OK, so I've never really understood 'dark matter', but if there's a bunch of stuff floating about that's not stars and only shows up through things like gravitational micro-lensing... might this cover some of the mass that is dark matter?
Or is this just way to insignificant to account for it?
A bunch of planets floating around in space without orbiting a star is probably a lot -- but maybe nowhere near enough to account for whatever bits of whatever equations that leads us to ponder dark matter.
wevtutil query-events System > \\server\logs\exported.log
Is this Powershell or native? I just tried this from a command line, and it doesn't work.
Microsoft is definitely getting better at providing some useful utilities... but for a lot of us, it's still lagging behind where Unix has been for quite some time.
I'd love to be able to script some of the tasks for IIS that you access from the My Computer > Manage -- maybe you can, I don't know. I've just never really had much luck in finding such things -- or they're supported on a version of the OS I don't have, and nonexistent on the ones I do.
Why do I get the feeling that large American and European corporations will be the ones to benefit most from this "international law enforcement"?
And the citizens of pretty much everywhere will be the ones who lose the most.
The democracies will become even more like surveillance societies. The places with questionable human rights records will be sold this stuff so they can further control their people (by companies who only care about the bottom line). And, the outright dictators will think it's just grand as they can lock down dissent.
We all lose in a scenario like this... having everything you do on the internet tied to a single, government issued network ID won't work. And, in fact, it will probably mean that innocent people become even more targeted by cybercrime -- think how valuable of a target those ids will become, and think of how difficult it will be to fix it when they're compromised.
Not only won't this alleviate crime, it will erode our rights and freedoms. Nothing good will come of this -- this is trying to legislate a solution to a problem which legislation can't possibly hope to find a solution.
Realistically, the best solution may be an app for the phone. You get a one time key from the app on the phone
All you've done is created another single point of failure... and, presume that in order to do anything in a secure manner, I need to have a smart phone.
You might as well just decide that I need a facebook login as well.
Wow, I'm afraid I have to conclude this guys is possibly a little too full of himself.
If we ever get anywhere near a "single secure cyberspace", we're pretty much all screwed.
Governments will use this to stifle your privacy, your rights, and every other thing they can think of. They'll make sure they monitor everything you do, and ensure you don't do anything they don't approve of.
Anybody who thinks the solution to cybercrime is to more or less lock down the internet like this... well, I think they deserve a series of well placed kicks to the groin. I can only see this as more or less fascism -- though I'm sure I'll be accused of hyperbole.
I haven't tracked where the system log viewer has moved in Windows Vista and Windows 7.
It's just right click on "My computer", and then "Manage"... it's up near the top. Been there since at least W2K3, but it still works on my Vista machine.
Sometimes, I have received the "something bad, contact your admin" message when nothing useful gets put into the even log -- diagnosing network flakiness for instance sometimes gives utterly useless information.
Using their repaid "wizard" usually ends up serving no purpose since it amounts to "plug in your cable, did this help?".
Despite Microsoft's attempts to completely nanny people, they've almost taken it too far... which means that people start ignoring/disabling the warnings.
The other week I launched IE on a new server install... the very first warning message is "You are about to access the internet, and people can see what you do" -- which gets a "do not show me this again" before I dismiss.
As soon as you submit into a search engine, you get told "You are about to submit something on the internet, are you sure" -- which also gets a "do not show again".
By the time I tell it I don't want it to save passwords, autocomplete forms, and that, yes, I really do want Google as my default search... well, I've stopped listening to anything "helpful" IE is telling me.
I rank the utility of the stuff that MS has "designed" to make IE safe right up there with the error messages that amount to "something bad has happened, contact your admin" --- oooh, that's informative. And, since I'm the admin... give me some f'ing idea as to what went wrong so I can try to fix it.
Microsoft build in really pedantic and lame safeguards, which get turned off and/or ignored for the rest of time since they don't actually do anything useful.
I've tagged things in delicio.us for years, in my gmail for years, Slashdot tags, my photo organizing software that came with my digital camera I bought 6 or so years ago... I'm sure in probably more examples if I think about it...
Depending on how far reaching this patent is, that pretty much sums up half of the "Web 2.0" stuff -- tag clouds are pretty much used everywhere nowadays.
It really is hard to believe that patents are providing any of the benefits they're supposed to. I can only imagine the wholesale extortion this patent can provide.
Maybe not grains of sand, but a 20kg steel slug sure packs a punch. I also used the idea in my thesis as an orbital bombardment system:
Ummmm... where does one write a thesis on orbital bombardment and in what discipline of study?
Besides, I should think getting your 20 tons of iron into orbit and aiming it so it lands where you intended. Hell... I should think a rail gun would be more feasible than getting multiple 'rounds' of 20 tons of iron up into space.:-P
Because, it's popular among military and police institutions. If you're gonna pick a small, close-quarters weapon with selectable firing rate... go with what the real guys are using.
Before the P-90, you saw an awful lot of Heckler & Koch models like the MP5 -- because, they already look bad-ass and don't need to be tarted up.
It's hard to "invent" a fictional design better than what you know the tactical guys are using -- and if you have video of how they carry it, you have something to show your actors. I think it may be as simple as "go with something used by the kind of people you're trying to look like".
If it looks like what the pros are using, it's likely one more step towards suspension of disbelief. Well, that and your props guys can probably bang out a model in a few hours based on pictures from the internet. It's not exactly hard to get photos of a P90.
A P90 is a weapon that you can pretty much look at, and understand that it's intended for close quarter combat, and not fancy long-distance competition shooting. It's a very business-like beast.
So, is it going to cost more to make the individual bulbs addressable... or to build in the home automation which makes it all go? The sheer amount of extra crap and infrastructure required to make sure I've got the wireless network of lightbulbs is staggering -- and, seems pointless. Why does everybody want every object I own to be internet enabled?
This seems to be a common condition of people who envision the "house of the future" -- we're going to plan for a tremendous amount of infrastructure which will never be affordable, or widely deployed. Most people don't care about it. But, dammit, we're going to envision it anyway.
This just seems like one of those "solutions in search of a problem". Microsoft has been envisioning the "house of the future" for what seems like at least two decades -- we're no closer to it, most of us don't want it (or even care about it), but people are spending millions on it to tell us that's what we'll be having soon.
I'm sorry, but short of a Star Trek like revolution in our energy economy where we can rebuild from scratch with cost not being a barrier -- most of this stuff falls into the category of purely speculating just because we can. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to buy stocks in this company either.
This is something that people who are rich or eccentric will play with, and the overwhelming majority of us will continue about our lives without being impacted by this. The last thing I want is for my house to get a virus.:-P
children's reactions are psychologically honest. adult reactions are due to the pharmaceutical qualities, not aesthetic ones
Horseshit... I've seen children who grew up eating 'exotic' foods with spices and international flavors. Give them a couple of weeks in school around a bunch of whiny kids who won't eat anything but KD and chicken fingers, and suddenly they're averse to things their peer group dislikes -- that's as much socialization as the fact that a child can inherently identify food that tastes gross. When I grew up, my father grew vegetables in our back yard -- I was probably the only 4 year old that looked forward to brussel sprouts.
If children can 'unlearn' to like things, they can equally learn to like things. It's not some pristine flavor detector mechanism which should be treated as infallible. Refusing to eat anything green isn't a 'rational' decision.
it's classic pavlov: ring a bell, give a dog food, and eventually, the dog will salivate just because you rang a bell
True, except Pavlov never actually used a bell since it startled the dogs.
and i am sure there are people like you who like certain bitter tastes on the merit of the bitter taste alone. but there isn't a radish or tonic water stand on every other corner in every city in the world. because its about the drug, not the taste
Wait, a radish is a drug now? I'm not even sure it's bitter. It's more 'hot' than bitter -- peppery I guess is the right term. And, what's not to love about radishes? But, yeah, I don't know anybody who likes the quinine in tonic water unless it's got a little gin in it.;-)
bitter is nasty and poisonous
Oh, you're just bitter.;-)
Look, evolutionary responses to prevent exposure to toxins... once we've established that something isn't toxic if prepared right, there isn't a tremendous amount of reason to explicitly avoid it. In fact, it seems more irrational to avoid it once you know it's not toxic.
Most of us here are slightly more than the sum of our biological instincts -- once you're past the mere survival stage, it really is subjective aesthetics -- there's all sorts of things that people will eat as a delicacy that I wouldn't really cross the street to eat. Doesn't make the people who do eat them wrong, it makes them braver than me.
Learning to like and enjoy something is slightly more complicated than operant conditioning -- and if you're citing all of this stuff, you should already know that. Aesthetics doesn't require us to be bound by the notion that "any bitter is toxic and therefore must be avoided".
what i am saying is that it does not matter the subtleties when the overarching flavor always dominates. and since with coffee the overarching flavor is hot and bitter, that condemns all flavors of coffee, no matter what the slight modifications that fills your mind with supposed merit that is essentially meaningless, since you are willfully ignoring the dominant flavor for psychological and addictive reasons
Or you're extraordinarily sensitive to bitter compounds.
Some of us like the flavor of coffee, and became addicted to caffeine because we liked the taste first.
Name your favorite flavor -- I guarantee someone here will more or less say what you just did: it's nasty, unpleasant, and they can't fathom how someone else could find it pleasant.
It doesn't mean we're all "willfully ignoring" anything -- it means taste is subjective, and different people like different things. It means than you're incapable of realizing that just because that's how you perceive it, doesn't mean that the rest of us are deluding ourselves. Hell, my wife read a couple of years ago, that if you don't like something, eat it for 10 days -- give it a chance. At the end of 10 days, you'll either have developed a taste for it, or you will never like that taste. There's several things she's taught herself to be able to enjoy like this (and several things she now knows she will never try again).
Me, I can't stand the taste of cloves or anise, and I can't fathom why people do. Doesn't mean there's something fundamentally with the flavor, it just means that to me they're both vile.
Taste is a complicated thing, and it's far from universal.
Has it only been 16 years since we discovered the first exoplanet?
I remember before I graduated university, the astronomy geeks were excited about this as something that was being worked on and the concept of finding a planet by detecting transit in front of the star made my brain hurt.
Now we can tell all of this... of course, if it would take 300,000 years to get there with current technology, it's still unimaginably far. Still, it's hard not to believe that if there's one that might be habitable "only" 20 light years away... the universe must simply be teeming with life.
Neat but I don't see the point. Why grab someone's fingerprints from a couple of meters when you can just have them swipe it on a pad? Could anyone point out the (legitimate, non-thiefy) benefits of such a device?
What, as opposed to the TSA setting up a backscatter imager in a public place, and by the time people reached the sign indicating they were in an area that "might" be scanned, they already had been? Or a courthouse keeping thousands of images of people in the scanners?
This is all about people who are quite willing to implement the surveillance society for us. Everything you do will be monitored, without you knowing it.
The people who are buying and building these technologies are giddy at the prospect of gathering all of their information with neither your consent nor your knowledge.
And you're asking for what the 'legitimate' uses of this are? The short answer from them is "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear". You're expected to be compliant, and just suck it up and accept it as normal.
To them, in order to protect us from terrorists, they need the ability to take this information from you without needing to ask you.
It's not necessarily anti-social, you insensitive clod, sometimes it's just difficult to find people with the same hobbies/interests.
So, are these just random people you "friend" just so you have someone?
Or are they people you actually know, but don't have anything in common with?
I've always been a little unclear on WTF people are doing with these 'friends' -- it seems some people just collect them for the sake of it, which seems rather lame.
I'm aware that some of the people I know in the real world use Facebook, but I just can't make myself care enough to look. However, I'm also aware that I'm a crusty old geek who doesn't care about shiny things on the internet anymore.
Alright, so I can know if my sister (or whoever) "likes" a particular restaurant (or whatever) through Bing. But what about the why? Was the service good? How was the food? Are the drinks reasonably priced? And so forth. Absent any of that information, this "addition" is rather useless.
Well, that pretty much sums up the entire fscking "like" button idea.
I often find myself in Subway seeing the "Like us on Facebook" or whatever the heck the sign says -- near as I can figure, the "Like" button is really only useful for marketing purposes to be able to say "see, we have eleventy million people on Facebook who like us". Who gives a crap?
It's complete drivel, which is more or less how I feel about Facebook. Seems like half the web pages I go to now have the embedded "friend us on facebook" or "like us facebook" -- there is nothing meaningful, or useful in there, it's just casting your lot in with everyone else to say you like McDonald's or whatever. In fact, I'm sure from a marketing perspective, it's the best thing evar.
The fact that it's integrated now with Bing... well, once again, I find myself yawning at the prospect of Bing. Oooh, they've added a Facebook 'Like' button -- that's gonna make me switch search engines.
Maybe I just got bored with IRC, usenet, and ICQ back in the 90s... but I gotta say, I just don't 'get' this stuff.
Why the needless troll for accountants? You don't think keeping track of the money in a company is an important task?
Accountants to serve a function within the company, and you can't run the company without all of the other jobs. That is absolutely true.
But when your company makes software (or any technology/engineering type product)... occasionally, you can have accounting nickle and dime you to death, to the point that you can't actually do your job. You know... things like deciding that the RAM you need to build a test server is too expensive, so you should get by with a tiny fraction of what you tell your customers they should have. Meaning it takes about 4 times as long to actually run the software or do anything with it. I saw one example, where instead of buying two new, modern machines for QA... a truckload of obsolete machines was shipped in that was bought from auction, with the belief that QA could cobble together a modern system out of 10 year old parts. In the end, they spent more on shipping a truck full of obsolete computers than the new ones would have cost... and, the old obsolete ones were essentially junked almost immediately since they were so old. This was the decision of accountants.
At a certain point, the accountants can become people who mostly specialize in making sure you have to expend ridiculous energy justifying what it is you do in order to do your job. They effectively become the gatekeepers of actually building stuff, and they make you jump through obscene hoops to do even the most basic things.
It's right up there with HR people or managers who get think of people as interchangeable components because the "skills matrix" you filled out has some of the same boxes checked. It usually demonstrates a distinct lack of understanding of the actual work performed by your company.
I'm not saying that all companies should bow down before their mighty developer/engineer overlords -- but it is really pathetic to see what should be a technology company being stymied by bean counters who have you filling our your time sheets in four different systems (I know people who do this), and fighting to get even the basic tools for your job.
My job isn't, and likely never will be the most important one in the company. But, don't go out of your way to make it seem like mine is the least important one in the company as well and make me a slave to a byzantine process which is designed to ensure you can't get anything done.
When accounting makes your like feel like a Dilbert strip, well, the company has probably jumped the shark.
I'd much rather have a larger higher resolution monitor than two smaller monitors.
Except, anything which is bigger than 1920x1080 is 'exotic'... you can't just buy those as commodity items, and you pay a hugely larger price. Flat panels at this resolution are pretty much available anywhere for relatively cheap. I mean, sure, if you want to buy me a 4 foot wide monitor that runs at 4000x2000 or something even bigger, go right ahead. But, it's gonna cost more.
Years ago, the Dell computers my company were buying came with a cable which did the video splitting itself. Plug in a second monitor, and it just worked. It was awesome -- suddenly people were scavenging old monitors.
A company I work at now, pretty much everyone can have dual monitors if they want. They're widely accepted to be far more productive -- and IT isn't their industry, IT is seen as serving the needs of the company.
Having had both dual and single monitor setups, I can definitely say that when writing cod the second monitor is a massive advantage. As pointed out elsewhere, I can have the IDE fill one monitor, and the actual program in another. I also use multiple virtual desktops, so I can end up with "email and browser on one"... development environment and debugging in another... remote desktops and system admin. I end up with a lot of screen real estate, and I'm not constantly minimizing windows and looking for what I'm working on -- it's amazing how much time you can waste doing that.
People wouldn't have started using multiple monitors if it actually didn't improve their productivity. If you're yanking the second monitor off of one of your developers to give to someone in accounting... well, I can see why he's annoyed. Effectively, you've halved his screen real-estate.
I'm sure eventually he can learn to go back to having just one... but in the mean time, you're making him change the way he works. In most environments where I've worked, taking hardware from someone's desk that is still in use... well, that might bring bodily harm to you. It's just not done. If it's plugged into someone on someone's desk, and it's powered on.... leave it the hell alone.
In the case of a second monitor, you might have some windows applications that 'know' they go on the right screen. I've never seen a mechanism for Windows to properly recover from windows that want to be too far off the screen for the current resolution. (I'd appreciate any tips if anyone has them.)
So why do you think you should profit from something so painfully obvious?
Well, like any patent... to actually read this one it's anything but obvious.
It's 79 (or so) points of an 'invention' involving... well, 'evaluating a commodity' is the closest I could find to any useful noun, and then a bunch of subsequent claims which say various things like "claim n-1 but in fabulous pink".
I'm not a patent attorney (or, any kind of attorney)... this could have been describing a metaphysical system to measure karma... who the hell knows what it actually says. It's so convoluted into legalese as to be incomprehensible. It bamboozled the USPTO into approving it, and apparently they did several patent extensions/refilings/amendments... which, as I recall, effectively reset the clock and the patent stays in the queue but gets back dated to the original date.
So, he came up with a vague idea, and spent literally years tweaking it endlessly to get through the system... all the while, people were independently creating his 'idea', but he got to keep his work back dated to the original filing.
Of course, the USPTO are morons, and their rules say that say that once they've validated a patent, you have to act like it's legit, and that becomes the law of the land. Trying to overturn a stupid and pointless patent is exceedingly difficult.
Sadly, they now have a patent which covers... well, it's so vague, it probably covers things we haven't even identified yet. Maybe even the stock market since it's mostly talking about valuation and distribution of commodities.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you mean "wanderer" -- as in they "wandered around the sky" not "wondered what was for lunch".
OK, so I've never really understood 'dark matter', but if there's a bunch of stuff floating about that's not stars and only shows up through things like gravitational micro-lensing ... might this cover some of the mass that is dark matter?
Or is this just way to insignificant to account for it?
A bunch of planets floating around in space without orbiting a star is probably a lot -- but maybe nowhere near enough to account for whatever bits of whatever equations that leads us to ponder dark matter.
Is this Powershell or native? I just tried this from a command line, and it doesn't work.
Microsoft is definitely getting better at providing some useful utilities ... but for a lot of us, it's still lagging behind where Unix has been for quite some time.
I'd love to be able to script some of the tasks for IIS that you access from the My Computer > Manage -- maybe you can, I don't know. I've just never really had much luck in finding such things -- or they're supported on a version of the OS I don't have, and nonexistent on the ones I do.
Please, stop using words like "designed" and "built" in reference to the human brain.
It evolved, it exists ... it's not something which was created by a specific actor according to a spec.
And the citizens of pretty much everywhere will be the ones who lose the most.
The democracies will become even more like surveillance societies. The places with questionable human rights records will be sold this stuff so they can further control their people (by companies who only care about the bottom line). And, the outright dictators will think it's just grand as they can lock down dissent.
We all lose in a scenario like this ... having everything you do on the internet tied to a single, government issued network ID won't work. And, in fact, it will probably mean that innocent people become even more targeted by cybercrime -- think how valuable of a target those ids will become, and think of how difficult it will be to fix it when they're compromised.
Not only won't this alleviate crime, it will erode our rights and freedoms. Nothing good will come of this -- this is trying to legislate a solution to a problem which legislation can't possibly hope to find a solution.
All you've done is created another single point of failure ... and, presume that in order to do anything in a secure manner, I need to have a smart phone.
You might as well just decide that I need a facebook login as well.
Wow, I'm afraid I have to conclude this guys is possibly a little too full of himself.
If we ever get anywhere near a "single secure cyberspace", we're pretty much all screwed.
Governments will use this to stifle your privacy, your rights, and every other thing they can think of. They'll make sure they monitor everything you do, and ensure you don't do anything they don't approve of.
Anybody who thinks the solution to cybercrime is to more or less lock down the internet like this ... well, I think they deserve a series of well placed kicks to the groin. I can only see this as more or less fascism -- though I'm sure I'll be accused of hyperbole.
It's just right click on "My computer", and then "Manage" ... it's up near the top. Been there since at least W2K3, but it still works on my Vista machine.
Sometimes, I have received the "something bad, contact your admin" message when nothing useful gets put into the even log -- diagnosing network flakiness for instance sometimes gives utterly useless information.
Using their repaid "wizard" usually ends up serving no purpose since it amounts to "plug in your cable, did this help?".
Despite Microsoft's attempts to completely nanny people, they've almost taken it too far ... which means that people start ignoring/disabling the warnings.
The other week I launched IE on a new server install ... the very first warning message is "You are about to access the internet, and people can see what you do" -- which gets a "do not show me this again" before I dismiss.
As soon as you submit into a search engine, you get told "You are about to submit something on the internet, are you sure" -- which also gets a "do not show again".
By the time I tell it I don't want it to save passwords, autocomplete forms, and that, yes, I really do want Google as my default search ... well, I've stopped listening to anything "helpful" IE is telling me.
I rank the utility of the stuff that MS has "designed" to make IE safe right up there with the error messages that amount to "something bad has happened, contact your admin" --- oooh, that's informative. And, since I'm the admin ... give me some f'ing idea as to what went wrong so I can try to fix it.
Microsoft build in really pedantic and lame safeguards, which get turned off and/or ignored for the rest of time since they don't actually do anything useful.
What an insane patent.
I've tagged things in delicio.us for years, in my gmail for years, Slashdot tags, my photo organizing software that came with my digital camera I bought 6 or so years ago ... I'm sure in probably more examples if I think about it ...
Depending on how far reaching this patent is, that pretty much sums up half of the "Web 2.0" stuff -- tag clouds are pretty much used everywhere nowadays.
It really is hard to believe that patents are providing any of the benefits they're supposed to. I can only imagine the wholesale extortion this patent can provide.
Ummmm ... where does one write a thesis on orbital bombardment and in what discipline of study?
Besides, I should think getting your 20 tons of iron into orbit and aiming it so it lands where you intended. Hell ... I should think a rail gun would be more feasible than getting multiple 'rounds' of 20 tons of iron up into space. :-P
Because, it's popular among military and police institutions. If you're gonna pick a small, close-quarters weapon with selectable firing rate ... go with what the real guys are using.
Before the P-90, you saw an awful lot of Heckler & Koch models like the MP5 -- because, they already look bad-ass and don't need to be tarted up.
It's hard to "invent" a fictional design better than what you know the tactical guys are using -- and if you have video of how they carry it, you have something to show your actors. I think it may be as simple as "go with something used by the kind of people you're trying to look like".
If it looks like what the pros are using, it's likely one more step towards suspension of disbelief. Well, that and your props guys can probably bang out a model in a few hours based on pictures from the internet. It's not exactly hard to get photos of a P90.
A P90 is a weapon that you can pretty much look at, and understand that it's intended for close quarter combat, and not fancy long-distance competition shooting. It's a very business-like beast.
Ah, yes ... masturdebation ... a little dialectic onanism never hurt anyone. ;-)
So, is it going to cost more to make the individual bulbs addressable ... or to build in the home automation which makes it all go? The sheer amount of extra crap and infrastructure required to make sure I've got the wireless network of lightbulbs is staggering -- and, seems pointless. Why does everybody want every object I own to be internet enabled?
This seems to be a common condition of people who envision the "house of the future" -- we're going to plan for a tremendous amount of infrastructure which will never be affordable, or widely deployed. Most people don't care about it. But, dammit, we're going to envision it anyway.
This just seems like one of those "solutions in search of a problem". Microsoft has been envisioning the "house of the future" for what seems like at least two decades -- we're no closer to it, most of us don't want it (or even care about it), but people are spending millions on it to tell us that's what we'll be having soon.
I'm sorry, but short of a Star Trek like revolution in our energy economy where we can rebuild from scratch with cost not being a barrier -- most of this stuff falls into the category of purely speculating just because we can. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but that doesn't mean that I'm going to buy stocks in this company either.
This is something that people who are rich or eccentric will play with, and the overwhelming majority of us will continue about our lives without being impacted by this. The last thing I want is for my house to get a virus. :-P
Horseshit ... I've seen children who grew up eating 'exotic' foods with spices and international flavors. Give them a couple of weeks in school around a bunch of whiny kids who won't eat anything but KD and chicken fingers, and suddenly they're averse to things their peer group dislikes -- that's as much socialization as the fact that a child can inherently identify food that tastes gross. When I grew up, my father grew vegetables in our back yard -- I was probably the only 4 year old that looked forward to brussel sprouts.
If children can 'unlearn' to like things, they can equally learn to like things. It's not some pristine flavor detector mechanism which should be treated as infallible. Refusing to eat anything green isn't a 'rational' decision.
True, except Pavlov never actually used a bell since it startled the dogs.
Wait, a radish is a drug now? I'm not even sure it's bitter. It's more 'hot' than bitter -- peppery I guess is the right term. And, what's not to love about radishes? But, yeah, I don't know anybody who likes the quinine in tonic water unless it's got a little gin in it. ;-)
Oh, you're just bitter. ;-)
Look, evolutionary responses to prevent exposure to toxins ... once we've established that something isn't toxic if prepared right, there isn't a tremendous amount of reason to explicitly avoid it. In fact, it seems more irrational to avoid it once you know it's not toxic.
Most of us here are slightly more than the sum of our biological instincts -- once you're past the mere survival stage, it really is subjective aesthetics -- there's all sorts of things that people will eat as a delicacy that I wouldn't really cross the street to eat. Doesn't make the people who do eat them wrong, it makes them braver than me.
Learning to like and enjoy something is slightly more complicated than operant conditioning -- and if you're citing all of this stuff, you should already know that. Aesthetics doesn't require us to be bound by the notion that "any bitter is toxic and therefore must be avoided".
Or you're extraordinarily sensitive to bitter compounds.
Some of us like the flavor of coffee, and became addicted to caffeine because we liked the taste first.
Name your favorite flavor -- I guarantee someone here will more or less say what you just did: it's nasty, unpleasant, and they can't fathom how someone else could find it pleasant.
It doesn't mean we're all "willfully ignoring" anything -- it means taste is subjective, and different people like different things. It means than you're incapable of realizing that just because that's how you perceive it, doesn't mean that the rest of us are deluding ourselves. Hell, my wife read a couple of years ago, that if you don't like something, eat it for 10 days -- give it a chance. At the end of 10 days, you'll either have developed a taste for it, or you will never like that taste. There's several things she's taught herself to be able to enjoy like this (and several things she now knows she will never try again).
Me, I can't stand the taste of cloves or anise, and I can't fathom why people do. Doesn't mean there's something fundamentally with the flavor, it just means that to me they're both vile.
Taste is a complicated thing, and it's far from universal.
Here is something that may interest you. This is a time-lapse video of asteroids discoveries.
That is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while.
Thanks.
Has it only been 16 years since we discovered the first exoplanet?
I remember before I graduated university, the astronomy geeks were excited about this as something that was being worked on and the concept of finding a planet by detecting transit in front of the star made my brain hurt.
Now we can tell all of this ... of course, if it would take 300,000 years to get there with current technology, it's still unimaginably far. Still, it's hard not to believe that if there's one that might be habitable "only" 20 light years away ... the universe must simply be teeming with life.
Wow, he's gonna port his open source implementation of .NET to iOS.
That could rip a hole in the space-time continuum.
What, as opposed to the TSA setting up a backscatter imager in a public place, and by the time people reached the sign indicating they were in an area that "might" be scanned, they already had been? Or a courthouse keeping thousands of images of people in the scanners?
This is all about people who are quite willing to implement the surveillance society for us. Everything you do will be monitored, without you knowing it.
The people who are buying and building these technologies are giddy at the prospect of gathering all of their information with neither your consent nor your knowledge.
And you're asking for what the 'legitimate' uses of this are? The short answer from them is "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear". You're expected to be compliant, and just suck it up and accept it as normal.
To them, in order to protect us from terrorists, they need the ability to take this information from you without needing to ask you.
So, are these just random people you "friend" just so you have someone?
Or are they people you actually know, but don't have anything in common with?
I've always been a little unclear on WTF people are doing with these 'friends' -- it seems some people just collect them for the sake of it, which seems rather lame.
I'm aware that some of the people I know in the real world use Facebook, but I just can't make myself care enough to look. However, I'm also aware that I'm a crusty old geek who doesn't care about shiny things on the internet anymore.
Well, that pretty much sums up the entire fscking "like" button idea.
I often find myself in Subway seeing the "Like us on Facebook" or whatever the heck the sign says -- near as I can figure, the "Like" button is really only useful for marketing purposes to be able to say "see, we have eleventy million people on Facebook who like us". Who gives a crap?
It's complete drivel, which is more or less how I feel about Facebook. Seems like half the web pages I go to now have the embedded "friend us on facebook" or "like us facebook" -- there is nothing meaningful, or useful in there, it's just casting your lot in with everyone else to say you like McDonald's or whatever. In fact, I'm sure from a marketing perspective, it's the best thing evar.
The fact that it's integrated now with Bing ... well, once again, I find myself yawning at the prospect of Bing. Oooh, they've added a Facebook 'Like' button -- that's gonna make me switch search engines.
Maybe I just got bored with IRC, usenet, and ICQ back in the 90s ... but I gotta say, I just don't 'get' this stuff.
Accountants to serve a function within the company, and you can't run the company without all of the other jobs. That is absolutely true.
But when your company makes software (or any technology/engineering type product) ... occasionally, you can have accounting nickle and dime you to death, to the point that you can't actually do your job. You know ... things like deciding that the RAM you need to build a test server is too expensive, so you should get by with a tiny fraction of what you tell your customers they should have. Meaning it takes about 4 times as long to actually run the software or do anything with it. I saw one example, where instead of buying two new, modern machines for QA ... a truckload of obsolete machines was shipped in that was bought from auction, with the belief that QA could cobble together a modern system out of 10 year old parts. In the end, they spent more on shipping a truck full of obsolete computers than the new ones would have cost ... and, the old obsolete ones were essentially junked almost immediately since they were so old. This was the decision of accountants.
At a certain point, the accountants can become people who mostly specialize in making sure you have to expend ridiculous energy justifying what it is you do in order to do your job. They effectively become the gatekeepers of actually building stuff, and they make you jump through obscene hoops to do even the most basic things.
It's right up there with HR people or managers who get think of people as interchangeable components because the "skills matrix" you filled out has some of the same boxes checked. It usually demonstrates a distinct lack of understanding of the actual work performed by your company.
I'm not saying that all companies should bow down before their mighty developer/engineer overlords -- but it is really pathetic to see what should be a technology company being stymied by bean counters who have you filling our your time sheets in four different systems (I know people who do this), and fighting to get even the basic tools for your job.
My job isn't, and likely never will be the most important one in the company. But, don't go out of your way to make it seem like mine is the least important one in the company as well and make me a slave to a byzantine process which is designed to ensure you can't get anything done.
When accounting makes your like feel like a Dilbert strip, well, the company has probably jumped the shark.
Except, anything which is bigger than 1920x1080 is 'exotic' ... you can't just buy those as commodity items, and you pay a hugely larger price. Flat panels at this resolution are pretty much available anywhere for relatively cheap. I mean, sure, if you want to buy me a 4 foot wide monitor that runs at 4000x2000 or something even bigger, go right ahead. But, it's gonna cost more.
Years ago, the Dell computers my company were buying came with a cable which did the video splitting itself. Plug in a second monitor, and it just worked. It was awesome -- suddenly people were scavenging old monitors.
A company I work at now, pretty much everyone can have dual monitors if they want. They're widely accepted to be far more productive -- and IT isn't their industry, IT is seen as serving the needs of the company.
Having had both dual and single monitor setups, I can definitely say that when writing cod the second monitor is a massive advantage. As pointed out elsewhere, I can have the IDE fill one monitor, and the actual program in another. I also use multiple virtual desktops, so I can end up with "email and browser on one" ... development environment and debugging in another ... remote desktops and system admin. I end up with a lot of screen real estate, and I'm not constantly minimizing windows and looking for what I'm working on -- it's amazing how much time you can waste doing that.
People wouldn't have started using multiple monitors if it actually didn't improve their productivity. If you're yanking the second monitor off of one of your developers to give to someone in accounting ... well, I can see why he's annoyed. Effectively, you've halved his screen real-estate.
I'm sure eventually he can learn to go back to having just one ... but in the mean time, you're making him change the way he works. In most environments where I've worked, taking hardware from someone's desk that is still in use ... well, that might bring bodily harm to you. It's just not done. If it's plugged into someone on someone's desk, and it's powered on .... leave it the hell alone.
In the case of a second monitor, you might have some windows applications that 'know' they go on the right screen. I've never seen a mechanism for Windows to properly recover from windows that want to be too far off the screen for the current resolution. (I'd appreciate any tips if anyone has them.)
Well, like any patent ... to actually read this one it's anything but obvious.
It's 79 (or so) points of an 'invention' involving ... well, 'evaluating a commodity' is the closest I could find to any useful noun, and then a bunch of subsequent claims which say various things like "claim n-1 but in fabulous pink".
I'm not a patent attorney (or, any kind of attorney) ... this could have been describing a metaphysical system to measure karma ... who the hell knows what it actually says. It's so convoluted into legalese as to be incomprehensible. It bamboozled the USPTO into approving it, and apparently they did several patent extensions/refilings/amendments ... which, as I recall, effectively reset the clock and the patent stays in the queue but gets back dated to the original date.
So, he came up with a vague idea, and spent literally years tweaking it endlessly to get through the system ... all the while, people were independently creating his 'idea', but he got to keep his work back dated to the original filing.
Of course, the USPTO are morons, and their rules say that say that once they've validated a patent, you have to act like it's legit, and that becomes the law of the land. Trying to overturn a stupid and pointless patent is exceedingly difficult.
Sadly, they now have a patent which covers ... well, it's so vague, it probably covers things we haven't even identified yet. Maybe even the stock market since it's mostly talking about valuation and distribution of commodities.
This is no way to run a legal system.