I'm surprised it hasn't imploded, creating a black hole to suck enthusiasts in.
[I dearly loved both forth and LISP (and Modula-2). They changed the way I program. Doesn't really make them successful languages, though.]
Re:Impact on the environment (and the ground)
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not going to be for free, if only because most of your mass is being sent up there for a reason (ie, you send the satellite into orbit, you slingshot the Mars mission to Mars, etc).
In fact, when you come down to it, with this system it probably costs as much to bring stuff down (in a controlled fashion) as to take it up, so you would want to minimize how much to bring back. Maybe delicate things like results from zero-G experiments, or people, ride the elevator back down, while other items might be ejected to reenter in more traditional fashion (if the cost of carrying the heat shield up is cheaper than the cost of carrying the payload down).
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
It's easy enough - you use the solar sail to cancel your orbital velocity by tacking, then you fall into the sun.
The best part is that you don't even need that effective of a sail, once you're out of earth orbit. You need just enough to cancel your sun-orbital velocity a little. You'll fall inward to a new orbit - which is closer to the sun, and thus your sail becomes more efficient. While it might be hard to sail into the sun in a week or month, it should be pretty easy to accomplish in a year or decade.
For some reason, I was under the impression that preventing man-in-the-middle was one of the primary _points_ of public key crypto. You're saying that if the end-user isn't paying attention, they were exploitable in the first place. The problem is that now if the end-user _is_ paying attention, they're also exploitable.
Re:If we are going to go ballistic...
on
Gone Fission
·
· Score: 1
Of course, at one point there WERE NO HUMANS ANYWHERE.
As much as I agree with you that reality TV shows are a waste of time, can you truly say they "suck" without having seen a fair representation of them?
Sure you can say they suck. They're on television, right? Worse, they're on primetime, right? Then you can say they suck without watching any footage, and you're already in the 90th percentile or so.
Don't take UI advice from a gray-on-gray webpage
on
GUIs for Everyone
·
· Score: 1
Err, I'm not certain I need to add anything. I suppose it could have been white on blue, that would have been even worse.
Why not just ask them what the problem is? You say they understand the domain problem, because you've had plenty of discussions - maybe they think _you_ understand the domain problem, and are afraid to appear stupid?
Hey, thanks for not only linking the article, but also linking cnet. With this great hint, I was all by myself able to fill in the missing links to macworld, apple, Microsoft, and Mac OS X. Someday, maybe this stuff will be easy enough for new users to figure out all on their own.
Why would he need CG legs to return as Superman? He should be able to fly and shoot lasers from his eyes and blow cold and whatnot just as easily from a chair as not. Yoda managed just fine in AoTC, after all...
If you honestly think that what you see on mass media is targetted at rich people, then you obviously know different wealthy people than I do. Mass media is targetted at people who wish they were wealthy. Time isn't printing articles about buffing up your summer cottage because millions of readers have summer cottages - they do it because millions of readers want summer cottages.
What's neat about this is that if they had simply done the cross-breeding in Africa, any escaped swarms would simply have crossbred with native bees, become Africanized, and (probably) no big deal would come of it. Same benefits if it worked out, improved benefits if it didn't.
It's like the plot to most sci-fi movies. "Yes, I think it would be a good idea to take the BIG GIANT POISONOUS PREGNANT SHAPESHIFTING ALIEN THAT WE CAN'T CONTROL to New York for further study, because that's where I live and there's no way this is worth uprooting myself to Utah or something to keep the world safe."
Huh? I'll admit a bus pollutes more than a car, but are you really suggesting that a busload of 30 people travelling 10 miles pollutes more than 30 cars travelling 10 miles? Or that a train with 250 people pollutes more than 250 cars? I think that kind of assertion needs some evidence.
"The slashdot effect" isn't anything amazing, it's not a force of nature. People lard up their http server with all sorts of offpoint crap - mod_perl, mason, php, servlets, database access on every single page (including images), etc, etc, without considering whether that stuff is really necessary, or just cool. And it all works just fine so long as they're getting only a couple dozen hits per hour.
I remember someone a year or two ago doing a "study" of the slashdot effect. Their hit rate went from something like 30-100 pages per hour to more like 2000-3000 pages per hour, at which point they had a cascade failure (more requests initiated per unit time than requests completed). The machines at work handle a couple thousand pages per minute, day in, day out, and I'm not even certain we could see "the slastdot effect" on our graphs.
Most sites could save themselves from slashdot by tuning their cache directives and installed a simple http accelerator. Under Linux, it might take a half hour to setup.
[Unfortunately, you do get the periodic site slashdotted through simple lack of bandwidth. But that's hardly the fault of the machine at the far end of the connection...]
You teach people spelling and grammar, _then_ you teach them to write stories.
You teach people calculus, _then_ you teach them physics.
You teach people algebra _then_ you teach them calculus.
Well, I'm running out of examples, here. My last year of college I had a younger student ask me "But, what's the point of a tree?" There's really no point to teaching the abstract stuff _first_. Programming a computer is an unnatural act, people generally simply have no conceptual framework to slot the abstractions into!
Sorry, dude, I read Moonrise. It was a soap opera in a futuristic setting, and then only reason I finished it is because I couldn't believe that they'd publish such a crummy book with no redeeming qualities. It literally put me off Ben Bova (admittedly, I've only read three or four of his other books).
I was wrong and now those hours (and that $5.95) are lost to me forever.
I've always wondered how companies justify the expense, too. I mean, take, oh.... *toothbrushes*. I mean, here you have a fairly basic item, and while they advertise the hell out of the massive new advances they've made, it's basically bristles on a stick. Yet almost every primetime show you see has at least one toothbrush ad. It's bizarre.
This is pretty much why I prefer to limit to only two types of comments. One type describes how the code fits into the overall system, so you can relatively easily figure out how the component was intended to fit into things (when debugging someone else's 500klines of code, you want to tenatively omit big chunks of code as quickly as possible).
The other type of comment documents the non-obvious aspects of what's going on. First, assume that the reader is perfectly capable of rewriting the code, and that they're 75-90% as intelligent as you are (which perfectly describes the delta between when I'm writing the comment and six months later when I'm reading it:-). They'll have certain assumptions about how it should work, which assumptions generally derive from proven past techniques. So you need a quick description of how things want to work, followed by a description of what you couldn't get to work that way, and why.
BTW, most comments suck because they document WHAT the code does, instead of WHY it does it. Telling me that this code implements/uses a linked list is worthless - I can see that. But if I run across a linked list with no explanation why a linked list rather than something else, my first question is whether I can make the code simpler or faster by using something more appropriate. [No, I usually try not to *act* on that unless I have to refactor the code anyhow. It's just the first thing that comes to mind.]
Hash tables are cool. I can completely see spending 9 figures on one. [Hey, if anyone else out there wants to buy a neat data structure for millions of dollars, let me know and I'll whip up a tree for you...]
Slashdot Mirror
heavily influenced by Forth,
Crush is dead on arrival.
LISP,
OK, Crush is dead before leaving.
and Ada
I'm surprised it hasn't imploded, creating a black hole to suck enthusiasts in.
[I dearly loved both forth and LISP (and Modula-2). They changed the way I program. Doesn't really make them successful languages, though.]
It's not going to be for free, if only because most of your mass is being sent up there for a reason (ie, you send the satellite into orbit, you slingshot the Mars mission to Mars, etc).
In fact, when you come down to it, with this system it probably costs as much to bring stuff down (in a controlled fashion) as to take it up, so you would want to minimize how much to bring back. Maybe delicate things like results from zero-G experiments, or people, ride the elevator back down, while other items might be ejected to reenter in more traditional fashion (if the cost of carrying the heat shield up is cheaper than the cost of carrying the payload down).
It's easy enough - you use the solar sail to cancel your orbital velocity by tacking, then you fall into the sun.
The best part is that you don't even need that effective of a sail, once you're out of earth orbit. You need just enough to cancel your sun-orbital velocity a little. You'll fall inward to a new orbit - which is closer to the sun, and thus your sail becomes more efficient. While it might be hard to sail into the sun in a week or month, it should be pretty easy to accomplish in a year or decade.
For some reason, I was under the impression that preventing man-in-the-middle was one of the primary _points_ of public key crypto. You're saying that if the end-user isn't paying attention, they were exploitable in the first place. The problem is that now if the end-user _is_ paying attention, they're also exploitable.
Of course, at one point there WERE NO HUMANS ANYWHERE.
As much as I agree with you that reality TV shows are a waste of time, can you truly say they "suck" without having seen a fair representation of them?
Sure you can say they suck. They're on television, right? Worse, they're on primetime, right? Then you can say they suck without watching any footage, and you're already in the 90th percentile or so.
Err, I'm not certain I need to add anything. I suppose it could have been white on blue, that would have been even worse.
Have only read a couple dozen posts, but...
Why not just ask them what the problem is? You say they understand the domain problem, because you've had plenty of discussions - maybe they think _you_ understand the domain problem, and are afraid to appear stupid?
You're right. I'm sure a $10,000 car will have at least as high-quality of a redundant control system as a $100,000,000 airplane.
Hey, thanks for not only linking the article, but also linking cnet. With this great hint, I was all by myself able to fill in the missing links to macworld, apple, Microsoft, and Mac OS X. Someday, maybe this stuff will be easy enough for new users to figure out all on their own.
Why would he need CG legs to return as Superman? He should be able to fly and shoot lasers from his eyes and blow cold and whatnot just as easily from a chair as not. Yoda managed just fine in AoTC, after all...
Ever posted today :-).
Indeed - this is the first item ever posted on slashdot which could truly fix the last-mile problem.
If you honestly think that what you see on mass media is targetted at rich people, then you obviously know different wealthy people than I do. Mass media is targetted at people who wish they were wealthy. Time isn't printing articles about buffing up your summer cottage because millions of readers have summer cottages - they do it because millions of readers want summer cottages.
New to slashdot?
Try this story
[No wonder there are so many repeats.]
What's neat about this is that if they had simply done the cross-breeding in Africa, any escaped swarms would simply have crossbred with native bees, become Africanized, and (probably) no big deal would come of it. Same benefits if it worked out, improved benefits if it didn't.
It's like the plot to most sci-fi movies. "Yes, I think it would be a good idea to take the BIG GIANT POISONOUS PREGNANT SHAPESHIFTING ALIEN THAT WE CAN'T CONTROL to New York for further study, because that's where I live and there's no way this is worth uprooting myself to Utah or something to keep the world safe."
Huh? I'll admit a bus pollutes more than a car, but are you really suggesting that a busload of 30 people travelling 10 miles pollutes more than 30 cars travelling 10 miles? Or that a train with 250 people pollutes more than 250 cars? I think that kind of assertion needs some evidence.
carry the two
Which two? I can see carrying a three, but I can't find a two! This is going to bug me all day...
"The slashdot effect" isn't anything amazing, it's not a force of nature. People lard up their http server with all sorts of offpoint crap - mod_perl, mason, php, servlets, database access on every single page (including images), etc, etc, without considering whether that stuff is really necessary, or just cool. And it all works just fine so long as they're getting only a couple dozen hits per hour.
I remember someone a year or two ago doing a "study" of the slashdot effect. Their hit rate went from something like 30-100 pages per hour to more like 2000-3000 pages per hour, at which point they had a cascade failure (more requests initiated per unit time than requests completed). The machines at work handle a couple thousand pages per minute, day in, day out, and I'm not even certain we could see "the slastdot effect" on our graphs.
Most sites could save themselves from slashdot by tuning their cache directives and installed a simple http accelerator. Under Linux, it might take a half hour to setup.
[Unfortunately, you do get the periodic site slashdotted through simple lack of bandwidth. But that's hardly the fault of the machine at the far end of the connection...]
You teach people spelling and grammar, _then_ you teach them to write stories.
You teach people calculus, _then_ you teach them physics.
You teach people algebra _then_ you teach them calculus.
Well, I'm running out of examples, here. My last year of college I had a younger student ask me "But, what's the point of a tree?" There's really no point to teaching the abstract stuff _first_. Programming a computer is an unnatural act, people generally simply have no conceptual framework to slot the abstractions into!
The Transmeta machine is a VLIW machine, almost the antipathy of CISC.
Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I was wrong and now those hours (and that $5.95) are lost to me forever.
I've always wondered how companies justify the expense, too. I mean, take, oh .... *toothbrushes*. I mean, here you have a fairly basic item, and while they advertise the hell out of the massive new advances they've made, it's basically bristles on a stick. Yet almost every primetime show you see has at least one toothbrush ad. It's bizarre.
This is pretty much why I prefer to limit to only two types of comments. One type describes how the code fits into the overall system, so you can relatively easily figure out how the component was intended to fit into things (when debugging someone else's 500klines of code, you want to tenatively omit big chunks of code as quickly as possible).
:-). They'll have certain assumptions about how it should work, which assumptions generally derive from proven past techniques. So you need a quick description of how things want to work, followed by a description of what you couldn't get to work that way, and why.
The other type of comment documents the non-obvious aspects of what's going on. First, assume that the reader is perfectly capable of rewriting the code, and that they're 75-90% as intelligent as you are (which perfectly describes the delta between when I'm writing the comment and six months later when I'm reading it
BTW, most comments suck because they document WHAT the code does, instead of WHY it does it. Telling me that this code implements/uses a linked list is worthless - I can see that. But if I run across a linked list with no explanation why a linked list rather than something else, my first question is whether I can make the code simpler or faster by using something more appropriate. [No, I usually try not to *act* on that unless I have to refactor the code anyhow. It's just the first thing that comes to mind.]
Hash tables are cool. I can completely see spending 9 figures on one. [Hey, if anyone else out there wants to buy a neat data structure for millions of dollars, let me know and I'll whip up a tree for you...]