The next generation of scientists, brought up on Mythbusters, are going to be much more interesting than those in days gone by.
Some old-style scientists went in for very big explosions indeed. If the names Teller and Sakharov mean nothing to you, let's just say that Jamie and Adam's biggest to date isn't even close on a logarithmic scale...
Is this one of those "let's feed a positive story to the press to create some good vibes" type of story - straight out of marketing?
Maybe it's "igniting" as in "going down in flames".
(Of course, it's possible that MS have done their UI homework and have actually made this all work and the story is based on excitement from OEMs wanting to shift all this stuff. If so, I'll be watching out for the flying pigs too.)
Copyright is defined as "The legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work"
What is the MTA schedule?
A literary work of fiction, so entirely covered by copyright.
Not just the Empire but the Trade Federation too. Everyone knows the way to run a droid army is through one centralized server with no backup system.
Never underestimate the capacity of businessmen to cut corners. The backup server was probably an optional extra that they declined; hardly the fault of the vendor if the customer explicitly turns down a robustness feature. After all, any number of small IT businesses today dispense with fripperies like backups, so why would a Trade Federation be any different?
I always wondered how seating was arranged. By importance? Size of your constituent population? What about the poor shmoe senators at the very, very top or very, very bottom? What a crappy seat.
Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would occupy immense amounts of senatorial time, preventing them from doing real damage by passing laws and such. All that jolly backbiting stupidity, put to a use to which it is truly suited.
Oh wait, you're talking about Star Wars senators...
I can't help thinking this is just thin-client + mainframe again, and just like every other time the model has come around, it's being pushed as the future.
The thing is, it's good for some things (e.g., plain old web pages) and the thin-client model is much easier when it comes to deployment. If only there weren't idiots about who insist on using it for everything; some stuff just works better with thick clients or standalone.
Of course in practice it probably doesn't scale that seamlessly and you have to pay the host based on CPU / disk / database/whatever consumption but you get the idea.
Where did you get the idea that scalable is free? Resources cost. What's nice about the cloud is that (with well-designed apps on top) you scale almost linearly, especially in terms of cost. There's far less of a problem with non-linearities as you increase in scale (well, not until you're getting up to the size where it might be an idea to build your own server facility...)
For the home, however, I have a hard time imagining that it is more feasible to do your computing through the network rather than doing it locally. What about things like audio editors and games, that require latencies in the low milliseconds to be usable?
For businesses, there's a lot of things they do where latency is less critical and where the flexibility of a cloud is a good win. Not having to worry so much about scaling out physical server facilities is a really big win, as is the fact that clouds are damned easy to handle as a customer in accounting terms.
Of course, they have to worry about data security. But trust me on this, they have to worry about that anyway. Really. The cloud doesn't change that very much.
Do you know what I'm talking about? Did you see the Wave demo video? It's *real time typing* - not just a notification like "dude is typing...", it's ACTUAL typing showing on your screen as it happens.
You mean, like in the old school Unix talk program from 20 years or more ago?
Real time as you write has never been much of a problem, but doing it with more than one person at a time is a bear in terms of user interfaces. Whole message-oriented chatrooms work better for many-to-many live discussion, and even they can get confusing.
I wrote the shortlink specification a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback.
So, are you going to just put it on a random website out there or are you going to do the proper thing and get it on a standards track somewhere? (Maybe IETF or W3C.) That's the only way to get it really trusted by the bulk of users, since they trust those organizations to keep on what they've been doing for years.
Not if you have a legal system that supports property rights.
Doesn't help at all if the company that caused the pollution manages to either pass off the property with that large undisclosed liability, or if they go bust or something. Now what are you going to do? The land is still polluted. The money's vanished. I suppose there is one approach that will work: leave it all alone for a few hundred years, maybe a thousand, and it will become much less of a problem. Don't know if this is an alternative that you care for...
Taxes aren't punishment, they are an obligation you have to your government.
And you uses roads for your bicycle don't you, shouldn't you pay for them somehow? If not through a fuel tax, then perhaps we should just require an annual registration of all bicycles.
On the other hand, if you want to know why roads need maintenance (or at least most of it) look first at trucks. (Road damage is approximately related to the 4th power of axle weight, though there's lots of other factors too, e.g., inter-axle distance.) Bicycles do virtually no damage to metaled roads.
It might not seem complicated, but there are a number of traps for new players. Most of these traps involve trying to store location/user/OS information in the hostname - which seems like a good idea at the time, but just gives you false information down the track when people quit, machines move, or the OS gets upgraded.
It gets worse than that. We had (or maybe have; my machines don't follow it anyway) that policy here and it worked fine until the first time a department was relocated from one building to another. First they tried renaming all the machines, but that broke lots of firewalls and software licensing (yes, that's deeply stupid in the first place, but there you go) so they went back to the old names they had in place before the move. Then they acquired new machines which obviously also had to have names in the old scheme. Yes, this means that there are machines about whose name depends on the location they would have had if they had been purchased and used before a move several years ago. Insanity!
My machine has a proper location-independent name and IP address (location-dependent IP addresses only work at the campus level if you're going to force everyone, everyone, to use DHCP properly; we don't for stupid reasons that I can't be bothered to list). If they want to know where it is, they can use a real database, damnit!
The best questions are almost certainly those that are specific to the employer and the job which they might hire you for. These are excellent because they show that you've taken an actual interest in what they are doing and may have something to contribute to the overall team in the first 6 months or so. Which isn't to say that the other questions (e.g., generic "what are employment conditions like on the ground" checks) aren't good, but if the boss-to-be thinks you care, it's a big way to stand out for the better.
Or at least that technique has consistently worked for me so far, and people who ask such things do stand out when you're on the interview panel. Too many people just do generic applications for jobs and don't seem to care what they actually end up doing...
On the plus side, the ability of a 9 volt to deliver high currents isn't all that hot(compared to, say, a microwave transformer) so you'd be less likely to suffer massive damage from thermal effects, unless the lot caught fire. A similarly long chain of lead acid batteries would be substantially nastier in that regard.
That's because the 9 volt battery (deliberately) has quite a lot of internal resistance. Makes it much safer if there is an external short, at a cost of limiting it to low-current applications.
The C API for Python changes with each release of Python, and modules have to be updated and rebuilt for each platform.
That's stupid. If you were - as a community - to commit to a stable ABI then the modules would only need rebuilding when they are to take advantage of a new piece of API. That in turn allows developer effort to be spent far more wisely in areas where it can make a good difference. (The Tcl community has been doing this for a decade.) You can even leverage this to strengthen your packaging technologies too, but that's getting off-topic.
This process lags years behind Python releases. Often, the needed changes are minor, but short of forking and taking over maintenance of the module, there's no way to get them done fast.
That's why a production module shouldn't have a single maintainer (and preferably shouldn't have all maintainers be from the same organization). Like that, you've always got a panic button ready to be pressed in case something goes wrong.
There have been amusing moments. At one point, the maintenance organization for a module used in business applications was a World of Warcraft guild. At least they got stuff done.
I just hope it wasn't an interface to a RAID system that they were maintaining; that'd be just too funny for Sunday morning...
That is fine until someone figures out what your algorithm is.
If the algorithm is any good, knowing it won't help very much with cracking the passwords it produces. (Naturally, you'd power it off a strong RNG in the first place; there are plenty about that are Good Enough even without resorting to hardware noise.)
'find' can be used as grep on Windows. Windows does not come with grep.
XP does come with 'findstr' though, which is... well, not as good as 'grep' but still far better than (old MSDOS-style) 'find'. You can even use regexps with it; it's a genuine real productivity tool that Microsoft accidentally let slip out of the door and one of the few real gems.
Of course, back when I used to use Windows a lot I had a build of real GNU grep for it.
A real problem here is that if upstream providers do this sort of thing, there is no limit to their power. We're not talking about any court action, any due process or any other legal nicity. We are talking about vigilante action and mob rule.
You agreed to abide by your ISP's AUP when you signed up for their service. I know this because I'm damn sure that it's a condition of the service agreement, and I'm sure that any court would view that as a reasonable and proportionate thing to impose. Yes, there is collusion between ISPs on this; no legit ISP wants anything to do with the likes of the scum behind the RBN...
Slashdot Mirror
The next generation of scientists, brought up on Mythbusters, are going to be much more interesting than those in days gone by.
Some old-style scientists went in for very big explosions indeed. If the names Teller and Sakharov mean nothing to you, let's just say that Jamie and Adam's biggest to date isn't even close on a logarithmic scale...
Is this one of those "let's feed a positive story to the press to create some good vibes" type of story - straight out of marketing?
Maybe it's "igniting" as in "going down in flames".
(Of course, it's possible that MS have done their UI homework and have actually made this all work and the story is based on excitement from OEMs wanting to shift all this stuff. If so, I'll be watching out for the flying pigs too.)
Copyright is defined as "The legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work"
What is the MTA schedule?
A literary work of fiction, so entirely covered by copyright.
Not just the Empire but the Trade Federation too. Everyone knows the way to run a droid army is through one centralized server with no backup system.
Never underestimate the capacity of businessmen to cut corners. The backup server was probably an optional extra that they declined; hardly the fault of the vendor if the customer explicitly turns down a robustness feature. After all, any number of small IT businesses today dispense with fripperies like backups, so why would a Trade Federation be any different?
I always wondered how seating was arranged. By importance? Size of your constituent population? What about the poor shmoe senators at the very, very top or very, very bottom? What a crappy seat.
Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would occupy immense amounts of senatorial time, preventing them from doing real damage by passing laws and such. All that jolly backbiting stupidity, put to a use to which it is truly suited.
Oh wait, you're talking about Star Wars senators...
I can't help thinking this is just thin-client + mainframe again, and just like every other time the model has come around, it's being pushed as the future.
The thing is, it's good for some things (e.g., plain old web pages) and the thin-client model is much easier when it comes to deployment. If only there weren't idiots about who insist on using it for everything; some stuff just works better with thick clients or standalone.
Of course in practice it probably doesn't scale that seamlessly and you have to pay the host based on CPU / disk / database /whatever consumption but you get the idea.
Where did you get the idea that scalable is free? Resources cost. What's nice about the cloud is that (with well-designed apps on top) you scale almost linearly, especially in terms of cost. There's far less of a problem with non-linearities as you increase in scale (well, not until you're getting up to the size where it might be an idea to build your own server facility...)
For the home, however, I have a hard time imagining that it is more feasible to do your computing through the network rather than doing it locally. What about things like audio editors and games, that require latencies in the low milliseconds to be usable?
For businesses, there's a lot of things they do where latency is less critical and where the flexibility of a cloud is a good win. Not having to worry so much about scaling out physical server facilities is a really big win, as is the fact that clouds are damned easy to handle as a customer in accounting terms.
Of course, they have to worry about data security. But trust me on this, they have to worry about that anyway. Really. The cloud doesn't change that very much.
Do you know what I'm talking about? Did you see the Wave demo video? It's *real time typing* - not just a notification like "dude is typing...", it's ACTUAL typing showing on your screen as it happens.
You mean, like in the old school Unix talk program from 20 years or more ago?
Real time as you write has never been much of a problem, but doing it with more than one person at a time is a bear in terms of user interfaces. Whole message-oriented chatrooms work better for many-to-many live discussion, and even they can get confusing.
Linux isn't written by lonely nerds hiding out in their parents' basements
Of course! There's the lonely nerds hiding out in their parents' attics as well. More light, less ground water.
Do SSNs get reused?
No.
I understand that you're wrong there.
I wrote the shortlink specification a few months ago (based on similar work done by others), released it into the public domain using CC Zero and went about soliciting feedback.
So, are you going to just put it on a random website out there or are you going to do the proper thing and get it on a standards track somewhere? (Maybe IETF or W3C.) That's the only way to get it really trusted by the bulk of users, since they trust those organizations to keep on what they've been doing for years.
Not if you have a legal system that supports property rights.
Doesn't help at all if the company that caused the pollution manages to either pass off the property with that large undisclosed liability, or if they go bust or something. Now what are you going to do? The land is still polluted. The money's vanished. I suppose there is one approach that will work: leave it all alone for a few hundred years, maybe a thousand, and it will become much less of a problem. Don't know if this is an alternative that you care for...
Taxes aren't punishment, they are an obligation you have to your government.
And you uses roads for your bicycle don't you, shouldn't you pay for them somehow? If not through a fuel tax, then perhaps we should just require an annual registration of all bicycles.
On the other hand, if you want to know why roads need maintenance (or at least most of it) look first at trucks. (Road damage is approximately related to the 4th power of axle weight, though there's lots of other factors too, e.g., inter-axle distance.) Bicycles do virtually no damage to metaled roads.
It might not seem complicated, but there are a number of traps for new players. Most of these traps involve trying to store location/user/OS information in the hostname - which seems like a good idea at the time, but just gives you false information down the track when people quit, machines move, or the OS gets upgraded.
It gets worse than that. We had (or maybe have; my machines don't follow it anyway) that policy here and it worked fine until the first time a department was relocated from one building to another. First they tried renaming all the machines, but that broke lots of firewalls and software licensing (yes, that's deeply stupid in the first place, but there you go) so they went back to the old names they had in place before the move. Then they acquired new machines which obviously also had to have names in the old scheme. Yes, this means that there are machines about whose name depends on the location they would have had if they had been purchased and used before a move several years ago. Insanity!
My machine has a proper location-independent name and IP address (location-dependent IP addresses only work at the campus level if you're going to force everyone, everyone, to use DHCP properly; we don't for stupid reasons that I can't be bothered to list). If they want to know where it is, they can use a real database, damnit!
I heard that it's so toxic that exposing your lungs to dihydrogen-monoxide in the liquid state could KILL you.
Well I heard that it was found in cancer tumors!
That just means the no-bid contracts will be going to their friends instead of those of the GOP.
I do believe that that would fall under the definition of change.
Especially when prefixed by "not much" and with "there" on the end.
"green" or conversationalist initiatives
You mean the ones where they talk about things a lot but never actually do anything practical for the environment? Sounds about right.
The best questions are almost certainly those that are specific to the employer and the job which they might hire you for. These are excellent because they show that you've taken an actual interest in what they are doing and may have something to contribute to the overall team in the first 6 months or so. Which isn't to say that the other questions (e.g., generic "what are employment conditions like on the ground" checks) aren't good, but if the boss-to-be thinks you care, it's a big way to stand out for the better.
Or at least that technique has consistently worked for me so far, and people who ask such things do stand out when you're on the interview panel. Too many people just do generic applications for jobs and don't seem to care what they actually end up doing...
On the plus side, the ability of a 9 volt to deliver high currents isn't all that hot(compared to, say, a microwave transformer) so you'd be less likely to suffer massive damage from thermal effects, unless the lot caught fire. A similarly long chain of lead acid batteries would be substantially nastier in that regard.
That's because the 9 volt battery (deliberately) has quite a lot of internal resistance. Makes it much safer if there is an external short, at a cost of limiting it to low-current applications.
[Bang! There goes the modpoints...]
The C API for Python changes with each release of Python, and modules have to be updated and rebuilt for each platform.
That's stupid. If you were - as a community - to commit to a stable ABI then the modules would only need rebuilding when they are to take advantage of a new piece of API. That in turn allows developer effort to be spent far more wisely in areas where it can make a good difference. (The Tcl community has been doing this for a decade.) You can even leverage this to strengthen your packaging technologies too, but that's getting off-topic.
This process lags years behind Python releases. Often, the needed changes are minor, but short of forking and taking over maintenance of the module, there's no way to get them done fast.
That's why a production module shouldn't have a single maintainer (and preferably shouldn't have all maintainers be from the same organization). Like that, you've always got a panic button ready to be pressed in case something goes wrong.
There have been amusing moments. At one point, the maintenance organization for a module used in business applications was a World of Warcraft guild. At least they got stuff done.
I just hope it wasn't an interface to a RAID system that they were maintaining; that'd be just too funny for Sunday morning...
That is fine until someone figures out what your algorithm is.
If the algorithm is any good, knowing it won't help very much with cracking the passwords it produces. (Naturally, you'd power it off a strong RNG in the first place; there are plenty about that are Good Enough even without resorting to hardware noise.)
100 is the average.
Do you hear that noise over your head?
'find' can be used as grep on Windows. Windows does not come with grep.
XP does come with 'findstr' though, which is ... well, not as good as 'grep' but still far better than (old MSDOS-style) 'find'. You can even use regexps with it; it's a genuine real productivity tool that Microsoft accidentally let slip out of the door and one of the few real gems.
Of course, back when I used to use Windows a lot I had a build of real GNU grep for it.
A real problem here is that if upstream providers do this sort of thing, there is no limit to their power. We're not talking about any court action, any due process or any other legal nicity. We are talking about vigilante action and mob rule.
You agreed to abide by your ISP's AUP when you signed up for their service. I know this because I'm damn sure that it's a condition of the service agreement, and I'm sure that any court would view that as a reasonable and proportionate thing to impose. Yes, there is collusion between ISPs on this; no legit ISP wants anything to do with the likes of the scum behind the RBN...