in person.
Moving sidewalks? Try the airport.
Duuh, surely they are going to offer to go easy on him if he can give useful information that might lead them to the original perp. That's one reason you arrest small fish: to extract information on the bigger fish. After all, he got the source from *somewhere*.
Certainly someone witnessing a crime in progress is required to assist to the extent that it doesn't put him in unreasonable danger. Shouting, "Hey, you, stop! POLICE!!! POLICE!!!" would probably be enough to make a bludgeoner run away. If the crime actually takes place in your presence, aren't you required to report what you saw, and to summon LE if possible?
(Note to the touchy: yes, this is US-centric. I've not left the country except for one overnight stay in Canada and cannot comment on others' laws.)
Priorities and budgets are why we allow people to manage for us. Let them do their job so you can do yours.
Exactly. There is no request too big to do; there are only projects that the customer decided he didn't want to pay for. "We can do that. It'll take five years and $3million. It sounds like fun -- when can we get started? Why are you looking at me like that?" Just be sure these are honest estimates.
Besides, if they go for it and the big bosses approve, you get five years and three million dollars to play with. You can't lose!
Also, when there are not enough resources to do everything in the time requested, get bigger fish to decide which things are more important. Prioritize!
I never heard of Eolas until this. How big could they be? We could pass the hat and buy them out, then place the patented methods in the public domain. End of problem.
:-/
Or we could just let them get away with it, and give up on using active objects in web pages. Most of the ones I remember are just silly or annoying anyway, and could be done better by other means. Anything that cuts down on the amount of Shockwave/Flash gunk I have to wade through will win my praises.
(A hollow voice says, "fvwm!" :-)
There are several issues here.
There's a fundamental split between people who want to understand their tools and use them in innovative ways, and people who want the tools to tell them what is possible. The developer and professional computerist market is composed largely of the former, the mass market mostly of the latter. Microsoft and many Linux promoters are making the same mistake by trying to crowd the entire user base into one mold or the other. No matter which way you go, some of us won't fit. Let the distro.s each first decide whether they want to be consumer-grade or professional-grade. Then the consumer-grade distro.s can get together and settle on one default environment, and the pro-grade distro.s can continue giving the pros the control that they demand. This is a selling point against Windows, where important and useful choices are frowned upon while trivial choices are lavished with attention.
Remember that a lot of Linux instances are in server racks and don't really need a GUI at all. This is a selling point against Windows, which can't live without its memory- and performance-sucking GUI. Some of them don't have display hardware at all; they're run over a serial port or via ssh. "None" is also a choice.
Windows has the advantage that, while I'm sure there were competing models within Microsoft, they never gave us a choice; only one became a product. There's long been a choice on Linux and all choices now have their fierce adherents who will raise a ruckus if their choice is deprecated.