> for all the easy to do but time-consuming and boring as heck tasks.
That's what CPUs are for. Just put the shell command in a for() loop, or if it's more complex, a 10 line Perl script.
Ah, you must be from the land of Windows, where the shell is graphical-only and therefore a PITA to script, and rather than inputting and outputting simple text, everything has it's own special object format. Yeah, in that case you need $60,000 worth of minions to do what we Linux guys do in 60 minutes per year of scripting time.
An interesting job is to be a minion in a Windows shop, but a minion who can script and has a Mac. The boss gives you an eight hour job, you spend 10 minutes scripting, two hours on Slashdot, two hours at lunch, and give them the results two hours sooner than expected.
It's LOL, for sure. In three months you can teach someone the essential keywords of a language and basic syntax, sure. Knowing the essential words doesn't make one a developer any more than it makes one a poet. Programming is nearly pure thought, reasoning. Noting the results of the thought-work using the shorthand known as "code" is a necessary piece of sidework, like an archaeologist. taking notes using archaeological abbreviations. The ability to take notes doesn't make one an archaeologist, the ability to scrawl code,doesn't make one a software architect. To be fair, their very name admits they teach the wrong thing - Code Academy. Apparently they teach code. Pretty much like setting up Medical Abbreviations Academy, where they teach medical abbreviations.
As others have said, I've been programming professionally, and studying my craft, for nearly 20 years ; I still consult with my peers several times each week because none of us know everything we nees to know yet. Except Knuth, of course. Probably the closest any programmer has gotten to knowing their job is Ted T'so - he's the best in the world at developing filesystems. He only needs about 20 other people to review his work before it goes to production.
Indeed. Most dems go apeshit when you point out that even the co-founder of Greenpeace has said that nuclear is the _only_ feasible solution for most,of our energy needs, and he lays out exactly why. Cognitive dissonance to the max.
He opened one article by saying that he and his friends had slightly exaggerated the risks of nuclear power back in the 1960s-1980s, but a think to get most of their former followers to do the right thing they'll have to come right out and say "we lied to you". That's the only way the people most concerned about global warming will support the one solution that can actually work in the real world. They'll keep chasing magic energy until there is a complete famine rather than acknowledging the solution is something they were told to dislike.
Cooking for one CAN be a hassle, for sure. I find it often works well to do a middle ground- microwave a frozen burrito, and toss fresh cheese, onions and tomato on top, or whatever I have on hand. I always have cheese on hand because it goes on so many things and is much better fresh than frozen. Similarly, I'll take 30 seconds to toss some ramen in water, then add whatever to make it good. That takes less time than going to McDonald's and costs $300/month less.
> to get something even mildly similar to a big mac.
I was specifically addressing the topic of eating fattening food vs willpower and the question "what about people who CAN'T AFFORD better than a Big Mac". I'm comparing the Big Mac to healthier food, not to a homemade Big Mac. Healthier food costs less than McDonald's food, so people aren't eating McDonald's because they can't afford healthy food.
Trivia fact regarding the Big Mac: A Big Mac is $4. A McDonald's double cheeseburger with Mac sauce is $1-$1.50 and it's almost exactly the same thing.
Your point is certainly correct. Almost everything you buy, from food to medicine, to clothing is carried in trucks, so high gas taxes increase the cost of all goods. A minor nitpick:
> What about the people who couldn't afford better than a Big Mac?
A Big Mac costs $4 and weighs half a pound, so it's $8 per pound. Fruits and vegetables run about $1 per pound. Junk food is expensive, so the oft-expressed claim that Americans eat junk because they can't afford nutritious food is silly. Our neighbors to the south, in Mexico, spend $1 / day for more nutritious food that many of us spend $10 / day on. Many healthy foods are less than 50 cents per pound, including rice, beans, and bananas. I just spent 99 cents on a loaf of whole wheat bread. A single Hershey bar or orser of fries would cost more.
> Perhaps all the morons buying hummers and F-150s
Wven the four-door SuperCab version of the F-150 gets real- world 23.5 in road tests. Do you have a more efficient way to haul things, or are you spouting off without having any idea what you're talking about?
You can base your opinions on facts, or you can base them on what a Comedy Central comedian tells you to think. Your choice.
If you have the thermal datasheet in front of you, you see it says the physical properties START to change at about -75, and it remains usable to -250, depending on the application. -56 sounds a bit low, but there is a cold layer before it starts to warm up with increasing altitude, so you could hit -56, I suppose.
The top of the stratosphere is a little below freezing. Weather balloons often hit the lower range of the stratosphere and burst only because they don't have a pressure release valve.
I wasn't serious. My actual strategy is to leave drips all over whichever restroom does not contain her makeup. She'll quickly stop using that restroom and only use "her" bathroom, the one with her makeup in it. Bonus points if her bathroom is also the guest bathroom.
Totally kidding- I want my woman to be happy when she has her pants down.
-> Specifically, if you express a value for the rooms as almost the same as your roommate, but slightly lower for the rooms he wants the most and slightly higher for the rooms he likes the least, I suspect their mechanism for overdemanded and underdemanded rooms will give you the slightly inferior rooms at a greatly reduced price
You'll only screw yourself that way. Suppose he values the first bedroom at $600 and the second at $500, because the first bedroom is better in some way.
You suggest going lower on the room he wants, so $550, and slightly higher for the room he doesn't want, so again $550. So you've said that you don't care which room you get. Since you don't care and he does, he'll get the better room. You said it's worth $550, he said $600, so he'll end up paying about $575.
Most of these algorithms automatically account for lying in the same way - the try to give you what you say you want. If you lie and say you want to sleep in the dumpster, you'll get what you asked for. The only time you won't get what you asked for is if someone else asked for the same thing.
What the algorithms don't cover well is if preferences vastly differ between people, AND you know what the other person's true preferences are. Suppose a brother and sister are dividing up a Barbie, a GI Joe, and a slice of cake. Brother can gain an advantage by OVER valuing the Barbie and under valuing the GI Joe, but not by too much - he doesn't want to actually end up getting the Barbie. He wants to end up with the "undesireable" GI Joe AND the cake. However , if the sister does the same thing, undervaluing the Barbie and overvaluing the GI Joe, they'll likely end up with what neither of them wanted.
the main practical complication I've had in real life is when one person makes much more money than the other person. the well off person would likely be willing to spend far more than the "fair" price in this situation for the better room. I don't think there's any clear cut solution that works in every case.
Suppose the rent on the two bedroom place is $1,000. The "rich" roommate over bids as you suggest and says he'll pay $800 for the room on the left. Fine, that leaves the other roommate to cover only $200 for the other room. One can hardly complain about getting half of a $1,000 apartment for $200.
The male wants to avoid unnecessary raising and lowering - conservation of energy. The female wants TWO things - she wants the seat lifted before the gentleman urinates, AND she wants it lowered before she does.
If the gentleman leaves the seat up, the female (provably) got the first thing she wants - the seat was raised before he urinated. Each party ends up doing the same amount of effort - they either raise or lower the seat before using it. That's fair.
The other option, that the seat is left down, means that a) the man is expected to do 100% of the work, both raising and lowering, while the female does none. More importantly from her point of view, if the seat is down, she doesn't know whether or not it was down when he peed. She might be sitting on pee spots.
Fairness, and her own piece of mind, therefore dictate that he leave the seat up.
However, if she's clever, she can't gently force the seat to be lowered afterwards by placing a tray of soaps, potpourri, etc. on top of the toilet. The tray will prevent the seat from being raised all way to vertical and gravity will ensure it ends up down. The clever gentleman can respond to this forcing function by pointing out that it prevents her from knowing whether male guests ever raised the seat at all.
A chart matching growth with president's budget's can be found here for 1964-2006. Not shown on that chart is 2008, which is http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...
Again, the numbers and chart don't tell us anything about fairness, social justice, or any other issues. It simply shows that "pro-business" republican policies have been good for the economy. This trend shouldn't be surprising - we'd expect government spending on assistance programs to increase with democrat presidents, and we'd expect business to do well with republican presidents. What I find surprising is the consistency - the fact hat growth got worse under EVERY democrat president between their first budget and their last.
As you indicated, the budget has to be approved by both congress and the president. For example, Reagan had to negotiate with the Democrats, who were in control of congress. Obama's party controlled both houses of congress at first, then the republicans controlled the house. What we can say is that the president, in signing a budget, has a significant impact on the how government funds are spent, and how much is spent. Each senator also has small amount of influence, but the president's influence is roughly the same as all of the congress put together, so the budget will certainly tend to reflect a president's priorities.
> I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
If anyone can post anything and nothing is excluded, you end up with the internet. They are trying to build an encyclopedia, not the internet. Most of the comments on this page are true, but they don't belong in an encyclopedia.
I should have used preview. That should say I'd certainly prefer less than 100ms, preferably less than 25 in order to have that "real time" feel, no noticeable lag.
Also should say at 1000ms Hawking will get ahead of the echo.
You certainly CAN use a text interface with 1000ms latency. You can also watch video at 56K, I did a lot of that late at night when I was a teenager. I'd sure rather have a few Mbps for video and 100ms for text, though. At 100ms, even Stephen Hawking's typing will get ahead of the echo, and his arms are paralyzed- he types by blinking his eyes ala Morse code or similar.
> we have to do something. We also have to be mindful that giving federal government agencies more power turns out bad about 90% of the time. But - we have to do something.
The second sentence needs to be a firm bound on the first and third. All too often, "we have to do something " is followed by "and this idea is something , so we have to do it". Knowing that our type of government is designed to be fair, not to be effective, we should say "we have to do something when and if we know that something will help, and at an acceptable cost ".
The intent behind network neutrality is good. It IS likely that Comcast will do something bad if they are allowed to*. The actual wording of the neutrality proposals so far is always a cure worse than the disease, though.
* NN advocates chose a bad example in Netflix, as that was pretty much a matter of them simply not wanting to pay their hosting bill like every other web site in the world does. Netflix wanted to be treated as special. That makes them a really bad example. Give it time, Comcast will eventually throttle competing content providers in order to promote their own services.
Until January, Democrats have control since they control both the Senate and the presidency. In January we'll have a bipartisan government, with republicans having some control. I'll bet $100 that this gets funded within 30 days of the date the new republicans go to Washington.
If you want to go by the markets, the market has rallied on the news of the republican wins, with the Dow up 100 points today. That is a record high, if you ignore inflation. In real terms, the markets are still lower than they were fourteen years ago, in 2000.
> Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly
Very wrong. Horrible latency, 500 ms, will require that the video buffer for half a second. Latency does not matter at all for prerecorded video. Jitter matters some, and sufficient bandwidth matters a lot. When someone doesn't have a basic understanding of the facts, the opinions they come to based on their misunderstanding of the facts are not persuasive.
VoIP is a good example of an application with specific needs, low jitter and low to medium latency, contrasted with Netflix style video, where bandwidth is #1. A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.
Have another look. In real terms, the Dow still isn't as high as it was in 2000. Devaluing the dollar is actually a _bad_ thing. Soon, the markets will probably get back to the same level as fourteen years ago, inflation adjusted.
You're probably familiar with various differences between the policies each party supports. What you may not be aware of is that since the great depression, economic growth has ALWAYS improved over the period of every republican president's budgets, and always gotten worse of the course of every democrat president. The one exception is the 2008 housing crash.
People can argue forever about fairness and a number of other things, but this is simply a fact- the economy always improves with republicans in charge.
Slashdot Mirror
> for all the easy to do but time-consuming and boring as heck tasks.
That's what CPUs are for. Just put the shell command in a for() loop, or if it's more complex, a 10 line Perl script.
Ah, you must be from the land of Windows, where the shell is graphical-only and therefore a PITA to script, and rather than inputting and outputting simple text, everything has it's own special object format. Yeah, in that case you need $60,000 worth of minions to do what we Linux guys do in 60 minutes per year of scripting time.
An interesting job is to be a minion in a Windows shop, but a minion who can script and has a Mac. The boss gives you an eight hour job, you spend 10 minutes scripting, two hours on Slashdot, two hours at lunch, and give them the results two hours sooner than expected.
It's LOL, for sure. In three months you can teach someone the essential keywords of a language and basic syntax, sure. Knowing the essential words doesn't make one a developer any more than it makes one a poet. Programming is nearly pure thought, reasoning. Noting the results of the thought-work using the shorthand known as "code" is a necessary piece of sidework, like an archaeologist. taking notes using archaeological abbreviations. The ability to take notes doesn't make one an archaeologist, the ability to scrawl code,doesn't make one a software architect. To be fair, their very name admits they teach the wrong thing - Code Academy. Apparently they teach code. Pretty much like setting up Medical Abbreviations Academy, where they teach medical abbreviations.
As others have said, I've been programming professionally, and studying my craft, for nearly 20 years ; I still consult with my peers several times each week because none of us know everything we nees to know yet. Except Knuth, of course. Probably the closest any programmer has gotten to knowing their job is Ted T'so - he's the best in the world at developing filesystems. He only needs about 20 other people to review his work before it goes to production.
Indeed. Most dems go apeshit when you point out that even the co-founder of Greenpeace has said that nuclear is the _only_ feasible solution for most,of our energy needs, and he lays out exactly why. Cognitive dissonance to the max.
He opened one article by saying that he and his friends had slightly exaggerated the risks of nuclear power back in the 1960s-1980s, but a think to get most of their former followers to do the right thing they'll have to come right out and say "we lied to you". That's the only way the people most concerned about global warming will support the one solution that can actually work in the real world. They'll keep chasing magic energy until there is a complete famine rather than acknowledging the solution is something they were told to dislike.
> optionally learning to cook ... pointless to cook only for themselves.
It's been my experience that if you can cook a few things well, attractive members of the opposite sex will eat with you. :)
Cooking for one CAN be a hassle, for sure. I find it often works well to do a middle ground- microwave a frozen burrito, and toss fresh cheese, onions and tomato on top, or whatever I have on hand. I always have cheese on hand because it goes on so many things and is much better fresh than frozen. Similarly, I'll take 30 seconds to toss some ramen in water, then add whatever to make it good. That takes less time than going to McDonald's and costs $300/month less.
> to get something even mildly similar to a big mac.
I was specifically addressing the topic of eating fattening food vs willpower and the question "what about people who CAN'T AFFORD better than a Big Mac". I'm comparing the Big Mac to healthier food, not to a homemade Big Mac. Healthier food costs less than McDonald's food, so people aren't eating McDonald's because they can't afford healthy food.
Trivia fact regarding the Big Mac:
A Big Mac is $4. A McDonald's double cheeseburger with Mac sauce is $1-$1.50 and it's almost exactly the same thing.
Your point is certainly correct. Almost everything you buy, from food to medicine, to clothing is carried in trucks, so high gas taxes increase the cost of all goods. A minor nitpick:
> What about the people who couldn't afford better than a Big Mac?
A Big Mac costs $4 and weighs half a pound, so it's $8 per pound. Fruits and vegetables run about $1 per pound. Junk food is expensive, so the oft-expressed claim that Americans eat junk because they can't afford nutritious food is silly. Our neighbors to the south, in Mexico, spend $1 / day for more nutritious food that many of us spend $10 / day on. Many healthy foods are less than 50 cents per pound, including rice, beans, and bananas. I just spent 99 cents on a loaf of whole wheat bread. A single Hershey bar or orser of fries would cost more.
> Perhaps all the morons buying hummers and F-150s
Wven the four-door SuperCab version of the F-150 gets real- world 23.5 in road tests. Do you have a more efficient way to haul things, or are you spouting off without having any idea what you're talking about?
You can base your opinions on facts, or you can base them on what a Comedy Central comedian tells you to think. Your choice.
If you have the thermal datasheet in front of you, you see it says the physical properties START to change at about -75, and it remains usable to -250, depending on the application. -56 sounds a bit low, but there is a cold layer before it starts to warm up with increasing altitude, so you could hit -56, I suppose.
The top of the stratosphere is a little below freezing. Weather balloons often hit the lower range of the stratosphere and burst only because they don't have a pressure release valve.
Mylar is good to about -150C.
Online spending vs age:
56-66: $122 / month
46-55: $106 / month
23-31: $103 / month
18-22: $43 / month
If I'm Facebook, trying to put ads in front of buyers, college kids are a waste of my time. I want baby boomers.
I wasn't serious. My actual strategy is to leave drips all over whichever restroom does not contain her makeup. She'll quickly stop using that restroom and only use "her" bathroom, the one with her makeup in it. Bonus points if her bathroom is also the guest bathroom.
Totally kidding- I want my woman to be happy when she has her pants down.
-> Specifically, if you express a value for the rooms as almost the same as your roommate, but slightly lower for the rooms he wants the most and slightly higher for the rooms he likes the least, I suspect their mechanism for overdemanded and underdemanded rooms will give you the slightly inferior rooms at a greatly reduced price
You'll only screw yourself that way. Suppose he values the first bedroom at $600 and the second at $500, because the first bedroom is better in some way.
You suggest going lower on the room he wants, so $550, and slightly higher for the room he doesn't want, so again $550. So you've said that you don't care which room you get. Since you don't care and he does, he'll get the better room. You said it's worth $550, he said $600, so he'll end up paying about $575.
Most of these algorithms automatically account for lying in the same way - the try to give you what you say you want. If you lie and say you want to sleep in the dumpster, you'll get what you asked for. The only time you won't get what you asked for is if someone else asked for the same thing.
What the algorithms don't cover well is if preferences vastly differ between people, AND you know what the other person's true preferences are. Suppose a brother and sister are dividing up a Barbie, a GI Joe, and a slice of cake. Brother can gain an advantage by OVER valuing the Barbie and under valuing the GI Joe, but not by too much - he doesn't want to actually end up getting the Barbie. He wants to end up with the "undesireable" GI Joe AND the cake. However , if the sister does the same thing, undervaluing the Barbie and overvaluing the GI Joe, they'll likely end up with what neither of them wanted.
the main practical complication I've had in real life is when one person makes much more money than the other person. the well off person would likely be willing to spend far more than the "fair" price in this situation for the better room. I don't think there's any clear cut solution that works in every case.
Suppose the rent on the two bedroom place is $1,000. The "rich" roommate over bids as you suggest and says he'll pay $800 for the room on the left. Fine, that leaves the other roommate to cover only $200 for the other room. One can hardly complain about getting half of a $1,000 apartment for $200.
The male wants to avoid unnecessary raising and lowering - conservation of energy.
The female wants TWO things - she wants the seat lifted before the gentleman urinates, AND she wants it lowered before she does.
If the gentleman leaves the seat up, the female (provably) got the first thing she wants - the seat was raised before he urinated. Each party ends up doing the same amount of effort - they either raise or lower the seat before using it. That's fair.
The other option, that the seat is left down, means that a) the man is expected to do 100% of the work, both raising and lowering, while the female does none. More importantly from her point of view, if the seat is down, she doesn't know whether or not it was down when he peed. She might be sitting on pee spots.
Fairness, and her own piece of mind, therefore dictate that he leave the seat up.
However, if she's clever, she can't gently force the seat to be lowered afterwards by placing a tray of soaps, potpourri, etc. on top of the toilet. The tray will prevent the seat from being raised all way to vertical and gravity will ensure it ends up down. The clever gentleman can respond to this forcing function by pointing out that it prevents her from knowing whether male guests ever raised the seat at all.
The official data on economic growth can be found here:
http://www.bea.gov/national/xl...
A chart matching growth with president's budget's can be found here for 1964-2006. Not shown on that chart is 2008, which is
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...
Again, the numbers and chart don't tell us anything about fairness, social justice, or any other issues. It simply shows that "pro-business" republican policies have been good for the economy. This trend shouldn't be surprising - we'd expect government spending on assistance programs to increase with democrat presidents, and we'd expect business to do well with republican presidents. What I find surprising is the consistency - the fact hat growth got worse under EVERY democrat president between their first budget and their last.
As you indicated, the budget has to be approved by both congress and the president. For example, Reagan had to negotiate with the Democrats, who were in control of congress. Obama's party controlled both houses of congress at first, then the republicans controlled the house. What we can say is that the president, in signing a budget, has a significant impact on the how government funds are spent, and how much is spent. Each senator also has small amount of influence, but the president's influence is roughly the same as all of the congress put together, so the budget will certainly tend to reflect a president's priorities.
A recent article noted that the full text of Wikipedia is 40 GB. With a 64 GB or larger stick, you could have Wikipedia and a lot more.
> I've just never understood why something true should be excluded there.
If anyone can post anything and nothing is excluded, you end up with the internet.
They are trying to build an encyclopedia, not the internet. Most of the comments on this page are true, but they don't belong in an encyclopedia.
I should have used preview. That should say I'd certainly prefer less than 100ms, preferably less than 25 in order to have that "real time" feel, no noticeable lag.
Also should say at 1000ms Hawking will get ahead of the echo.
You certainly CAN use a text interface with 1000ms latency. You can also watch video at 56K, I did a lot of that late at night when I was a teenager. I'd sure rather have a few Mbps for video and 100ms for text, though. At 100ms, even Stephen Hawking's typing will get ahead of the echo, and his arms are paralyzed- he types by blinking his eyes ala Morse code or similar.
> we have to do something. We also have to be mindful that giving federal government agencies more power turns out bad about 90% of the time. But - we have to do something.
The second sentence needs to be a firm bound on the first and third. All too often, "we have to do something " is followed by "and this idea is something , so we have to do it". Knowing that our type of government is designed to be fair, not to be effective, we should say "we have to do something when and if we know that something will help, and at an acceptable cost ".
The intent behind network neutrality is good. It IS likely that Comcast will do something bad if they are allowed to*. The actual wording of the neutrality proposals so far is always a cure worse than the disease, though.
* NN advocates chose a bad example in Netflix, as that was pretty much a matter of them simply not wanting to pay their hosting bill like every other web site in the world does. Netflix wanted to be treated as special. That makes them a really bad example. Give it time, Comcast will eventually throttle competing content providers in order to promote their own services.
Until January, Democrats have control since they control both the Senate and the presidency. In January we'll have a bipartisan government, with republicans having some control. I'll bet $100 that this gets funded within 30 days of the date the new republicans go to Washington.
If you want to go by the markets, the market has rallied on the news of the republican wins, with the Dow up 100 points today. That is a record high, if you ignore inflation. In real terms, the markets are still lower than they were fourteen years ago, in 2000.
> Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly
Very wrong. Horrible latency, 500 ms, will require that the video buffer for half a second. Latency does not matter at all for prerecorded video. Jitter matters some, and sufficient bandwidth matters a lot. When someone doesn't have a basic understanding of the facts, the opinions they come to based on their misunderstanding of the facts are not persuasive.
VoIP is a good example of an application with specific needs, low jitter and low to medium latency, contrasted with Netflix style video, where bandwidth is #1. A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.
Have another look. In real terms, the Dow still isn't as high as it was in 2000. Devaluing the dollar is actually a _bad_ thing. Soon, the markets will probably get back to the same level as fourteen years ago, inflation adjusted.
You're probably familiar with various differences between the policies each party supports. What you may not be aware of is that since the great depression, economic growth has ALWAYS improved over the period of every republican president's budgets, and always gotten worse of the course of every democrat president. The one exception is the 2008 housing crash.
People can argue forever about fairness and a number of other things, but this is simply a fact- the economy always improves with republicans in charge.