Okay. So let's see the income graph that is the inverse of the piracy graph.
Inverse? No.
I would predict such a graph would look like a flat line, with little or no correlation
whatsoever between income and piracy - I have X dollars of disposable income to use on
entertainment. I will spend those X dollars. I will also do as I damned well
please and not let such details as "physical possession" limit my choice of what games
I play.
The key point here - Whether or not I have the ability to play more games (or music,
or movies, etc) than I actually buy has no impact on my spending of X dollars.
My income may cause X to shift up or down, but unless I make so much that I can
afford a significant fraction of all available games, the correlation with piracy
remains almost zero.
A buddy of mine worked a variant of 9/80 schedule. They worked 9 hour days M-Th,
and then worked a half day every Friday.
Theoretically, my company does that. Sounds decent enough, right?
In practice, we rarely leave more than an hour early on Friday (and I mean
that as an hour early from the 9-hour day), effectively pushing the norm up
to 43-44 hours per week.
As for true 9/80, that could actually work out, in that as long as the company
doesn't expect you at all on the 10th day, they can't abuse the definition
of "half day".
The best schedule I ever worked was 12 hour days. I'd work 3 days one week, and
4 days the next week. I always had either 3 or 4 days off.
Lucky dog! I consider any day I get up and go to work "wasted", in the personal
sense, right from the start. So given the choice, I'd take your schedule without
a second thought. Sadly, all the companies in my area seem averse to anything but
the weakest deviation from the traditional 9-to-5 schedule.
Of course, I also don't really care about competing in the rat race, so as long
as I make enough to pay the bills, I'd just as soon work 20 hour weeks. Companies
really don't like that suggestion, though (at least not in IT, anyway).
Just get an iPhone with the biggest data plan they offer. Seriously.
I normally get modded down for my opinion of Apple, but in this
case, it seems like the optimal solution... A portable, fairly efficient all-in-one
platform for communication, including at least basic web browsing and multimedia
capabilities, and most importantly, including its own built-in means of getting
to the 'net (at least when in port, anyway).
who would you rather bring to meet the client: the arrogant jackass who's got
a lot of technical experience, or the personable guy who is willing to learn
anything he doesn't know and happy to admit that he doesn't know everything.
Correct, if unpopular answer - The guy who does know everything.
I'd rather have my computer/IRA/car/furnace/whatever maintained by a prick who
does a damned fine job, than a feel-good yes-man who tries to make me feel better
about how much his incompetence has cost me. I want my mechanic to tell me
"Hey moron, take your goddamned foot off the clutch once in a while, and you won't
have to see me for a new one again next year" rather than some schmuck consoling
me that "these things just happen, don't worry about it, sorry for the large bill".
Your mileage may vary, but I just jumped $30k in salary during a recession.
It comes as no surprise to anyone that people get promoted for personality (or good
hair) over skills... In fact, geeks have a whole self-debasing cartoon devoted to
exactly that topic - Remember, "Dilbert is a documentary".
Those imaginary lines are a lot more important than you think. My country
guarantees me several freedoms that other countries (or even the UN Declaration
of Human Rights) don't provide for.
No. YOU (and I, and any Slashdot reader from a modern Western democracy)
have granted certain rights to our governments in exchange for them making
certain aspects of our lives easier and safer. The governments of the world have
no actual rights they can ever grant us, only rights they can (try to) take
away.
Now, I will agree with you that many cultures do not hold dear many of
the freedoms we normally take for granted... But that has more to do with fear
and ignorance than the position of any given line on a map... Simple example,
radical Islam and Evangelical Christianity. Both want scarily similar restrictions
on personal freedom, but only one (the last eight years in the US aside) uses the
mask of national sovereignty to lend itself some pretense of legitimacy.
Oh stop being stupid with that red herring! This isn't about "personal
responsibility".
I count as about as anti-corporate as they come, and even I have to say the burden
of keeping your personal records for long-term reference doesn't rest on the
companies involved. Once you pay your bill, end of transaction. If you want a copy,
keep a copy.
It's about transfer of effort and risk from the company billing you to you yourself.
Effort they need to expend on a non-customer? Think of that from the reverse
perspective - A company has to keep your W2 on file for X years, whether or not
you still work there. If X-1 years after you quit, they have a fire and ask you
to resubmit a destroyed W2, do you feel "obligated" to comply, or do you tell them
to go pound sand?
And about companies removing a service that they have led you to expect will be
available.
Why should I expect them to make any service available to me after discontinuing
my relationship with them? If they really wanted to stick it to an ex customer, they
could very well (and legally) insist that you drive to a physical office and pay
in actual green US currency. Accepting CC payment via phone, or even a check via mail,
counts as a courtesy they have no obligation to extend to you.
This person is expecting to pay their last bill online, like they expected to (and
succeeded in) paying their previous bills online.
By nature of the problem itself, the relationship has changed. Do you still expect
sex from your ex after trading her in for a younger model, just because she consented previously?
And just as some helpful general info - A TrueCrypt volume makes an excellent
place to store personal financial information available in electronic form (make it under
4.5GB, and you can easily back it up to DVD periodically); and for the Luddites, you can
always print the damned thing out and stick them in the filing cabinet. Not rocket
science...
Yeah - Did you also notice how many manufacturers skimped on a $0.05 filter
cap (or for that matter, who can't even bother using a full-wave rectifier)?
Damned flickering drives me completely batshit. Of course, it only looks really
annoying when moving - For example, in a car, with them draped over every bush and
small tree you pass.
that was filmed eight years ago? Awesome! No seriously, there might be
a logical fallacy in what you said.
You've incorrectly conflated "age of the media" with "age of the actors"
to lead to an apparent absurdity.
A 7 year old Drew Barrymore could not have legally appeared in a porn
sequel to ET, not even with the passing of time making her now 33. She
could (and did), however, legally appear nude in Playboy in 1995
at age 20.
If we want to try to absurdly apply laws intended to protect children,
to fantasy animated worlds, then why not apply the laws of
physics as well? A brand new Simpson's episode features a 30 year
old Bart, a 28 year old Lisa, and a 20 year old Maggie (based on the Tracy
Ulman show rather than the 1989 premier of the Simpsons in their own show).
The "Actors", if we insist on considering them such, merely portray
younger characters.
First, any claim that this test identifies "innate" ability is nonsense.
Because, y'know, not like we have any sort of hardwired advantages or limitations in
other more easily measured aspects of our physiology... If only I had the drive,
I could compete with the best pro athlete out there, regardless of height or mitochondrial
density or baseline testosterone levels. And if only Paris Hilton applied herself, she
could reconcile quantum and classical physics.
Sorry, but All Men Are NOT Created Equal, no matter how much the PC police
want to claim such. Boys will hold dolls as weapons or pretend to blow them up,
and girls will tuck a rubber knife in to its comfy little pink bed. Some people get
ripped abs from walking across the room to get coffee, some remain squishy no matter
how hard they work out. Some kids get in trouble for throwing rocks at squirrels,
some get in trouble for taking apart the TV to see how it works.
In the world of CS, you don't need a study to confirm the fact claimed
by the GP... Some people can code, and others can't (very well). Sure, anyone can
learn VB, anyone can trudge through a chain of logic to figure out what a given input
will do, anyone can (with enough training) hack out a few toy apps; but only a small
minority of people can maintain the mental state needed to "think" in algorithms for
16 hours straight to come up with something that transcends mere arithmetic.
Perhaps, by way of compromise, this has more to do with few people having the desire
or will to maintain such a mental state for long stretches. But if you ask a "real"
programmer how they feel about coding, they don't describe it as a chore, they describe
it as a form of meditation, relaxing and enjoyable. Therein lies the key
difference, and no amount of "nurture" will change that.
Being able to compare prices to something other than ebay without having
to make a couple dozen phone calls would be extremely helpful.
Why did this get modded "Troll"?
Granted, we can normally consider eBay more-or-less the definitive price guide for
used stuff, but the parent post has a good point - Online 2nd-hand storefronts tend
to have an abysmal record when it comes to keeping prices and product availability
up to date.
Offhand, I know of only two reasons for doing that - Either they can't
keep track of their own inventory, or they play the classic game of "once someone calls
for a price, they'll say yes to almost anything"... And I for one wouldn't recommend
buying from someone in either category.
And I say that as someone who encourages people to print in the most severe toner-saving mode their printer
has; as someone who duplexes everything, often 4-up per side; someone who considers a 9pt font
shamelessly wasteful for anything but a presentation-quality final result.
I also say it as someone who doesn't get all elitist about fonts (I happen to like Comic
Sans, ThankYouVeryMuch), as long as they don't hurt to read.
And Spranq Eco Sans hurts to read. At large sizes, it looks like a billboard with all the lights
out, and at small sizes it looks like someone ran it through the shredder and taped it back together. Just
way too visually distracting to even consider.
why did slashdot miss out on a pretty important article that could potentially
affect all Mac users, while they posted an article that's not really going to apply
to more than 1% or 2% of Mac users?
Because the former said something bad about Apple, while the latter says something
good (if irrelevant to most people). Duh?
You seem to have forgotten that OSDN counts as a wholly pwned subsidiary of SteveCo.
What's so different about singling out one more high-risk group and
protecting ourselves from the collateral damage they are more likely to cause?
Because unlike other high-risk groups, teens get into more accidents largely due to
mere inexperience - The cure for which involves, of all things, doing the
activity they suck at more, not less.
Grandma's eyesight won't ever come back, but young drivers will learn
when to pay more attention to the road than to their phone/radio/whatever.
I don't see why an algorithm would break just because you're changing language type, the whole
point of an algorithm is that it's programming language independent.
More to the point, why would your choice of programming paradigm have a significant impact on parallelization of
algorithms? They all have equal computational power, and differ only in the style of expressing your
intent.
If anything, current CPUs best match the imperative model (and more cores of a similar design won't change that); But
they only do so out of popularity - If functional programming didn't count as a complete bitch to implement with no
benefits over imperative or OO, CPUs would export a more functional-friendly ISA.
And for the record, I can code adequately in Tcl... And given a choice, I'd choose C(++/#/whatever) for
any task (Even intended recursion - In that, on Von Neuman architecture, the nonrecursive form of any
given algorithm will outperform the recursive version).
swappiness = 0 is the same as running swapoff -a and will crash your
programs when they need more memory than is available (as the kernel isn't
written for a system without swap).
I run several linux machines with swap turned off, as well as several XP boxes using
a pagefile on a RAMDisk (if you turn paging "off" in XP, it makes a 64MB pagefile
in the Windows directory without asking permission) because I believe the same thing
as the FP author - You simply don't need swap anymore on a machine with enough
memory.
And you know, I have yet to have a machine (of either OS) crash because of it. I
don't get anomalous errors, I don't get bluescreens or kernel panics, I don't get
thrashing as programs fight over who gets to use the available RAM.
Yeah, feel free to call me six kinds of idiot, but it makes Explorer much
more responsive. Linux doesn't benefit quite so much because it doesn't
insist on flogging swap several times a second when it has nothing to page out, but
particularly with slow disks (ie, laptops), it makes a noticeable improvement.
either losing my sanity in the confines of ship I can't leave for months on end or
waiting for my fellow shipmates to do the same
Thus the obvious need to send hardcore geeks (with interests in medicine, architecture,
and alternative construction methods) as the first colonists.
Confined to a small space for months on end? No problem, as long as the ship has a
nice library of games (and perhaps a LAN for when the crew feels like "socializing"
via a deathmatch). No interaction with other humans? Puh-lease, I strive for
that here on Earth, and rarely get it (ever wonder why so many geeks have seemingly
paradoxical offline hobbies like mountain climbing and hiking? You don't get many
visitors on the face of a cliff).
And for our side-hobbies, geeks tend to produce some of the best work outside a true
professional in that field. Personally, I've done some damned fine finish-carpentry
work, myself; I have geek friends who excel at skills ranging from metal-smithing to
animal husbandry.
As for points A, B, and D... Well, a properly-designed ship negates all of those,
and serves as an initial habitat until the crew can build something better.
Seriously, the first people to go to Mars would almost have to have a deathwish to
do so.
I may have self-destructive tendancies, but certainly no death wish... And I'll
gladly go to the front of the line to join that first ship's crew.
Now, I ask you: How many terrorist attacks have there been on planes since this
system was put in place?
True, but that little or nothing to do with the TSA. You see, I have this
"anti-terrorist" rock I found a few years ago, and as long as I give it a
lucky pat before bed every night, it keeps the entire US safe.
The TSA has not publicly said whether it has caught a terrorist through the program
Of course not - That would presume the TSA (and DHS in general) actually has the goal of
stopping terrorists.
Don't make the mistake of taking their name and stated goals literally. The DHS exists
solely for the purpose of keeping the US populace in fear, making us easier to control
and more tolerant of increasingly draconian laws relating to "security". For proof, you
need look no further than how well FEMA (once an actually useful agency) has handled
various disasters since they got sucked into the DHS... Or for that matter, the TSA's
record at catching weapons carried by various reporters.
The second amendment grows increasingly relevant to our society every day... And not
for protection from dark-skinned foreigners, but the real "terrorists" running our
country and our world.
15-30 minutes for BOOTING? I don't care if they "start programs".
You left out a grey area between the actual booting and the starting of programs - The
automatic starting of programs at every boot.
My own machine at work (salaried, so this issue has no relevance to me BTW) takes about
30 seconds to boot, another minute and a half after logging in for the desktop to
appear, and then up to twenty minutes before the autostarts finish and I can actually
do something on it (as in, so much system activity going on that the mouse pointer
lags).
So yeah, I can see calling that "boot time", in that it only happens on startup, the
user didn't initiate it (except by pressing the power button), and you don't have any
choice but to wait for it to finish before you can use the machine.
That said, I agree with you completely - Any time spent in a place not of my choosing
(with the exception of the commute, since you could fairly argue I "choose" to live more
than a 30 second drive from work), I would expect to get paid for. If someone has to show
up at 8am to turn on a machine, they need to start getting paid at 8am, even if they
sit there twiddling their thumbs for the next 20 minutes.
Many corporations are now utilizing virtual time clock software, requiring
hourly employees to clock in via their PC. Couple that with a hypothetical
policy of having to shut down PCs overnight to save power, and presto, employees
don't get paid for booting.
Man, why can't I ever work for a company with such stupid metrics like that
(or "lines of code", or something like that)?
Turn on "boot at 8:00am" in the BIOS, set up a shutdown script to run at 4:30pm, (or,
lacking the privilege to create a scheduled task, just run "shutdown -f -t 15300" at
startup) problem solved. Or if they stupidly use the actual uptime to figure
out hours, push those out another half hour for some serious free overtime.
Companies that treat workers like mindless interchangeable robots deserve what
they get when their drones learn to game the system.
They'll be a good deal more unfriendly if they realize there's actual
malice intended rather than possibly innocent filming.
So a few people might get kicked out of Walmart. Turning off their TVs doesn't
cause any actual damage, and as long as you leave when asked, you haven't broken
any laws.
How does this differ from simply turning them off (which I used to love doing as a
young kid - On entering any department store, I'd make a bee-line for the AV
department to start gleefully pulling plugs), except that the TV-B-Gone gives you the
power to turn off otherwise-inaccessible devices?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. So let's see the income graph that is the inverse of the piracy graph.
Inverse? No.
I would predict such a graph would look like a flat line, with little or no correlation whatsoever between income and piracy - I have X dollars of disposable income to use on entertainment. I will spend those X dollars. I will also do as I damned well please and not let such details as "physical possession" limit my choice of what games I play.
The key point here - Whether or not I have the ability to play more games (or music, or movies, etc) than I actually buy has no impact on my spending of X dollars. My income may cause X to shift up or down, but unless I make so much that I can afford a significant fraction of all available games, the correlation with piracy remains almost zero.
A buddy of mine worked a variant of 9/80 schedule. They worked 9 hour days M-Th, and then worked a half day every Friday.
Theoretically, my company does that. Sounds decent enough, right?
In practice, we rarely leave more than an hour early on Friday (and I mean that as an hour early from the 9-hour day), effectively pushing the norm up to 43-44 hours per week.
As for true 9/80, that could actually work out, in that as long as the company doesn't expect you at all on the 10th day, they can't abuse the definition of "half day".
The best schedule I ever worked was 12 hour days. I'd work 3 days one week, and 4 days the next week. I always had either 3 or 4 days off.
Lucky dog! I consider any day I get up and go to work "wasted", in the personal sense, right from the start. So given the choice, I'd take your schedule without a second thought. Sadly, all the companies in my area seem averse to anything but the weakest deviation from the traditional 9-to-5 schedule.
Of course, I also don't really care about competing in the rat race, so as long as I make enough to pay the bills, I'd just as soon work 20 hour weeks. Companies really don't like that suggestion, though (at least not in IT, anyway).
Just get an iPhone with the biggest data plan they offer. Seriously.
I normally get modded down for my opinion of Apple, but in this case, it seems like the optimal solution... A portable, fairly efficient all-in-one platform for communication, including at least basic web browsing and multimedia capabilities, and most importantly, including its own built-in means of getting to the 'net (at least when in port, anyway).
who would you rather bring to meet the client: the arrogant jackass who's got a lot of technical experience, or the personable guy who is willing to learn anything he doesn't know and happy to admit that he doesn't know everything.
Correct, if unpopular answer - The guy who does know everything.
I'd rather have my computer/IRA/car/furnace/whatever maintained by a prick who does a damned fine job, than a feel-good yes-man who tries to make me feel better about how much his incompetence has cost me. I want my mechanic to tell me "Hey moron, take your goddamned foot off the clutch once in a while, and you won't have to see me for a new one again next year" rather than some schmuck consoling me that "these things just happen, don't worry about it, sorry for the large bill".
Your mileage may vary, but I just jumped $30k in salary during a recession.
It comes as no surprise to anyone that people get promoted for personality (or good hair) over skills... In fact, geeks have a whole self-debasing cartoon devoted to exactly that topic - Remember, "Dilbert is a documentary".
Yet again, Nvidia showed ATI that it, indeed, has the biggest penis.
Not quite - They proved they have the biggest number of penises... Making for some interesting crossover potential into the Hentai gaming market.
/ Wonders what "ultra realistic" means as regards H - "Wow, the fur on her tail looks almost real, and her breasts look like actual porcelain!"
Those imaginary lines are a lot more important than you think. My country guarantees me several freedoms that other countries (or even the UN Declaration of Human Rights) don't provide for.
No. YOU (and I, and any Slashdot reader from a modern Western democracy) have granted certain rights to our governments in exchange for them making certain aspects of our lives easier and safer. The governments of the world have no actual rights they can ever grant us, only rights they can (try to) take away.
Now, I will agree with you that many cultures do not hold dear many of the freedoms we normally take for granted... But that has more to do with fear and ignorance than the position of any given line on a map... Simple example, radical Islam and Evangelical Christianity. Both want scarily similar restrictions on personal freedom, but only one (the last eight years in the US aside) uses the mask of national sovereignty to lend itself some pretense of legitimacy.
If you get rid of the restrictions on people moving you destroy national sovereignty and identity
You say that like you consider it a bad thing...
The sooner we get rid of the petty tribal "us vs them" mentality we get from all the imaginary lines we've drawn on our globe, the better.
Oh stop being stupid with that red herring! This isn't about "personal responsibility".
I count as about as anti-corporate as they come, and even I have to say the burden of keeping your personal records for long-term reference doesn't rest on the companies involved. Once you pay your bill, end of transaction. If you want a copy, keep a copy.
It's about transfer of effort and risk from the company billing you to you yourself.
Effort they need to expend on a non-customer? Think of that from the reverse perspective - A company has to keep your W2 on file for X years, whether or not you still work there. If X-1 years after you quit, they have a fire and ask you to resubmit a destroyed W2, do you feel "obligated" to comply, or do you tell them to go pound sand?
And about companies removing a service that they have led you to expect will be available.
Why should I expect them to make any service available to me after discontinuing my relationship with them? If they really wanted to stick it to an ex customer, they could very well (and legally) insist that you drive to a physical office and pay in actual green US currency. Accepting CC payment via phone, or even a check via mail, counts as a courtesy they have no obligation to extend to you.
This person is expecting to pay their last bill online, like they expected to (and succeeded in) paying their previous bills online.
By nature of the problem itself, the relationship has changed. Do you still expect sex from your ex after trading her in for a younger model, just because she consented previously?
And just as some helpful general info - A TrueCrypt volume makes an excellent place to store personal financial information available in electronic form (make it under 4.5GB, and you can easily back it up to DVD periodically); and for the Luddites, you can always print the damned thing out and stick them in the filing cabinet. Not rocket science...
Did you notice all the LED xmas lights this year?
Yeah - Did you also notice how many manufacturers skimped on a $0.05 filter cap (or for that matter, who can't even bother using a full-wave rectifier)?
Damned flickering drives me completely batshit. Of course, it only looks really annoying when moving - For example, in a car, with them draped over every bush and small tree you pass.
that was filmed eight years ago? Awesome! No seriously, there might be a logical fallacy in what you said.
You've incorrectly conflated "age of the media" with "age of the actors" to lead to an apparent absurdity.
A 7 year old Drew Barrymore could not have legally appeared in a porn sequel to ET, not even with the passing of time making her now 33. She could (and did), however, legally appear nude in Playboy in 1995 at age 20.
If we want to try to absurdly apply laws intended to protect children, to fantasy animated worlds, then why not apply the laws of physics as well? A brand new Simpson's episode features a 30 year old Bart, a 28 year old Lisa, and a 20 year old Maggie (based on the Tracy Ulman show rather than the 1989 premier of the Simpsons in their own show). The "Actors", if we insist on considering them such, merely portray younger characters.
First, any claim that this test identifies "innate" ability is nonsense.
Because, y'know, not like we have any sort of hardwired advantages or limitations in other more easily measured aspects of our physiology... If only I had the drive, I could compete with the best pro athlete out there, regardless of height or mitochondrial density or baseline testosterone levels. And if only Paris Hilton applied herself, she could reconcile quantum and classical physics.
Sorry, but All Men Are NOT Created Equal, no matter how much the PC police want to claim such. Boys will hold dolls as weapons or pretend to blow them up, and girls will tuck a rubber knife in to its comfy little pink bed. Some people get ripped abs from walking across the room to get coffee, some remain squishy no matter how hard they work out. Some kids get in trouble for throwing rocks at squirrels, some get in trouble for taking apart the TV to see how it works.
In the world of CS, you don't need a study to confirm the fact claimed by the GP... Some people can code, and others can't (very well). Sure, anyone can learn VB, anyone can trudge through a chain of logic to figure out what a given input will do, anyone can (with enough training) hack out a few toy apps; but only a small minority of people can maintain the mental state needed to "think" in algorithms for 16 hours straight to come up with something that transcends mere arithmetic.
Perhaps, by way of compromise, this has more to do with few people having the desire or will to maintain such a mental state for long stretches. But if you ask a "real" programmer how they feel about coding, they don't describe it as a chore, they describe it as a form of meditation, relaxing and enjoyable. Therein lies the key difference, and no amount of "nurture" will change that.
Being able to compare prices to something other than ebay without having to make a couple dozen phone calls would be extremely helpful.
Why did this get modded "Troll"?
Granted, we can normally consider eBay more-or-less the definitive price guide for used stuff, but the parent post has a good point - Online 2nd-hand storefronts tend to have an abysmal record when it comes to keeping prices and product availability up to date.
Offhand, I know of only two reasons for doing that - Either they can't keep track of their own inventory, or they play the classic game of "once someone calls for a price, they'll say yes to almost anything"... And I for one wouldn't recommend buying from someone in either category.
Looks interesting
No, looks like complete and utter crap.
And I say that as someone who encourages people to print in the most severe toner-saving mode their printer has; as someone who duplexes everything, often 4-up per side; someone who considers a 9pt font shamelessly wasteful for anything but a presentation-quality final result.
I also say it as someone who doesn't get all elitist about fonts (I happen to like Comic Sans, ThankYouVeryMuch), as long as they don't hurt to read.
And Spranq Eco Sans hurts to read. At large sizes, it looks like a billboard with all the lights out, and at small sizes it looks like someone ran it through the shredder and taped it back together. Just way too visually distracting to even consider.
Some users installing third party apps that modify their system files, and then apply updates over them have issues is hardly newsworthy.
Riiiiiight... Because a Linux-heavy audience would never even consider violating the sanctity of those spoooooky "system files" of which you speak...
why did slashdot miss out on a pretty important article that could potentially affect all Mac users, while they posted an article that's not really going to apply to more than 1% or 2% of Mac users?
Because the former said something bad about Apple, while the latter says something good (if irrelevant to most people). Duh?
You seem to have forgotten that OSDN counts as a wholly pwned subsidiary of SteveCo.
What's so different about singling out one more high-risk group and protecting ourselves from the collateral damage they are more likely to cause?
Because unlike other high-risk groups, teens get into more accidents largely due to mere inexperience - The cure for which involves, of all things, doing the activity they suck at more, not less.
Grandma's eyesight won't ever come back, but young drivers will learn when to pay more attention to the road than to their phone/radio/whatever.
I don't see why an algorithm would break just because you're changing language type, the whole point of an algorithm is that it's programming language independent.
More to the point, why would your choice of programming paradigm have a significant impact on parallelization of algorithms? They all have equal computational power, and differ only in the style of expressing your intent.
If anything, current CPUs best match the imperative model (and more cores of a similar design won't change that); But they only do so out of popularity - If functional programming didn't count as a complete bitch to implement with no benefits over imperative or OO, CPUs would export a more functional-friendly ISA.
And for the record, I can code adequately in Tcl... And given a choice, I'd choose C(++/#/whatever) for any task (Even intended recursion - In that, on Von Neuman architecture, the nonrecursive form of any given algorithm will outperform the recursive version).
swappiness = 0 is the same as running swapoff -a and will crash your programs when they need more memory than is available (as the kernel isn't written for a system without swap).
I run several linux machines with swap turned off, as well as several XP boxes using a pagefile on a RAMDisk (if you turn paging "off" in XP, it makes a 64MB pagefile in the Windows directory without asking permission) because I believe the same thing as the FP author - You simply don't need swap anymore on a machine with enough memory.
And you know, I have yet to have a machine (of either OS) crash because of it. I don't get anomalous errors, I don't get bluescreens or kernel panics, I don't get thrashing as programs fight over who gets to use the available RAM.
Yeah, feel free to call me six kinds of idiot, but it makes Explorer much more responsive. Linux doesn't benefit quite so much because it doesn't insist on flogging swap several times a second when it has nothing to page out, but particularly with slow disks (ie, laptops), it makes a noticeable improvement.
LoCs are data size. CoLAs are a measure of land area.
Sorry, I just can't take and study seriously if it doesn't measure land in "size of Rhode Island"s.
either losing my sanity in the confines of ship I can't leave for months on end or waiting for my fellow shipmates to do the same
Thus the obvious need to send hardcore geeks (with interests in medicine, architecture, and alternative construction methods) as the first colonists.
Confined to a small space for months on end? No problem, as long as the ship has a nice library of games (and perhaps a LAN for when the crew feels like "socializing" via a deathmatch). No interaction with other humans? Puh-lease, I strive for that here on Earth, and rarely get it (ever wonder why so many geeks have seemingly paradoxical offline hobbies like mountain climbing and hiking? You don't get many visitors on the face of a cliff).
And for our side-hobbies, geeks tend to produce some of the best work outside a true professional in that field. Personally, I've done some damned fine finish-carpentry work, myself; I have geek friends who excel at skills ranging from metal-smithing to animal husbandry.
As for points A, B, and D... Well, a properly-designed ship negates all of those, and serves as an initial habitat until the crew can build something better.
Seriously, the first people to go to Mars would almost have to have a deathwish to do so.
I may have self-destructive tendancies, but certainly no death wish... And I'll gladly go to the front of the line to join that first ship's crew.
Now, I ask you: How many terrorist attacks have there been on planes since this system was put in place?
True, but that little or nothing to do with the TSA. You see, I have this "anti-terrorist" rock I found a few years ago, and as long as I give it a lucky pat before bed every night, it keeps the entire US safe.
The TSA has not publicly said whether it has caught a terrorist through the program
Of course not - That would presume the TSA (and DHS in general) actually has the goal of stopping terrorists.
Don't make the mistake of taking their name and stated goals literally. The DHS exists solely for the purpose of keeping the US populace in fear, making us easier to control and more tolerant of increasingly draconian laws relating to "security". For proof, you need look no further than how well FEMA (once an actually useful agency) has handled various disasters since they got sucked into the DHS... Or for that matter, the TSA's record at catching weapons carried by various reporters.
The second amendment grows increasingly relevant to our society every day... And not for protection from dark-skinned foreigners, but the real "terrorists" running our country and our world.
15-30 minutes for BOOTING? I don't care if they "start programs".
You left out a grey area between the actual booting and the starting of programs - The automatic starting of programs at every boot.
My own machine at work (salaried, so this issue has no relevance to me BTW) takes about 30 seconds to boot, another minute and a half after logging in for the desktop to appear, and then up to twenty minutes before the autostarts finish and I can actually do something on it (as in, so much system activity going on that the mouse pointer lags).
So yeah, I can see calling that "boot time", in that it only happens on startup, the user didn't initiate it (except by pressing the power button), and you don't have any choice but to wait for it to finish before you can use the machine.
That said, I agree with you completely - Any time spent in a place not of my choosing (with the exception of the commute, since you could fairly argue I "choose" to live more than a 30 second drive from work), I would expect to get paid for. If someone has to show up at 8am to turn on a machine, they need to start getting paid at 8am, even if they sit there twiddling their thumbs for the next 20 minutes.
Many corporations are now utilizing virtual time clock software, requiring hourly employees to clock in via their PC. Couple that with a hypothetical policy of having to shut down PCs overnight to save power, and presto, employees don't get paid for booting.
Man, why can't I ever work for a company with such stupid metrics like that (or "lines of code", or something like that)?
Turn on "boot at 8:00am" in the BIOS, set up a shutdown script to run at 4:30pm, (or, lacking the privilege to create a scheduled task, just run "shutdown -f -t 15300" at startup) problem solved. Or if they stupidly use the actual uptime to figure out hours, push those out another half hour for some serious free overtime.
Companies that treat workers like mindless interchangeable robots deserve what they get when their drones learn to game the system.
They'll be a good deal more unfriendly if they realize there's actual malice intended rather than possibly innocent filming.
So a few people might get kicked out of Walmart. Turning off their TVs doesn't cause any actual damage, and as long as you leave when asked, you haven't broken any laws.
How does this differ from simply turning them off (which I used to love doing as a young kid - On entering any department store, I'd make a bee-line for the AV department to start gleefully pulling plugs), except that the TV-B-Gone gives you the power to turn off otherwise-inaccessible devices?