My front door has a major flaw, in that con artist can walk up to it and claim they are from and officially federal agency and have an urgent need for me to help them.
Doors from major outlets, including those of Lowe's and Home Depot, are affected by this flaw. Our investigations have determined that this flaw has been known for years, yet the major distributors have not plans to release an update to correct the problem.
US Senator, C. Ritter has introduce legislation under the title "Omnibus Weak Nutz United", the OWN-U bill, that seeks to station a security agent to watch over every door in the case the occupants cannot determine that they are being conned.
Noone wants to hire a C++ programmer. At most, they want a general programmer who happens to know C++ and who is smart and a good thinker and knows how to learn 'on the fly,'
2)cover everything with double sided tape. It can only get covered with 'highly abrasive dust' once that way, and it won't be highly abrasive if it isn't abrading.
Plant grass, havest it and pack it deep into closed limestone mines. (grass grows faster than trees can can be havested and transported more easily).
-or-
Burn the trees and bury the ashes (ashes == concentrated carbon)
Either was, trying to seperate out the CO2 from the rest of the atmosphere and then phase change it to a solid so that it can be buried is just a stupid waste of money when there are cheap ways to accomplish the same goal.
I used to be a DIY type, making homebrew beer, DIY beer coolers, DIY fish "pond" (in my dorm room) with DIY biological filter, etc. Several years after college if finally occured to me that what I made was invariably more expensive, less effective/efficient, bigger and just plain uglier than the commercially produced equivalents. And so I quit. (I still subscribed to MAKE when it was first published)
I'm just the opposite. I used to always assume that I couldn't make things, and that people who did were somewhat above and greater than the rest of us. Then I found out that people build airplanes, something I had always wanted but had not hope of ever being able to afford. I started building, and learned something about myself and the world in general.
People who make their own stuff have confidence and control. They look at problems from a different angle. Since I started building, "I can't" has dropped from my vocabulary (though in many cases it is replaced by "I'd rather not"). I look at a problem and don't feel overwhelmed by them. I also no longer feel 'used' by big manufacturing, probably because I don't watch much TV with it incessant advertising. I guess it can be summed up with the idea that I've gone from being a 'consumer' to a 'producer', from 'passive' to 'active'. It's a very different world on this side.
"the Mezzo desktop environment that poses a completely new way of presenting data to the user." [strike one]
"Symphony OS also includes a new packaging system" [strike two]
What may happen, is that some of the Mezzo ideas might get fed into other distributions, but whenever someone starts shouting about following a whole new paradigm they have lost from the start.
Why not just cover every one of the little devices with little solar panels that charge the batteries? Not expecting it to run solely off of what can be gained from light energy, but just wanting it to extend the battery life. Add a port to plug in a wall wart for a real charge.
If your blog sounds like a politician giving a speech at the UN, this service will do a wonderful job. Doubtful that it will do any better that Babelfish otherwise.
The biggest problem in artificial intelligence is that the system learns the material that it is trained to, and only that material. Computers don't generalize or extrapolate the known into the unknown worth a damn.
Whenver I hear about these sorts of things that are so obviously *STUPID*, I'm lead back to an alternative reading of the Bible's Revelations. Substitute a cell tower in for the multi-headed beast, and it gets downright...weird.
You still aren't going to be able to buy a flying car. You will, however, be able to invest in a company which intends to build one.
Don't be so sure about that. The most recent EAA newsletter had a blurb that the boys over at Monster Garage will be having a go at it.
I expect that by my grandchildren's time, work will look like hanging around in coffee shop and chatting.
As opposed to standing around a water cooler chatting? The jobs with risk of death and dismemberment are still around. And they're still brutally punishing to the body. But they're either done in China or by illegal Mexicans, so nobody here seems to care much.
Most of the post I've read so far seem to dwell on how Microsoft products suck, which I'll pretty much have to agree with. But I think we're missing out on another point.
In the late '80s and early '90s there was a lot of hobbiest using Microsoft operating systems to do cool things. The system was open and hackable. You could access BIOS routines and DOS interrupts.
Over time Microsoft built more and more cruft on top of the system, most of it buggy, and all of it constantly changing. The lower stuff kept getting harder to get to. A quick hack kept getting harder unless you were willing to worship at the Microsoft alter daily to learn the latest technique, language, interface, API, etc.
My hobby is airplanes, not programming APIs du jour. If I won't to do something on the computer for my hobby, it must be quick and easy or I'll go back to welding or something, and just run the numbers I need with pencil and paper (vs writing a program that I would distribute to other builders). Linux lets me do that, mostly because all distributions have a C compiler included.
Microsoft is looking for hobbiest that are using their system, because they know that it is the hobbiest who got them where they are and that those hobbiest have moved to Linux.
And who will be buying the products to fuel all these jobs, once the 'grayed' out work force aren't making any money to buy them.
I've heard this argument before, and I cried bullshit then, too. As the boomers retire, demand for the products they were producing will diminish as well. It will be a net wash.
People lament the loss of simpler mechanical systems that can be fixed with know-how and a socket set. We publicize every example of a system failure we hear of. But the numbers don't lie: a 2005 model with a half-dozen embedded computers has a far lower incidence of problems than a corresponding 1970 model when it was new. You are far less likely to ever have to call a tow truck in your lifetime than your father/grandfather was.
I bought a Dodge Dakota in 2000. Everything ran fine for years, except for the damn computer which was developed for the Jeep Cherokee. Turns out they used cheap components, and the computer would shut down everything when it got to hot from the engine heat. Was able to use dry ice to get home a couple times before I had it fixed.
In the past year, I've had the heater core to go out, the fan clutch is shot, and the ABS sensor in the rear had to be replaced. No problem for 5 years and then everything starts falling apart. I haven't even paid the thing off yet. Reliability of new cars doesn't mean a damn thing unless you're Hertz and swap out the cars every 3 years for business reasons. Tell me how reliable they are after at least 7.
There's so many other problems. For example, first click on the address bar of firefox in windows would highlight it, so I just type in new address. In Linux, that just put a cursor there. You're right, and this should never change! You forget this is *NIX and not Windows. When you highlight something like that, it is copying it to the clipboard. If I highlight a URL in a different document and want to paste it into the Firefox URL window, under your system I'm hosed because clicking in the window highlighted the existing URL and blew away my clipboard.
I totally agree. Kate does this, and is the one thing I hate about the editor. If you pull up the find dialog or replace dialog, it pulls the word containing the cursor into the dialog and highlights it. Forget that the word you wanted to find was first highlighted in another file. That is gone from you clipboard. You first have to delete what Kate put in the dialog box, RE-highlight the text in the other window, and then paste it. A royal PIA.
Or you can walk over to Harbor Freight and grab some off of one of their $5 saw blades. Or just make it in a large, hot press. They call it cubic zirconium. I've also heard rumors that there are also places in Russia where you can walk around and pick it up off the ground. Diamond scarcity it a con job propagated by the jewellery business.
Radically new materials. I think the periodic table has just about all of them covered.
Oh well. We see that once again the need for ratings overwhelms the need for completeness and accuracy.
And do you know of any neighborhoods where half the housewives are attractive 30-somethings running around naked half the time wanting to lay every guy in sight. The other half have dead people buried under their pool. Everyone lives in a big, recently built house with a perfectly manicured lawn, hardly anyone works, it never rains and NO ONE uses the bathroom.
So use an image manipulation program to generate the images on the fly. Pick one of 10,000 background images at random and merge it with a graphic rendering of the text. Mix them up, use the none-of-the-above technique and any other tricks you have.
There's still a 12.5% chance that the hacker will get in on the first try. But the first successful hit will make him want more. The key is to record the connection address of all unsuccessful attempts, and review the logs when a problem is reported. Contact the police, they obtain warrants, show up at the ISP, and then the hacker's house. Even better, let him transfer some money, buy some stuff, then REALLY come down on him/her.
Yes, but the environment the car operates in is much more complicated than the environment the computer has to operate in. There is some predictability to a new video card. But how do you program "Deer on the side of road possibly about to spring into your lane" . Now try "child", "stumbling drunk teenager", "armadillo", "dump truck", "boulder on side of hill", "dumb as sport car driver in the next lane"....
Limit the scope to all the problems that could go wrong in the car itself, and it is more than most computers can handle. I was having problems with my engine shutting off when I came to a stop. I fixed it by replacing the ABS speed sensor in the rearend differential. The OBS was getting a signal, just a bad one. Screw up the input with a little lack of maintenance, and the computer won't know what to make of it.
A OS' environment is extremely simple when compared to the real world.
I worked for IBM, coding in the mainframe networking department. Their motto should have been, "Don't change anything...it's working."
I got irritated. I would find stuff that was just STUPID. Horrendously mangled logic. Algorithms from other parts of the code applied completely wrong. Whenever I tried to improve the code I got the "It's working. Don't change anything" line. I left, determined to find a job where I could actually write code.
That was several years ago. I've gotten smarter since. I've worked on several large-scale, 5-9's systems. After several major and minor fuck-ups, now I know....
There is an upward limit with physics. Signal strength drops off with the cube of distance, and really goes to crap when you lose line-of-site. In either case, you have to have enough power to overcome the background noise between the transmitter and reciever. Antennae cannot increase a signal's strength, they can only focus the power in a certain direction. That's not very useful if you don't know where the xmit/rcv partners are.
VoD/PPV. I can't see the difference. I go through an on-screen menu, watch the movie, and get a hit on my monthly bill. It all looks the same from here. In neither case can I view the movie if the cable craps out.
Those people are happy to pay the 11.99 vs the $40 at the scummy video store that they have to walk into and risk someone seeing them there.
Never the less, they should be able to disguise them, use more powerful transmitters and better technology so they don't need as many, and they should be reasonably sensative about the environment that they put them in.
The cell phones are two way transmitters. You'd not only have to put a more powerful transmitter on the tower, you'd also need one next to your HEAD!! I worked on a tower reciever about a decade ago. This device was to pick up a AA powered two-way pager from a distance of 10 miles. Those things were so sensitive that bumping the table would cause it to fail the test, but there is only so much you can do to pick a needle out of a haystack.
One of the funniest things I ever heard was while riding with my brother-in-law. As we pull out of his fancy gated community, he stops his cell phone conversation long enough to complain about a tower going up behind a storage facility. He looked completely idiotic when I explained that he might want that tower if he expected to keep using that phone.
Slashdot Mirror
My front door has a major flaw, in that con artist can walk up to it and claim they are from and officially federal agency and have an urgent need for me to help them.
Doors from major outlets, including those of Lowe's and Home Depot, are affected by this flaw. Our investigations have determined that this flaw has been known for years, yet the major distributors have not plans to release an update to correct the problem.
US Senator, C. Ritter has introduce legislation under the title "Omnibus Weak Nutz United", the OWN-U bill, that seeks to station a security agent to watch over every door in the case the occupants cannot determine that they are being conned.
Cheapo Dell
*computer functionality at each room [benefit, assuming you have a montior, keyboard, and mouse to take advantage of it]
And be able to take it to various places outside, assuming the access points can reach.
*no sychronization (might was well have a indepent cdplayers in each room and burn cds)
And just what is wrong with the sound players that will synchronize the songs playing on two computers across a network?
*need powered speakers at each location (more $$$)
Are you saying the Sonos guys have invented 'unpowered speakers'?
*walk up to computer and change tracks on it
You'll also have to walk up to the Sonos control panel (correct?), or does it walk over to you?
Noone wants to hire a C++ programmer. At most, they want a general programmer who happens to know C++ and who is smart and a good thinker and knows how to learn 'on the fly,'
Not been to many interviews lately, have you?
Very good analysis. Now why are you posting AC.
My attempts would be:
1) stay off the surface
2)cover everything with double sided tape. It can only get covered with 'highly abrasive dust' once that way, and it won't be highly abrasive if it isn't abrading.
Here's some more ideas along the same lines.
Plant grass, havest it and pack it deep into closed limestone mines. (grass grows faster than trees can can be havested and transported more easily).
-or-
Burn the trees and bury the ashes (ashes == concentrated carbon)
Either was, trying to seperate out the CO2 from the rest of the atmosphere and then phase change it to a solid so that it can be buried is just a stupid waste of money when there are cheap ways to accomplish the same goal.
I used to be a DIY type, making homebrew beer, DIY beer coolers, DIY fish "pond" (in my dorm room) with DIY biological filter, etc. Several years after college if finally occured to me that what I made was invariably more expensive, less effective/efficient, bigger and just plain uglier than the commercially produced equivalents. And so I quit. (I still subscribed to MAKE when it was first published)
I'm just the opposite. I used to always assume that I couldn't make things, and that people who did were somewhat above and greater than the rest of us. Then I found out that people build airplanes, something I had always wanted but had not hope of ever being able to afford. I started building, and learned something about myself and the world in general.
People who make their own stuff have confidence and control. They look at problems from a different angle. Since I started building, "I can't" has dropped from my vocabulary (though in many cases it is replaced by "I'd rather not"). I look at a problem and don't feel overwhelmed by them. I also no longer feel 'used' by big manufacturing, probably because I don't watch much TV with it incessant advertising. I guess it can be summed up with the idea that I've gone from being a 'consumer' to a 'producer', from 'passive' to 'active'. It's a very different world on this side.
is the one you already know.
From the wikipedia:
"the Mezzo desktop environment that poses a completely new way of presenting data to the user." [strike one]
"Symphony OS also includes a new packaging system" [strike two]
What may happen, is that some of the Mezzo ideas might get fed into other distributions, but whenever someone starts shouting about following a whole new paradigm they have lost from the start.
Why not just cover every one of the little devices with little solar panels that charge the batteries? Not expecting it to run solely off of what can be gained from light energy, but just wanting it to extend the battery life. Add a port to plug in a wall wart for a real charge.
If your blog sounds like a politician giving a speech at the UN, this service will do a wonderful job. Doubtful that it will do any better that Babelfish otherwise.
The biggest problem in artificial intelligence is that the system learns the material that it is trained to, and only that material. Computers don't generalize or extrapolate the known into the unknown worth a damn.
Whenver I hear about these sorts of things that are so obviously *STUPID*, I'm lead back to an alternative reading of the Bible's Revelations. Substitute a cell tower in for the multi-headed beast, and it gets downright...weird.
You still aren't going to be able to buy a flying car. You will, however, be able to invest in a company which intends to build one.
Don't be so sure about that. The most recent EAA newsletter had a blurb that the boys over at Monster Garage will be having a go at it.
I expect that by my grandchildren's time, work will look like hanging around in coffee shop and chatting.
As opposed to standing around a water cooler chatting? The jobs with risk of death and dismemberment are still around. And they're still brutally punishing to the body. But they're either done in China or by illegal Mexicans, so nobody here seems to care much.
Most of the post I've read so far seem to dwell on how Microsoft products suck, which I'll pretty much have to agree with. But I think we're missing out on another point.
In the late '80s and early '90s there was a lot of hobbiest using Microsoft operating systems to do cool things. The system was open and hackable. You could access BIOS routines and DOS interrupts.
Over time Microsoft built more and more cruft on top of the system, most of it buggy, and all of it constantly changing. The lower stuff kept getting harder to get to. A quick hack kept getting harder unless you were willing to worship at the Microsoft alter daily to learn the latest technique, language, interface, API, etc.
My hobby is airplanes, not programming APIs du jour. If I won't to do something on the computer for my hobby, it must be quick and easy or I'll go back to welding or something, and just run the numbers I need with pencil and paper (vs writing a program that I would distribute to other builders). Linux lets me do that, mostly because all distributions have a C compiler included.
Microsoft is looking for hobbiest that are using their system, because they know that it is the hobbiest who got them where they are and that those hobbiest have moved to Linux.
And who will be buying the products to fuel all these jobs, once the 'grayed' out work force aren't making any money to buy them.
I've heard this argument before, and I cried bullshit then, too. As the boomers retire, demand for the products they were producing will diminish as well. It will be a net wash.
People lament the loss of simpler mechanical systems that can be fixed with know-how and a socket set. We publicize every example of a system failure we hear of. But the numbers don't lie: a 2005 model with a half-dozen embedded computers has a far lower incidence of problems than a corresponding 1970 model when it was new. You are far less likely to ever have to call a tow truck in your lifetime than your father/grandfather was.
I bought a Dodge Dakota in 2000. Everything ran fine for years, except for the damn computer which was developed for the Jeep Cherokee. Turns out they used cheap components, and the computer would shut down everything when it got to hot from the engine heat. Was able to use dry ice to get home a couple times before I had it fixed.
In the past year, I've had the heater core to go out, the fan clutch is shot, and the ABS sensor in the rear had to be replaced. No problem for 5 years and then everything starts falling apart. I haven't even paid the thing off yet. Reliability of new cars doesn't mean a damn thing unless you're Hertz and swap out the cars every 3 years for business reasons. Tell me how reliable they are after at least 7.
There's so many other problems. For example, first click on the address bar of firefox in windows would highlight it, so I just type in new address. In Linux, that just put a cursor there.
You're right, and this should never change! You forget this is *NIX and not Windows. When you highlight something like that, it is copying it to the clipboard. If I highlight a URL in a different document and want to paste it into the Firefox URL window, under your system I'm hosed because clicking in the window highlighted the existing URL and blew away my clipboard.
I totally agree. Kate does this, and is the one thing I hate about the editor. If you pull up the find dialog or replace dialog, it pulls the word containing the cursor into the dialog and highlights it. Forget that the word you wanted to find was first highlighted in another file. That is gone from you clipboard. You first have to delete what Kate put in the dialog box, RE-highlight the text in the other window, and then paste it. A royal PIA.
Or you can walk over to Harbor Freight and grab some off of one of their $5 saw blades. Or just make it in a large, hot press. They call it cubic zirconium. I've also heard rumors that there are also places in Russia where you can walk around and pick it up off the ground. Diamond scarcity it a con job propagated by the jewellery business.
Radically new materials. I think the periodic table has just about all of them covered.
Oh well. We see that once again the need for ratings overwhelms the need for completeness and accuracy.
And do you know of any neighborhoods where half the housewives are attractive 30-somethings running around naked half the time wanting to lay every guy in sight. The other half have dead people buried under their pool. Everyone lives in a big, recently built house with a perfectly manicured lawn, hardly anyone works, it never rains and NO ONE uses the bathroom.
So use an image manipulation program to generate the images on the fly. Pick one of 10,000 background images at random and merge it with a graphic rendering of the text. Mix them up, use the none-of-the-above technique and any other tricks you have.
There's still a 12.5% chance that the hacker will get in on the first try. But the first successful hit will make him want more. The key is to record the connection address of all unsuccessful attempts, and review the logs when a problem is reported. Contact the police, they obtain warrants, show up at the ISP, and then the hacker's house. Even better, let him transfer some money, buy some stuff, then REALLY come down on him/her.
Yes, but the environment the car operates in is much more complicated than the environment the computer has to operate in. There is some predictability to a new video card. But how do you program "Deer on the side of road possibly about to spring into your lane" . Now try "child", "stumbling drunk teenager", "armadillo", "dump truck", "boulder on side of hill", "dumb as sport car driver in the next lane"....
Limit the scope to all the problems that could go wrong in the car itself, and it is more than most computers can handle. I was having problems with my engine shutting off when I came to a stop. I fixed it by replacing the ABS speed sensor in the rearend differential. The OBS was getting a signal, just a bad one. Screw up the input with a little lack of maintenance, and the computer won't know what to make of it.
A OS' environment is extremely simple when compared to the real world.
How many posts will we see in this thread that ask the same thing?
I worked for IBM, coding in the mainframe networking department. Their motto should have been, "Don't change anything...it's working."
I got irritated. I would find stuff that was just STUPID. Horrendously mangled logic. Algorithms from other parts of the code applied completely wrong. Whenever I tried to improve the code I got the "It's working. Don't change anything" line. I left, determined to find a job where I could actually write code.
That was several years ago. I've gotten smarter since. I've worked on several large-scale, 5-9's systems. After several major and minor fuck-ups, now I know....
If it's working, don't change anything.
I find it a rather humorous 'insight'. If the airplanes are 'rusting' then they don't need to worry about software.
Modern airplanes don't rust. They die of metal fatique, which aluminum is much more prone to than 4130 steel.
There is an upward limit with physics. Signal strength drops off with the cube of distance, and really goes to crap when you lose line-of-site. In either case, you have to have enough power to overcome the background noise between the transmitter and reciever. Antennae cannot increase a signal's strength, they can only focus the power in a certain direction. That's not very useful if you don't know where the xmit/rcv partners are.
I'm in Cary, North Carolina.
VoD/PPV. I can't see the difference. I go through an on-screen menu, watch the movie, and get a hit on my monthly bill. It all looks the same from here. In neither case can I view the movie if the cable craps out.
Those people are happy to pay the 11.99 vs the $40 at the scummy video store that they have to walk into and risk someone seeing them there.
Never the less, they should be able to disguise them, use more powerful transmitters and better technology so they don't need as many, and they should be reasonably sensative about the environment that they put them in.
The cell phones are two way transmitters. You'd not only have to put a more powerful transmitter on the tower, you'd also need one next to your HEAD!! I worked on a tower reciever about a decade ago. This device was to pick up a AA powered two-way pager from a distance of 10 miles. Those things were so sensitive that bumping the table would cause it to fail the test, but there is only so much you can do to pick a needle out of a haystack.
One of the funniest things I ever heard was while riding with my brother-in-law. As we pull out of his fancy gated community, he stops his cell phone conversation long enough to complain about a tower going up behind a storage facility. He looked completely idiotic when I explained that he might want that tower if he expected to keep using that phone.