I can tell you WTF. Britain is marching full steam ahead into a big recession and the only thing that has prevented it from doing it this year was influx of cheap Polish labour. Unfortunately this only delays the inevitable as it does not change the underlying overheated housing market, phenomenal internal debt and other major economical metrics. Wow, replace Polish with Indian and Mexican and you suddenly sound exactly like the US about a year ago.
Could you really tell me that if Whitney had an agency like the RIAA for farm equipment, he wouldn't have enlisted their services?
If Whitney had enlisted the services of an organization like the RIAA, the RIAA would have gotten rich from his invention and he would have ended up owing them money in the end. With how the RIAA behaves, you could argue that he still would have broken even or lost money.
Name one thing the RIAA has invented or, here's the kicker, caused the invention of that wouldn't have happened had they not been there. Humans have been making music since the dawn of civilization. The RIAA is a recent creation. And when it's gone, humans will still make music. And, though it's hard to believe, some of those humans will be very successful, popular, and weathly because of it, all without the RIAA.
The / operator takes floats as operands. If you give it ints, it does an implicit cast for you, then casts it back for you when the result goes into an int. math.h has an integer divide function for this reason. This is also why the other versions of unix generate floating point exceptions even though I never mention float in the code.
IBM is technically right to return whatever they want, but all their competitors crashed the program like they should. So instead of of exercising common sense, they followed the letter of the law. Without asserting all the denominators, divide by zero would never be detected on AIX meaning that the program would continue with silly results, which was the bug I was investigating.
ok, you're right. it's not the operating system, just the compiler and libraries supplied with the operating system.
Finally, the slashdot parser removed from stuff from my post.
IBM AIX had an issue with dividing by zero. If you run this program:
#include
void main() {
int x,y,z;
x=1;
y=0;
z=x/y;
printf("%d\n",z);
}
You get 15. At least you did a few years ago the last time I tried. This is because the 0 is cast to a float before the divide, then cast back to an int. On other *nixs, you get a floating point exception like god intended. I found this after spending 4 hours in dbx chasing a bug in my factory scheduling system.
The irony here is that that financial woes are the leading cause of divorce -- if anything this silly notion is probably setting up young couples to fail.
+20 insightful.
Number of years I've been married: 15, and not likely to end any time soon.
Amount I paid for my wife's ring: $0.:-)
Starting out in debt for both the ring and the wedding is the worst possible way to start a marriage.
"Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?"
Assuming they mean business logic and not things like sorting algorithms, you had better have vast quantities of foresight to make that happen. As most other crud conjured up by these people, it sounds great on paper and when given to executive types in the form of powerpoint presentations, but in practice, it falls apart. Different programmers, different programming styles, changing business rules, mergers, new client requirements, scope creep, abandoned products, legacy code you're unable to get away from, new business standards (like we're a java company, no.net, no java), politics and empire building, and any number of other variables all come together to make the business environment so complicated that developers will be reinventing the wheel for years to come. Things like MQSeries or Oracle have gone a long way toward standardizing things. You don't cook up databases in flat files anymore. You don't (usually) write your own messaging systems by opening sockets directly. Things like the.net framework or j2ee mean we're not writing sorting algorithms anymore. But that just frees us up to work on other complex systems. And complexity is growing faster than these sorts of standardized frameworks can be created. We'll continue to use standardized middleware packages and other third party controls or libraries. But the business will always need custom solutions that build on those standards.
...instead of keeping people alive longer than nature intends?
Maybe nature intends for people to die of heart disease. And who is this "nature" anyway? God? There's a thorny question. I say any research into the understanding of the human body is good research, even if it doesn't seem to directly relate to something others deem more important. The miracle drug for my autoimmune disorder was discovered by accident while researching arthritis. Maybe their research will cure those children who age at a high rate and look 80 at age 10.
I also have an immune system/skin condition called psoriasis
I have psoriasis. I was 40% covered. Get on enbrel. I've been on every topical treatment imaginable, none of which really worked. I had skin atrophy problems from steroids. I finally stopped all treatments because they were causing more problems than they were solving. I never wanted to risk things like methotrexate or cyclosporin. This time they nailed it. It works. No side-effects. Two injections a week I give myself. I was 100% clear in four months. It's $2400 a month, but my health insurance is covering it, so I only have a $40 copay. If your derm is giving you problems with it, find a new derm.
A mate told me about such a machine - ie must be pressing two buttons before the machine will operate so you MUST have your hands clear - but some bozo figured out you could save a bunch of time by wedging in one of the buttons with cardboard so you only have to press one button.
While I was a kid in college, I took a third shift job testing electronic components. Usually, I'd start halucinating around 4am. I kept seeing this dog darting out of my peripheral vision. Anyway, one night, instead of testing transistors like I usually did, they brought me a big bucket of power diodes. The test harness had two buttons just like you describe. Unfortuneately, they were about 12 inches apart, just the right size to tape a ruler to the harnes so that it pressed both buttons. Getting shocked by the power diodes during a test woke me right up and stopped the halucinations.
I already have a digital camera to take pictures, and a music player to play music. Why try to cram all these features into a mobile phone, which just complicates the user interface and adds cost?
All of these functions are converging into one device that does everything. I already carry a phone and an mp3 player. I ordinarily don't carry my digital camera, but having one in my phone means I can take pictures of unexpected things. I expect a lot of other things to be added in. We already have internet access and games. Expect gps navigation to be added in... biometric monitoring... voice and face recognition... a bluetooth visor that superimposes information over your field of vision. You walk up to a human, independantly, the phone (or whatever it will be called) recognizes the person, reminds you of their name, that it's their birthday in a couple days, the names of their children, their phone and email address... you can record the conversation with audio and video... when they say their phone number, the phone hears and records it, you don't have to... You could incorporate vision correction, sunglasses, night vision, hearing aid functionality, live real-time language translation, weather and traffic reports... it could talk to your car and tell you what's wrong with your car, auto sync like a palm pilot, keep track of your caloric intake vs how much you've walked today. It can spot trends in your health and behavior, like your respiration becoming more labored over the space of, say, a month, or your heart rate at rest dropping telling you that your exercise program is working well. Then there's electronic money... hardened personal identification... emergency medical information.
This is just what I've come up with in a couple minutes. I'm sure there's much more. I give it about ten years. By 2016, we'll all be wearing these things. Well.. when i'm on vacation, having sex, or playing with my children I won't.:-) But I sure will at work.
Metroid's wacky stick-based controls hurt my hands. A lot. I can't see how anyone can deal with the default settings for more than 20 minutes. Then I realized I'm playing a FPS on a handheld when I bought the handheld to get away from the typical Sony/Xbox grind. If anything, Metriod Hunters is a seriously wrong move for this device. Its another 'me too' title with a control gimmick.
It took a lot of getting used to for me. Basically, I have to put the DS between my middle and ring fingers on my right hand. then hold the stylus with the 3 fingers on top. This exact position makes it very playable for me. I'm used to it now. Also, I haven't played a FPS in a long time because I hate console controls for them. It's a compromise because it's the DS. But in this case, I think they did a good job. I set the difficulty to easy which had made it very enjoyable to play. Comparing the interface to something like wolfenstein for the SP, or even any of the FPS games on the xbox, I think hunters has a better interface and is easier to play.
I used to work for veritas and got out shortly after the buyout. Veritas was a cool place to work. And when symantec took over, they sent out this 1/4" thick book full of management-speak. It was unreal. "What is winning?" "We believe in unity." "Our customers trust us to lead the way." After all of this, they listed the names of every employee from either company. Then they had a company-wide conference call with the new ceo. They had "questions from employees" dolled out by a pretty-sounding secretary type. One of the questions was "what can I do to be a better employee?" "You know, I'm being asked that all the time..." I nearly vomited. Ahead of their exit interview, they send you this questionaire to fill out planning to go ever it with you later. After I sent it back to them, they didn't want to have an exit interview anymore... something about how the ceo on the conference call sounded like a lord trying to placate the serfs.:-) I still have the book as a joke, and as a reminder of why, yet again, I've become a consultant and vow never again to be a wage-slave. I shudder to think about what it costs to print up 20,000 of these shiny black books. If they were trying to buy my loyalty with bull-shit management wrapped in a shiny package, they would have bought more loyalty by simply sending me a check for the printing cost of my little book.
I hear their stock has dropped by 1/3 since the buyout. I'm glad I didn't hang around for the stock options.
Women are crafty. They probably attacked from behind. And did 2x damage.
Sounds more like a critical hit to me.:-) He should have put on his Stinky Loincloth of Repulsion. That would have lowered his armor class and given him -10 to charisma. That would have made her choose a different target.
being classified as very difficult by most standards
I speak some japanese. I've never really been fluent, but I can easily get around tokyo, talk to people, conduct simple business transactions, ask for and undestand directions, etc. From a speaking standpoint, japanese is not really that difficult. For example, there's only one verb conjugation rule and almost all the verbs follow it. Japanese only has a few irregular verbs. Compare that to english which has three conjugation rules and 273 irregular verbs. English also depends more heavily on slang and idioms, more than most langauages. Also, the spelling system in english is archane. Words are spelled that way because of history, not because of how things are pronounced. There are a vast numer of exceptions in english that you just have to know.
There are a few things that are notably more complicated in japanese, such as counting. The language also has more rules for politeness depending on who is talking and who is being spoken to, whereas english tends to rely more on word choice, body language, and tone of voice to convey the same things. Reading and writing japanese on the other hand is a nightmare. Only chinese is worse. You need to know about 2000 characters to read a newspaper for example. I know both phonetic alphabets (105 characters each) and only about 100 kanji.
American school children learn the entire alphabet in a matter of a few months, then spend years and years learning how to spell and use proper grammar and punctuation. Japanese school children learn those things fairly quickly, then spend years and years memorizing kanji.
Well, yes, of course. However, as they don't have to worry about being re-elected, they can say what they think and vote for what they really think is in the nation's best interest instead of pandering to lobbyists and campaign contributors. In that sense, at least, they're more likely to be impartial than an elected official.
That's supposed to be the end result of the lifetime appointments for supreme court justices here in the US. Sadly, it seem to make more activists rather than champions of the constitution.
I understand that the UK negotiators say that the US administration is sympathetic to our case but that they don't think they could get the necessary waivers passed by Congress. Presumably Congress is worried we're going to use these aircraft to reconquer Ireland or something?
The article I was reading a few days ago said that it was the pentagon that was the problem. I guess the current situation allows the UK to ask for the codes if needed, and that it would certainly be granted, but that it takes something like 20 to 30 days for the request to go through. The royal navy/air force obviously feel like they need to be able to act faster than this. This is all completely ridiculous. I can't imagine why anyone in our government would want to withold any kind of military technology from the brits.
To remedy this, I suggest corner window offices for all office employees.
I would be far happier in my cube if the walls went floor to ceiling, and there were real sound dampening materials in the walls. I can hold a conversation with the guy on the other side of the wall while speaking in a low voice. And I'm sick and tired of impromptu speaker-phone conference calls in the cube next to me.
I feel exactly the same way about bathroom stalls.
Will the next big evolutionary change be (partial?) resistance to Bird-flu or Ebola ?
I saw a documentary about six months ago about a brittish researcher claiming that the black death wasn't the bubonic plague. He made a very good argument. In other plague outbreaks, there are literally thousands of dead rats scattered about the city, since the bacteria kills them also. Apparently in europe at the time of the black death, there simply wern't enough rats. In the cities there certainly were, but the black death had no trouble at all spreading across vast sparsly populated countryside, even in the colder climates where the rats have more problems. Also, the eurupean doctors of the time were familiar with bubos, but never used that word in describing the symptoms. This researcher believed that the black death was really a slow-burn form of haemmorhagic fever. Just like ebola, only with a much longer incubation period. This allowed people to walk around spreading the disease for two weeks while they felt fine, then get sick and die. So maybe ebola is really a souped up version of the black death. And maybe european descendents already have a resistance to it.
Slashdot Mirror
If one pedestrian in fifty had a couple of kilos of nitro-glicerine (sp?) in their backpack, no pedestrian would ever be hit again.
I just knew those Pedestrians were terrorists. Where is Pedestria anyway?
You can't stuff a $1 coin in a G-string.
:-)
Just put it in the slot.
I can tell you WTF. Britain is marching full steam ahead into a big recession and the only thing that has prevented it from doing it this year was influx of cheap Polish labour. Unfortunately this only delays the inevitable as it does not change the underlying overheated housing market, phenomenal internal debt and other major economical metrics.
Wow, replace Polish with Indian and Mexican and you suddenly sound exactly like the US about a year ago.
Could you really tell me that if Whitney had an agency like the RIAA for farm equipment, he wouldn't have enlisted their services?
If Whitney had enlisted the services of an organization like the RIAA, the RIAA would have gotten rich from his invention and he would have ended up owing them money in the end. With how the RIAA behaves, you could argue that he still would have broken even or lost money.
Name one thing the RIAA has invented or, here's the kicker, caused the invention of that wouldn't have happened had they not been there. Humans have been making music since the dawn of civilization. The RIAA is a recent creation. And when it's gone, humans will still make music. And, though it's hard to believe, some of those humans will be very successful, popular, and weathly because of it, all without the RIAA.
The / operator takes floats as operands. If you give it ints, it does an implicit cast for you, then casts it back for you when the result goes into an int. math.h has an integer divide function for this reason. This is also why the other versions of unix generate floating point exceptions even though I never mention float in the code.
IBM is technically right to return whatever they want, but all their competitors crashed the program like they should. So instead of of exercising common sense, they followed the letter of the law. Without asserting all the denominators, divide by zero would never be detected on AIX meaning that the program would continue with silly results, which was the bug I was investigating.
ok, you're right. it's not the operating system, just the compiler and libraries supplied with the operating system.
Finally, the slashdot parser removed from stuff from my post.
IBM AIX had an issue with dividing by zero. If you run this program:
#include
void main() {
int x,y,z;
x=1;
y=0;
z=x/y;
printf("%d\n",z);
}
You get 15. At least you did a few years ago the last time I tried. This is because the 0 is cast to a float before the divide, then cast back to an int. On other *nixs, you get a floating point exception like god intended. I found this after spending 4 hours in dbx chasing a bug in my factory scheduling system.
Take the money and run, my friend.
After 15 yeas in IT, I have to agree. Money is the only thing that means anything in corporate america.
The irony here is that that financial woes are the leading cause of divorce -- if anything this silly notion is probably setting up young couples to fail.
:-)
+20 insightful.
Number of years I've been married: 15, and not likely to end any time soon.
Amount I paid for my wife's ring: $0.
Starting out in debt for both the ring and the wedding is the worst possible way to start a marriage.
(It's possible--even likely--that other banks have a similar offer, but Key is the largest one i've seen do it)
IIRC, American Chartered Bank has the same or similar deal.
"Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?"
.net, no java), politics and empire building, and any number of other variables all come together to make the business environment so complicated that developers will be reinventing the wheel for years to come. Things like MQSeries or Oracle have gone a long way toward standardizing things. You don't cook up databases in flat files anymore. You don't (usually) write your own messaging systems by opening sockets directly. Things like the .net framework or j2ee mean we're not writing sorting algorithms anymore. But that just frees us up to work on other complex systems. And complexity is growing faster than these sorts of standardized frameworks can be created. We'll continue to use standardized middleware packages and other third party controls or libraries. But the business will always need custom solutions that build on those standards.
Assuming they mean business logic and not things like sorting algorithms, you had better have vast quantities of foresight to make that happen. As most other crud conjured up by these people, it sounds great on paper and when given to executive types in the form of powerpoint presentations, but in practice, it falls apart. Different programmers, different programming styles, changing business rules, mergers, new client requirements, scope creep, abandoned products, legacy code you're unable to get away from, new business standards (like we're a java company, no
...instead of keeping people alive longer than nature intends?
Maybe nature intends for people to die of heart disease. And who is this "nature" anyway? God? There's a thorny question. I say any research into the understanding of the human body is good research, even if it doesn't seem to directly relate to something others deem more important. The miracle drug for my autoimmune disorder was discovered by accident while researching arthritis. Maybe their research will cure those children who age at a high rate and look 80 at age 10.
Great move on the executives part!
Yeah, great! Now if we could just send the rest of the world's corporate executives in to outer space, we'd all live happily ever after.
I also have an immune system/skin condition called psoriasis
I have psoriasis. I was 40% covered. Get on enbrel. I've been on every topical treatment imaginable, none of which really worked. I had skin atrophy problems from steroids. I finally stopped all treatments because they were causing more problems than they were solving. I never wanted to risk things like methotrexate or cyclosporin. This time they nailed it. It works. No side-effects. Two injections a week I give myself. I was 100% clear in four months. It's $2400 a month, but my health insurance is covering it, so I only have a $40 copay. If your derm is giving you problems with it, find a new derm.
Prediction: Metallica will sue.
Sad, but true.
A mate told me about such a machine - ie must be pressing two buttons before the machine will operate so you MUST have your hands clear - but some bozo figured out you could save a bunch of time by wedging in one of the buttons with cardboard so you only have to press one button.
While I was a kid in college, I took a third shift job testing electronic components. Usually, I'd start halucinating around 4am. I kept seeing this dog darting out of my peripheral vision. Anyway, one night, instead of testing transistors like I usually did, they brought me a big bucket of power diodes. The test harness had two buttons just like you describe. Unfortuneately, they were about 12 inches apart, just the right size to tape a ruler to the harnes so that it pressed both buttons. Getting shocked by the power diodes during a test woke me right up and stopped the halucinations.
I already have a digital camera to take pictures, and a music player to play music. Why try to cram all these features into a mobile phone, which just complicates the user interface and adds cost?
:-) But I sure will at work.
All of these functions are converging into one device that does everything. I already carry a phone and an mp3 player. I ordinarily don't carry my digital camera, but having one in my phone means I can take pictures of unexpected things. I expect a lot of other things to be added in. We already have internet access and games. Expect gps navigation to be added in... biometric monitoring... voice and face recognition... a bluetooth visor that superimposes information over your field of vision. You walk up to a human, independantly, the phone (or whatever it will be called) recognizes the person, reminds you of their name, that it's their birthday in a couple days, the names of their children, their phone and email address... you can record the conversation with audio and video... when they say their phone number, the phone hears and records it, you don't have to... You could incorporate vision correction, sunglasses, night vision, hearing aid functionality, live real-time language translation, weather and traffic reports... it could talk to your car and tell you what's wrong with your car, auto sync like a palm pilot, keep track of your caloric intake vs how much you've walked today. It can spot trends in your health and behavior, like your respiration becoming more labored over the space of, say, a month, or your heart rate at rest dropping telling you that your exercise program is working well. Then there's electronic money... hardened personal identification... emergency medical information.
This is just what I've come up with in a couple minutes. I'm sure there's much more. I give it about ten years. By 2016, we'll all be wearing these things. Well.. when i'm on vacation, having sex, or playing with my children I won't.
Metroid's wacky stick-based controls hurt my hands. A lot. I can't see how anyone can deal with the default settings for more than 20 minutes. Then I realized I'm playing a FPS on a handheld when I bought the handheld to get away from the typical Sony/Xbox grind. If anything, Metriod Hunters is a seriously wrong move for this device. Its another 'me too' title with a control gimmick.
It took a lot of getting used to for me. Basically, I have to put the DS between my middle and ring fingers on my right hand. then hold the stylus with the 3 fingers on top. This exact position makes it very playable for me. I'm used to it now. Also, I haven't played a FPS in a long time because I hate console controls for them. It's a compromise because it's the DS. But in this case, I think they did a good job. I set the difficulty to easy which had made it very enjoyable to play. Comparing the interface to something like wolfenstein for the SP, or even any of the FPS games on the xbox, I think hunters has a better interface and is easier to play.
I used to work for veritas and got out shortly after the buyout. Veritas was a cool place to work. And when symantec took over, they sent out this 1/4" thick book full of management-speak. It was unreal. "What is winning?" "We believe in unity." "Our customers trust us to lead the way." After all of this, they listed the names of every employee from either company. Then they had a company-wide conference call with the new ceo. They had "questions from employees" dolled out by a pretty-sounding secretary type. One of the questions was "what can I do to be a better employee?" "You know, I'm being asked that all the time..." I nearly vomited. Ahead of their exit interview, they send you this questionaire to fill out planning to go ever it with you later. After I sent it back to them, they didn't want to have an exit interview anymore... something about how the ceo on the conference call sounded like a lord trying to placate the serfs. :-) I still have the book as a joke, and as a reminder of why, yet again, I've become a consultant and vow never again to be a wage-slave. I shudder to think about what it costs to print up 20,000 of these shiny black books. If they were trying to buy my loyalty with bull-shit management wrapped in a shiny package, they would have bought more loyalty by simply sending me a check for the printing cost of my little book.
I hear their stock has dropped by 1/3 since the buyout. I'm glad I didn't hang around for the stock options.
Women are crafty. They probably attacked from behind. And did 2x damage.
:-) He should have put on his Stinky Loincloth of Repulsion. That would have lowered his armor class and given him -10 to charisma. That would have made her choose a different target.
Sounds more like a critical hit to me.
being classified as very difficult by most standards
I speak some japanese. I've never really been fluent, but I can easily get around tokyo, talk to people, conduct simple business transactions, ask for and undestand directions, etc. From a speaking standpoint, japanese is not really that difficult. For example, there's only one verb conjugation rule and almost all the verbs follow it. Japanese only has a few irregular verbs. Compare that to english which has three conjugation rules and 273 irregular verbs. English also depends more heavily on slang and idioms, more than most langauages. Also, the spelling system in english is archane. Words are spelled that way because of history, not because of how things are pronounced. There are a vast numer of exceptions in english that you just have to know.
There are a few things that are notably more complicated in japanese, such as counting. The language also has more rules for politeness depending on who is talking and who is being spoken to, whereas english tends to rely more on word choice, body language, and tone of voice to convey the same things. Reading and writing japanese on the other hand is a nightmare. Only chinese is worse. You need to know about 2000 characters to read a newspaper for example. I know both phonetic alphabets (105 characters each) and only about 100 kanji.
American school children learn the entire alphabet in a matter of a few months, then spend years and years learning how to spell and use proper grammar and punctuation. Japanese school children learn those things fairly quickly, then spend years and years memorizing kanji.
Well, yes, of course. However, as they don't have to worry about being re-elected, they can say what they think and vote for what they really think is in the nation's best interest instead of pandering to lobbyists and campaign contributors. In that sense, at least, they're more likely to be impartial than an elected official.
That's supposed to be the end result of the lifetime appointments for supreme court justices here in the US. Sadly, it seem to make more activists rather than champions of the constitution.
They're part of America too you know.
;-)
Yeah, they just don't know it yet. How many states does that make now?
I understand that the UK negotiators say that the US administration is sympathetic to our case but that they don't think they could get the necessary waivers passed by Congress. Presumably Congress is worried we're going to use these aircraft to reconquer Ireland or something?
The article I was reading a few days ago said that it was the pentagon that was the problem. I guess the current situation allows the UK to ask for the codes if needed, and that it would certainly be granted, but that it takes something like 20 to 30 days for the request to go through. The royal navy/air force obviously feel like they need to be able to act faster than this. This is all completely ridiculous. I can't imagine why anyone in our government would want to withold any kind of military technology from the brits.
To remedy this, I suggest corner window offices for all office employees.
I would be far happier in my cube if the walls went floor to ceiling, and there were real sound dampening materials in the walls. I can hold a conversation with the guy on the other side of the wall while speaking in a low voice. And I'm sick and tired of impromptu speaker-phone conference calls in the cube next to me.
I feel exactly the same way about bathroom stalls.
Will the next big evolutionary change be (partial?) resistance to Bird-flu or Ebola ?
I saw a documentary about six months ago about a brittish researcher claiming that the black death wasn't the bubonic plague. He made a very good argument. In other plague outbreaks, there are literally thousands of dead rats scattered about the city, since the bacteria kills them also. Apparently in europe at the time of the black death, there simply wern't enough rats. In the cities there certainly were, but the black death had no trouble at all spreading across vast sparsly populated countryside, even in the colder climates where the rats have more problems. Also, the eurupean doctors of the time were familiar with bubos, but never used that word in describing the symptoms. This researcher believed that the black death was really a slow-burn form of haemmorhagic fever. Just like ebola, only with a much longer incubation period. This allowed people to walk around spreading the disease for two weeks while they felt fine, then get sick and die. So maybe ebola is really a souped up version of the black death. And maybe european descendents already have a resistance to it.