To see this guy suggest using a CDROM in a console back in 1991 brings me a lot of doubt.
Perhaps this guy had a innovative mind, perhaps not. I hate to do it, but IMO, this story has 'hoax' written all over it.
Not quite. In 1991, I was a physics student, not a CS student. My friend Larry & I would often sit around after late-night physics homework and do "what if" scenarios. We didn't have to worry about whether/not the thing was technically easy to do, but whether or not it was possible.
"Could you store data on a CDROM?" "Oh yes, you can get CDROM drives for a computer. CS has them." "If you could run them with DOS, maybe you could use that for games."
"How do you boot the system?" "Well, I suppose you could do a ROM for that?"
Stuff like this was just a "what if", so we didn't take it much further than that. If it wasn't something you could get cheaply, that didn't bother us.
The only reason I made these notes in the first place was because I thought I'd write down some ideas that we had. The most interesting ideas that Larry & I had were often jotted down in the back of a notebook, and we'd go back to them later.
I always dated my notes. As a good physics student at a school where Lab Physics was paramount, we had it drummed into us from almost the moment we entered class that all our notebooks would be dated. This became second habit in Advanced Labs, where our notebooks were held to industry standards.
At the time I made these notes, it wasn't unusual for me to date everything I wrote.
I highly recommend Lyda Morehouse. Her work is always associated with Lois McMaster Bujold's, although I can't think why. Morehouse's LINK series is interesting and provacative.
There is an art, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day and try it. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.
Quite simply, keep all your text in a seperate file which can be compiled completely seperately from the rest of your project. The goes for Dialogs, Menus, and Labels. This primarily makes it easier to allow users to switch from one language to another.
This is called a "message catalog", by the way. It's the easiest way for almost any program to support internationalization ("I18N" = "I" + 18 letters + "N".)
On most commercial UNIX systems, the preferred library is catgets(). On Linux (GNU) systems, the preferred library is gettext(). In the FreeDOS Project we wrote an implementation of catgets(), called Cats, because it turns out to be quite easy to write. There's also another library for FreeDOS called MSGLIB that does the same thing.
What it all comes down to is containing all your strings that would be printed by the program in the "message catalog". The catgets() or gettext() is just a method to retrieve the string you want from the catalog that represents what the current language setting is (the LANG env variable under UNIX.) catgets() references each catalog by a number, and each string in the catalog by a "set" number and a "message" number, so you have three points of identification. gettext() is more complicated, and searches all open catalogs based on the untranslated string.
Since I've supported I18N using catgets() in my programs, it's been really easy to keep my Free software / open source programs up to date because volunteers from around the world will email me the message catalog for my programs, translated into their language. I just add the catalog to my distribution, and that's all I have to do to support the new language.
Of course, you also have to keep in mind the locale (monetary symbols, "." or "," as "decimal point",...) and character set.:-)
Oh, and supporting double-byte character sets (Chinese,...) is different.
For myself, most (90% or more) of my Slashdot browsing is done from work. And unfortunately, we have a few business applications that can only be used from Windows. So I'm sure that's contributing to the mostly-Windows stats that you see. At home, I use Red Hat Linux 8 all the way. My (non-geek) wife does, too.
That said, as more and more of our business functions at work are made web-accessible, I have less reliance on using Windows2000 as my work platform. I am fortunate to have a boss that doesn't mind us using Linux on the desktop - in fact, he pretty much encouraged it for anyone in our unit who doesn't need access to our Novell network. All our web servers are running Linux, though.
We have one person here who is running full-time on Linux (OpenOffice, etc.), and I'd like to see more of my staff running on Linux. If I had access to a Novell5 client for Linux that was TCP-only (the future of our network will no longer route IPX) then I think I could use Linux at work 90% of the time. After Feb '03 when we have a major implementation point to put much of our business functions on web applications, I would be able to go Linux full-time (with a Novell5 client for Linux, that is.)
It IS going to twist continuity. Badly.
[..continuity points deleted..] Some VERY, VERY, VERY deft script-editing is going to be required to fix this. Sadly, the seemingly non-existent Continuity/Canon Cops at the BBC don't seem to care about fixing it the way continuity's been bollocked.
Dude, you need to get out more. Turn off the TV and go play in the big blue room, the one with the bright yellow orb. Dr Who is only a television show.
...the Electoral College exists because of a concern they had in those long-ago days, a concern which is still very valid today: a concern that with pure direct election of the President, metropolitan areas would overwhelm rural interests...
You are incorrect - we were given an Electoral college because counting a popular vote was considered too difficult to administer in 1776. The Electoral college is very similar to a parliamentary election, in that the Electoral college gets together to decide who becomes president:
"Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector." Art. II, Sec 1.
Note that this says nothing about "a state's vote becomes the elector's vote". The state appoints an elector that it thinks will represent its interests... the elector can then go and vote how he/she pleases.
Counting the popular vote of a handful of electors was considered to be much easier than counting the popular vote of an entire nation... especially when you consider electronic transmission of county results, or FedEx Overnight service, didn't exist then.
As a result, we've evolved towards the Electoral college we have now. And unfortunately, that has meant Presidential campaigns overwhelmingly focus on "swing states" that are not only close in electoral terms, but also have large populations. Every 4 years, we hear about the Presidential candidates spending lots of time in places like California... but not too much time spent in places like North Dakota.
Would a pure popular vote be better? Maybe. It certainly would mean that candidates tried to spend more time across more of the nation. If TV stations were required to give free air time, a candidate could have the potential to reach a national audience.
In Article 2 - Section 1 of the US Constitution, the framers had a good idea that has since been changed through amendment... perhaps we should consider going back to that original method? Here it is:
"The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President... after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President."
Basically, the candidate with the most votes becomes President. You take his votes out of the pool, and the candidate with the most votes after that becomes Vice-President. Seems kind of simplistic, but this was written in a time when they wanted to keep the election process simple so that we didn't have the mess we had in 2000. I suspect the campaigning would be much more civil if the person you were knocking down could end up after the election as your boss... or your second-in-command!
My wife and I had a discussion about the voting process last night, and the problem comes down to every American has had "one citizen - one vote" drilled into their head since 2nd grade. So to try to remove that process in favor of an "instant runoff" election process would cause problems because too many dumb Americans would see it as being something other than the "one citizen - one vote" theology they know so well (even though it is still a "one vote" process.)
I suggested that perhaps voters could be allowed to split their vote 2/3 & 1/3. It's still 1 vote (2/3 + 1/3 = 1) but this allows you to vote for a first choice and a second choice. Or maybe you only vote for one person, so the "1" goes to a single candidate. I wonder if a voting system like this would have changed the 2000 election? Imagine if a bunch of Nader voters said "I'll vote 2/3 for Nader, but 1/3 for Gore because he'd be a good second choice." And I don't think this assumes a 2-party + third candidate system... it is just a particular implementation of first choice / second choice.
Bernoulli's Principle demo - get a fan blower, hooked up to a hose. Use the fast-moving air to suspend a ping-pong ball in mid-air, even at an angle.
liquid Nitrogen cannon - get a 12" lead pipe, seal off one end. Carefully place a small container of liquid Nitrogen into the pipe, place a cork stopper firmly in the other end. Now give the thing a single, serious shake to spill the Nitrogen all over the inside the pipe, and the sudden boiling of the Nitrogen pops off the cork.
2L bottle detonator - get some dry ice, and put a few slices into an empty 2L pop bottle. Tightly cap. Weight the bottle, and drop it into a large container of water so it is entirely submerged (such as a large outdoors Rubbermaid trash can.) It's amazing how long it takes the pressure to build up to cause the bottle to rupture, and it's even more amazing the splash that you get.
This one is better to do if you mount a post into a bowling ball. Balls are round, so they don't have sharp edges that can smack you when the object swings back in your direction.
You mean, they haven't already?:-) I read somewhere that both IBM and Microsoft are dissing MySQL, but Sun Microsystems and Yahoo are quoted as providing positive opinions on MySQL.
Seems liks a religious war already, without me getting involved.
Gotta ask: who else here also submitted a domain name request for microsoft.com in December 1999, hoping that Verisign would have fscked up with Y2k and reassigned the domain to me? Unfortunately, Y2k was pretty quiet.:-)
>>This is particularly true since I still have to boot off a floppy to install Linux (something about autoboot and my scsi CD-ROM)...
which would suggest that he as trouble booting off of cd's and likes the alternative floppy disks give him.
We use the floppy when installing our servers at work using Kickstart. It just makes it easier to post all the install files on a central server, then create a boot floppy that contains the ks.cfg file you need to read the install files off the server.
That's got to be the most annoying website design in the history of history.
I agree. The flashing (seems like 50Hz) gave me a headache right away. And the "mystery meat" navigation really had me going for a while. I didn't realize at first that some of the items had a sub-menu!
I've just submitted this page to Web Pages That Suck. Hopefully the site authors will get a clue.
I own a kilt, so I was visiting a kilt maker's web site in Scotland when I found that I couldn't click on any of the links, and things just didn't render properly in general. I was using a recent Mozilla build at the time (6mos ago), but their site was designed for IE.
I had emailed the webmaster about their site not working with Mozilla, then went somewhere else to buy stuff.
I recently came back to buy some more (expensive) stuff, and saw that the site problem hadn't been fixed. So I emailed the company owner (who had their address on another page). This time, the general manager sent me an email apologizing for the site problem and asking for my postal address so she could send me a printed catalog and some free samples of stuff. Nothing big, but enough to know I was getting personal attention and that she wanted my business. I'm hoping that now I contacted the site owner, the site will improve with compatibility.
Slashdot Mirror
To see this guy suggest using a CDROM in a console back in 1991 brings me a lot of doubt. Perhaps this guy had a innovative mind, perhaps not. I hate to do it, but IMO, this story has 'hoax' written all over it.
Not quite. In 1991, I was a physics student, not a CS student. My friend Larry & I would often sit around after late-night physics homework and do "what if" scenarios. We didn't have to worry about whether/not the thing was technically easy to do, but whether or not it was possible.
"Could you store data on a CDROM?" "Oh yes, you can get CDROM drives for a computer. CS has them." "If you could run them with DOS, maybe you could use that for games."
"How do you boot the system?" "Well, I suppose you could do a ROM for that?"
Stuff like this was just a "what if", so we didn't take it much further than that. If it wasn't something you could get cheaply, that didn't bother us.
The only reason I made these notes in the first place was because I thought I'd write down some ideas that we had. The most interesting ideas that Larry & I had were often jotted down in the back of a notebook, and we'd go back to them later.
-jh
FYI: I'm the original poster.
I always dated my notes. As a good physics student at a school where Lab Physics was paramount, we had it drummed into us from almost the moment we entered class that all our notebooks would be dated. This became second habit in Advanced Labs, where our notebooks were held to industry standards.
At the time I made these notes, it wasn't unusual for me to date everything I wrote.
-jh
No! You've got it all wrong ... another person who posts a reply without reading the article.
This is actually about combat microwaves, which are actually being used by soldiers to reheat their MRE rations in the field.
:-)
I highly recommend Lyda Morehouse. Her work is always associated with Lois McMaster Bujold's, although I can't think why. Morehouse's LINK series is interesting and provacative.
-jh
Gravity works because we believe in it. Just stop believing in it and it will stop working.
Ah, you must be referring to flying:
There is an art, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day and try it. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.
Quite simply, keep all your text in a seperate file which can be compiled completely seperately from the rest of your project. The goes for Dialogs, Menus, and Labels. This primarily makes it easier to allow users to switch from one language to another.
This is called a "message catalog", by the way. It's the easiest way for almost any program to support internationalization ("I18N" = "I" + 18 letters + "N".)
On most commercial UNIX systems, the preferred library is catgets(). On Linux (GNU) systems, the preferred library is gettext(). In the FreeDOS Project we wrote an implementation of catgets(), called Cats, because it turns out to be quite easy to write. There's also another library for FreeDOS called MSGLIB that does the same thing.
What it all comes down to is containing all your strings that would be printed by the program in the "message catalog". The catgets() or gettext() is just a method to retrieve the string you want from the catalog that represents what the current language setting is (the LANG env variable under UNIX.) catgets() references each catalog by a number, and each string in the catalog by a "set" number and a "message" number, so you have three points of identification. gettext() is more complicated, and searches all open catalogs based on the untranslated string.
Since I've supported I18N using catgets() in my programs, it's been really easy to keep my Free software / open source programs up to date because volunteers from around the world will email me the message catalog for my programs, translated into their language. I just add the catalog to my distribution, and that's all I have to do to support the new language.
Of course, you also have to keep in mind the locale (monetary symbols, "." or "," as "decimal point", ...) and character set. :-)
Oh, and supporting double-byte character sets (Chinese, ...) is different.
-jh
so you're saying i can go and buy ms dos6.22(or whatever was the latest) from ms and get support for it? or dr dos? freedos exists though.
To find them:
FreeDOS (GNU GPL, still under active development.)
DR-DOS (still "closed source", not sure about development future.)
Did a quick search (again) on Novell's site for Linux support. Since I had last checked, Novell links to a GPL'd Novell client for Linux. Go here:
http://novelclient.sourceforge.net/
I haven't been able to get it to work in my network yet, though. I'll keep trying.
For myself, most (90% or more) of my Slashdot browsing is done from work. And unfortunately, we have a few business applications that can only be used from Windows. So I'm sure that's contributing to the mostly-Windows stats that you see. At home, I use Red Hat Linux 8 all the way. My (non-geek) wife does, too.
That said, as more and more of our business functions at work are made web-accessible, I have less reliance on using Windows2000 as my work platform. I am fortunate to have a boss that doesn't mind us using Linux on the desktop - in fact, he pretty much encouraged it for anyone in our unit who doesn't need access to our Novell network. All our web servers are running Linux, though.
We have one person here who is running full-time on Linux (OpenOffice, etc.), and I'd like to see more of my staff running on Linux. If I had access to a Novell5 client for Linux that was TCP-only (the future of our network will no longer route IPX) then I think I could use Linux at work 90% of the time. After Feb '03 when we have a major implementation point to put much of our business functions on web applications, I would be able to go Linux full-time (with a Novell5 client for Linux, that is.)
-jh
It IS going to twist continuity. Badly. [..continuity points deleted..] Some VERY, VERY, VERY deft script-editing is going to be required to fix this. Sadly, the seemingly non-existent Continuity/Canon Cops at the BBC don't seem to care about fixing it the way continuity's been bollocked.
Dude, you need to get out more. Turn off the TV and go play in the big blue room, the one with the bright yellow orb. Dr Who is only a television show.
(L)GPL source for this project would be quite a boon for devlopers, who could reuse the CPU cores and other key components in other OSS projects.
More importantly for MAME, this also means that developers can incorporate improvements pulled from other (L)GPL'd programs to help the MAME project.
-jh
You are incorrect - we were given an Electoral college because counting a popular vote was considered too difficult to administer in 1776. The Electoral college is very similar to a parliamentary election, in that the Electoral college gets together to decide who becomes president:
"Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector." Art. II, Sec 1.
Note that this says nothing about "a state's vote becomes the elector's vote". The state appoints an elector that it thinks will represent its interests ... the elector can then go and vote how he/she pleases.
Counting the popular vote of a handful of electors was considered to be much easier than counting the popular vote of an entire nation ... especially when you consider electronic transmission of county results, or FedEx Overnight service, didn't exist then.
As a result, we've evolved towards the Electoral college we have now. And unfortunately, that has meant Presidential campaigns overwhelmingly focus on "swing states" that are not only close in electoral terms, but also have large populations. Every 4 years, we hear about the Presidential candidates spending lots of time in places like California ... but not too much time spent in places like North Dakota.
Would a pure popular vote be better? Maybe. It certainly would mean that candidates tried to spend more time across more of the nation. If TV stations were required to give free air time, a candidate could have the potential to reach a national audience.
In Article 2 - Section 1 of the US Constitution, the framers had a good idea that has since been changed through amendment ... perhaps we should consider going back to that original method? Here it is:
"The person having the greatest number of votes shall be the President ... after the choice of the President, the person having the greatest number of votes of the electors shall be the Vice President."
Basically, the candidate with the most votes becomes President. You take his votes out of the pool, and the candidate with the most votes after that becomes Vice-President. Seems kind of simplistic, but this was written in a time when they wanted to keep the election process simple so that we didn't have the mess we had in 2000. I suspect the campaigning would be much more civil if the person you were knocking down could end up after the election as your boss ... or your second-in-command!
Doesn't sound too bad to me.
-jh
My wife and I had a discussion about the voting process last night, and the problem comes down to every American has had "one citizen - one vote" drilled into their head since 2nd grade. So to try to remove that process in favor of an "instant runoff" election process would cause problems because too many dumb Americans would see it as being something other than the "one citizen - one vote" theology they know so well (even though it is still a "one vote" process.)
I suggested that perhaps voters could be allowed to split their vote 2/3 & 1/3. It's still 1 vote (2/3 + 1/3 = 1) but this allows you to vote for a first choice and a second choice. Or maybe you only vote for one person, so the "1" goes to a single candidate. I wonder if a voting system like this would have changed the 2000 election? Imagine if a bunch of Nader voters said "I'll vote 2/3 for Nader, but 1/3 for Gore because he'd be a good second choice." And I don't think this assumes a 2-party + third candidate system ... it is just a particular implementation of first choice / second choice.
-jh
I would also add these, from my Physics student days at UW-RF:
This one is better to do if you mount a post into a bowling ball. Balls are round, so they don't have sharp edges that can smack you when the object swings back in your direction.
-jh
Let the religious wars begin!
You mean, they haven't already? :-) I read somewhere that both IBM and Microsoft are dissing MySQL, but Sun Microsystems and Yahoo are quoted as providing positive opinions on MySQL.
Seems liks a religious war already, without me getting involved.
Except for the following case:
Person1: I have a terrible secret that I've been keeping from you all season!
Person2: What is it?
Person1: Well, I ...
Advertisement: -The new Wonderbra at Victoria's Secret!-
Person2: If that's the case, then we no longer have anything to say to one another. Goodbye!
I'd rather wait 4 months and pay my money to see it the way it is intended ! - BIG SCREEN, dolby surround sound, comfy chair, popcorn etc.
Your theatre has COMFY chairs? Theatres can HAVE comfy chairs? I must live in the boonies. :-(
Gotta ask: who else here also submitted a domain name request for microsoft.com in December 1999, hoping that Verisign would have fscked up with Y2k and reassigned the domain to me? Unfortunately, Y2k was pretty quiet. :-)
Vim is much better than that six editor.
:-)
>>This is particularly true since I still have to boot off a floppy to install Linux (something about autoboot and my scsi CD-ROM)...
which would suggest that he as trouble booting off of cd's and likes the alternative floppy disks give him.
We use the floppy when installing our servers at work using Kickstart. It just makes it easier to post all the install files on a central server, then create a boot floppy that contains the ks.cfg file you need to read the install files off the server.
I, for one, would miss the floppy!
-jh
As long as you don't open the box, it is alive.
Like Invisible Boy, it can turn invisible only when you don't look at it!
That's got to be the most annoying website design in the history of history.
I agree. The flashing (seems like 50Hz) gave me a headache right away. And the "mystery meat" navigation really had me going for a while. I didn't realize at first that some of the items had a sub-menu!
I've just submitted this page to Web Pages That Suck. Hopefully the site authors will get a clue.
I own a kilt, so I was visiting a kilt maker's web site in Scotland when I found that I couldn't click on any of the links, and things just didn't render properly in general. I was using a recent Mozilla build at the time (6mos ago), but their site was designed for IE. I had emailed the webmaster about their site not working with Mozilla, then went somewhere else to buy stuff.
I recently came back to buy some more (expensive) stuff, and saw that the site problem hadn't been fixed. So I emailed the company owner (who had their address on another page). This time, the general manager sent me an email apologizing for the site problem and asking for my postal address so she could send me a printed catalog and some free samples of stuff. Nothing big, but enough to know I was getting personal attention and that she wanted my business. I'm hoping that now I contacted the site owner, the site will improve with compatibility.
Contacting the owners does help.
-jh