That's fairly accurate. The only nit I'd throw in there is that the Democrats don't have to try. The Republicans have been doing everything in their power to block anything the Democrats might want to do for the last 8 years. All the Democrats really have to do is strategically pick which thing to have the Republicans block today.
You could be a cynic and claim that the Dems are just as bad. However, that is not only wrong, but the cynicism itself helps the Republicans continue to behave this way without repercussions.
Cringely started out as a pen name for a column in Infoworld, used by multiple authors (supposedly as a way to have some fake employee to "fire" whenever the column ticked off powerful advertisers). As such, it made perfect sense for Cringely to have a made-up backstory, complete with made-up degree.
Perhaps Yahoo! has taken this concept a step further, and come up with made-up executives?
Exactly. At home I have three montiors arranged side-by-side, which allows me to reference things in one browser window while composing a message in another window (and perhaps playing a video in a third even). There is no interface you can come up with that will work for both that situation, and the 4" screen on my smartphone. They are, and should be, completely differnet paradigms of computing. Please do not try to artificially unify them.
A wrench or a hammer or a spear have no handedness
No, but when fighting against someone with hand weapons (eg: a club or spear), your opponent's handedness makes a huge difference. Go rewatch Princess Bride, or give up your 5-digit UID to some true geek who can make better use of it.
OOP is not slow. OOP is a design approach. You can use it with C code, and it won't somehow magically slow down your C code.
Dynamic dispatch is certianly a lot slower than a simple function call, but only a total noob uses dynamic dispatch when it isn't nessecary. DD is still quite competitive with dispatching via a huge switch statement (the situation it is meant to replace), and far less error prone, but if you wouldn't otherwise need to do something like that, you shouldn't be using DD. Static distpatch can be figured out at compile time, and no competent compiler will generate code for it that is slower than a simple function call.
He might actually be able to convince a few people today, while most of the industry players are still run by their founders.
However, a day will come when the new media companies are a few management generations removed from that, and are just sociopathic earnings machines like every other corporation. Expecting them to show "restraint" that doesn't help their own bottom line at that point is just naieve.
So perhaps even if they do show restraint now, that just postphones the problem and luls the rest of us into a false sense of security.
There was one that walked into a Church during services and murdered a man for performing abortions. Apparently that church had no sanctity in his mind because its dotrcine allowed behavior that his doctrine did not.
That doesn't work for you, how about the Christian man who went to a kids camp and started blowing away every kid he could find, because he felt it was tied politically to people who were allowing Muslims to flood into his Christian country?
If you believe no means to achieving your goals are out of bounds because your goals are holy goals, then your behavior is going to end up looking the same as anyone else who feels that way. The specifics of your "holy" goals don't change anything.
ultra-short duration (a few microseconds) increases in supply voltage (to 1-2 kV), due to large electric motors (e.g. HVAC compressors) being switched on or off
Hmmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with why my bulbs near the refrigerator keep going out.I have a few fixtures in the house that seem to just kill light bulbs. Putting new $20 bulbs in those a few times is enough to put just about anybody off of "green" bulbs.
The other problem with CFLs is that they are intolerant to heat. This means that care is needed over the type of fitting. CFLs are not suitable for use in enclosed fittings
Actually, no. The big selling point for Google in the early days was their interface. Or even more precisely, their lack of evil.
Yahoo and friends had this insanely busy front page designed to be confusing so you'd see all kinds of ads while looking around for the place to type your query and send it. Then when the query was served, the first few hits were likely to be paid hits that were not distinguished in any way whatsoever from the legitimate search hits. This is what their advertisers wanted, so this is what they got. Did you the user want something different? Well, you weren't paying their bills, so they didn't give a crap.
Google then came out with this incredibly simple front page with a single text box and a button, and links to do more advanced things still there but smaller and arranged to the point where they don't call attention to themselves unless you hunt for them. Then when you did the search the ads (when they existed) were all segregated off to the right where you could easily ignore them if you wanted. From a user's perspective, this was no contest. All the other user-unfriendly search engines became irrelevant overnight.
Yes, I remember some nerd-talk about their "innovative page-rank system". Frankly nobody really cared that much.
And they changed a web browser from something you had to buy to something that was free and shipped with every operating system.
Where on earth did you get this bizzare idea? I've been web surfing since the early NCSA Mosaic days, and have never once paid money for a browser. You could in fact make the argument that the closest I've come to paying for a browser is with IE, as I paid money for the OS CD's that it came on.
Of course it goes against the commonly taught narrative that the Civil War was about slavery and not a conflict between differing economic systems and beliefs in government, so this last bit is rarely mentioned
I can't see why that would be. The "differing economic systems" were a slave economy and a free economy, and the "differing beliefs in government" bascially boiled down to whether residents of free states should be allowed enough theoretical political power to stop slavery in slave states. Feel free to talk about individual soldiers all you want, it doesn't change what the war was about.
Actually, if you've been into a BB lately, you might have noticed that at least 70% of the floorspace is taken up selling what you might call "hardcopy media". Stuff like movies, music, and electroic games. All things that are increasingly being purchased online these days.
For a while I had hope for them when they starting reserving a good chunk of space for selling actual equipment for musicians. That seems to have been a fad though.
They still are my favorite place to shop for computer games (yeah, I'm old-school that way), but they've countered that by shrinking their selection down to about a shelf or two.:-(
If they honestly don't see any problems with their current operations, policies, or procedures, I don't see how they can expect anything other than more of the same decline.
However, isn't the value of rural farmland almost entirely based on how good it is for growing crops (and the current value of those crops)? I don't see how a nearby windmill affects that at all, unless its so tall it shades your property for a large part of the day or something.
...brought in by a guy who hid the weapon his genital area before getting in a car as a passenger with his wife and kid to visit family, knowing full well that there was a chance he'd get arrested after his wife was stopped for speeding for not paying a fine he had legal documentation on his person attestesting to having paid.
I don't know about you, but I'm sure glad our public servants are spending the time required to protect against such possibilities. Money well spent, that is.
I got thrown in Jail in New Orleans for making an "illegal left hand turn between 12 and 4 PM". I was a bit earlier than normal on my driving route, my GF was griping on me, and I didn't notice.
Yes, I was as polite as can be to the cop who pulled me over. No, I had no other charges or warrants or anything. I had an out-of-state license, and that was enough.
So have fun with your police strip search next time your SO distracts you in traffic at the wrong time.
But if that's the case, then one of the many many countries with no socilization of their health care system at all ought to have better outcomes than the US. So show me one.
Here, I'll even do a little of the legwork. The World Health Organization ranked countries by healthcare efficency here. The USA ranked 37th (of about 190). So if the real culprit, as you folks are claiming, is how "free market" the system is, then which of those 36 more efficient countries has a free-er healthcare market than us?
Well, actually the US has four different models that it uses simultaniously. I'll list them roughly in order of how "socalized" they are.
Veteran's Aministration. This system is totally government-run. The hospitals and doctors are all on the government payroll.
Medicare/Medicaid. The doctors and hospitals are paid based on services rendered, but the US Government is paying all (or nearly all) of the money. Essentially the US Government is acting like one really large insurance company, with your taxes being the premiums (even if you aren't covered). About 1/4th of US residents are under model 1 or 2.
Private insurance. The doctors and hospitals are paid based on services rendered, but a private insurance company is paying a large portion (if you are lucky the lion's share) of the bill. They in turn get their money from whoever pays their premiums. If that is a company, they are passing the costs of this on to their customers, making them less competitive in a global marketplace that includes companies in other countries that don't have to do this. About 46% of US residents are under this model.
"Free Market". This person has no coverage of any kind. They generally don't go to doctors, because almost none of them can afford it (if they could afford such things, they would have bought into option 3). If they get sick enough that it's obviously life-or-death, they go to the most expensive place in the system (an emergency room) where they have to be treated by law, and then generally don't pay because there's no way a typical person can pay a sudden ER bill in the 10's of thousands of dollars or more. So their treatment ends up being paid by users of option 2 or 3. More than a quarter of US residents are using this model, and the percentage is increasing every year.
The reason we have this problem is precisely because healthcare isn't a free market
OK. You seem convinced of this position, and I'm genuinely curious. Can you give an example of a country where there exists a genuine free market in health care, that achieves better health results than the USA does? There are roughtly 200 countries to pick from, and I know some have neither socialized medicine nor insurance systems, so throw me an example please.
Nvidia calls Tegra-powered products 'super,' as in super phones, super tablets, etc, presumably because it believes you'll be more inclined to buy one if you associate it with a red-booted man in blue spandex.
Wayne-powered products will of course be called "bat" instead.
You ought to RTFA. That was just one test out of many, and all the previous tests showed the mirror failing too. They just didn't report the failures. Why? Well, because they had other big "emergencies" going all the time, and (this is key) they were under intense pressure from management to solve all these other "emergency" problems quickly, since the whole project was already over budget by nearly a billion dollars.
Your anecdotal story is intersting, but it fits right into what he was talking about with the Management failures at NASA. Clearly it wasn't the lack of that test that caused the problem. It was a management decision to not perform it. Probably under the exact same pressures. Even if it had been performed though, who's to say they wouldn't have rationalized away the results like they did all the other failed tests?
"We tested that mirror over and over and over with a different kind of device, the old style refractive null corrector," Pellerin says.
The results? "Half wave of error, half wave of error, half wave of error."
"So some people sat down and said, 'What's going on?" Pellerin recalls. "The mindset was that the mirror can not be other than perfect. So something else is happening. They concluded that the mirror was sagging under the force of gravity in the three point mount rather than being on the bed of nails by half a wave.
"Well it turned out that was wrong. But they rationalised, rationalised, rationalised.
...
The project had suffered other challenges beyond fabricating and mounting the mirror; staff were being "hammered" all the time, Pellerin says. In addition there was constant angst about how far the project had gone over budget. "Hubble's initial budget was $434 million we closed it at $1.8 billion just for the flight segment; big overruns."
"So the way it works is you tend to blame the people doing the work," Pellerin says. "So we're hammering on them, hammering on them so they had no free time or no inclination to track down anything that wasn't a critical problem because we have other critical problems. Difficult technical things that we couldn't solve yet."
The review board also found that a hostile environment had been created for the contactor, which meant "they told us about any problem at their peril," Pellerin says.
Women's Sufferage wasn't an all-or-nothing thing before and after the 19th ammendment. Most states had some kind of sufferage already, but it was on a state by state basis. At the time of passage, fifteen states (or future states) had full sufferage already, and only seven states had no sufferage at all for women. See this nifty map.
Actually, I'm afraid the GP was quite right here. Women's Sufferage and the progressive income tax among other liberal mainstays were in fact pushed cheifly as a way to allow prohibition to happen. Women were thought to be overwhelmingly votes for prohibition (if only they were allowed to vote), and prior to the income tax the vast majority of government revenue came from liquor takes. It was thought that alcohol could never be banned by the government while it was its cheif source of income.
They will say they do because you can't be THAT exclusionary and get anyone elected and they know that
Sure you can. This is where they break out the "well, the Democrats are really no better..." arguments. The idea is to get everyone who disagrees with them to feel like there is no point in voting at all. Add in a few more restrictive voting laws to discorage young and poor folk from voting, and their enthused 22% magically becomes a majority on election day.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah. Why upgrade to a clunky VAX, when you can run your code on a PDP-11 coprocessor card right on your PC?
That's fairly accurate. The only nit I'd throw in there is that the Democrats don't have to try. The Republicans have been doing everything in their power to block anything the Democrats might want to do for the last 8 years. All the Democrats really have to do is strategically pick which thing to have the Republicans block today.
You could be a cynic and claim that the Dems are just as bad. However, that is not only wrong, but the cynicism itself helps the Republicans continue to behave this way without repercussions.
Cringely started out as a pen name for a column in Infoworld, used by multiple authors (supposedly as a way to have some fake employee to "fire" whenever the column ticked off powerful advertisers). As such, it made perfect sense for Cringely to have a made-up backstory, complete with made-up degree.
Perhaps Yahoo! has taken this concept a step further, and come up with made-up executives?
Exactly. At home I have three montiors arranged side-by-side, which allows me to reference things in one browser window while composing a message in another window (and perhaps playing a video in a third even). There is no interface you can come up with that will work for both that situation, and the 4" screen on my smartphone. They are, and should be, completely differnet paradigms of computing. Please do not try to artificially unify them.
A wrench or a hammer or a spear have no handedness
No, but when fighting against someone with hand weapons (eg: a club or spear), your opponent's handedness makes a huge difference. Go rewatch Princess Bride, or give up your 5-digit UID to some true geek who can make better use of it.
*sigh*
OOP is not slow. OOP is a design approach. You can use it with C code, and it won't somehow magically slow down your C code.
Dynamic dispatch is certianly a lot slower than a simple function call, but only a total noob uses dynamic dispatch when it isn't nessecary. DD is still quite competitive with dispatching via a huge switch statement (the situation it is meant to replace), and far less error prone, but if you wouldn't otherwise need to do something like that, you shouldn't be using DD. Static distpatch can be figured out at compile time, and no competent compiler will generate code for it that is slower than a simple function call.
He might actually be able to convince a few people today, while most of the industry players are still run by their founders.
However, a day will come when the new media companies are a few management generations removed from that, and are just sociopathic earnings machines like every other corporation. Expecting them to show "restraint" that doesn't help their own bottom line at that point is just naieve.
So perhaps even if they do show restraint now, that just postphones the problem and luls the rest of us into a false sense of security.
There was one that walked into a Church during services and murdered a man for performing abortions. Apparently that church had no sanctity in his mind because its dotrcine allowed behavior that his doctrine did not.
That doesn't work for you, how about the Christian man who went to a kids camp and started blowing away every kid he could find, because he felt it was tied politically to people who were allowing Muslims to flood into his Christian country?
If you believe no means to achieving your goals are out of bounds because your goals are holy goals, then your behavior is going to end up looking the same as anyone else who feels that way. The specifics of your "holy" goals don't change anything.
ultra-short duration (a few microseconds) increases in supply voltage (to 1-2 kV), due to large electric motors (e.g. HVAC compressors) being switched on or off
Hmmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with why my bulbs near the refrigerator keep going out.I have a few fixtures in the house that seem to just kill light bulbs. Putting new $20 bulbs in those a few times is enough to put just about anybody off of "green" bulbs.
The other problem with CFLs is that they are intolerant to heat. This means that care is needed over the type of fitting. CFLs are not suitable for use in enclosed fittings
My kitchen fixtures are also recessed.
Actually, no. The big selling point for Google in the early days was their interface. Or even more precisely, their lack of evil.
Yahoo and friends had this insanely busy front page designed to be confusing so you'd see all kinds of ads while looking around for the place to type your query and send it. Then when the query was served, the first few hits were likely to be paid hits that were not distinguished in any way whatsoever from the legitimate search hits. This is what their advertisers wanted, so this is what they got. Did you the user want something different? Well, you weren't paying their bills, so they didn't give a crap.
Google then came out with this incredibly simple front page with a single text box and a button, and links to do more advanced things still there but smaller and arranged to the point where they don't call attention to themselves unless you hunt for them. Then when you did the search the ads (when they existed) were all segregated off to the right where you could easily ignore them if you wanted. From a user's perspective, this was no contest. All the other user-unfriendly search engines became irrelevant overnight.
Yes, I remember some nerd-talk about their "innovative page-rank system". Frankly nobody really cared that much.
And they changed a web browser from something you had to buy to something that was free and shipped with every operating system.
Where on earth did you get this bizzare idea? I've been web surfing since the early NCSA Mosaic days, and have never once paid money for a browser. You could in fact make the argument that the closest I've come to paying for a browser is with IE, as I paid money for the OS CD's that it came on.
Most states in the deep south had no free blacks by law. Anybody freed was required to leave the state.
Of course it goes against the commonly taught narrative that the Civil War was about slavery and not a conflict between differing economic systems and beliefs in government, so this last bit is rarely mentioned
I can't see why that would be. The "differing economic systems" were a slave economy and a free economy, and the "differing beliefs in government" bascially boiled down to whether residents of free states should be allowed enough theoretical political power to stop slavery in slave states. Feel free to talk about individual soldiers all you want, it doesn't change what the war was about.
Actually, if you've been into a BB lately, you might have noticed that at least 70% of the floorspace is taken up selling what you might call "hardcopy media". Stuff like movies, music, and electroic games. All things that are increasingly being purchased online these days.
For a while I had hope for them when they starting reserving a good chunk of space for selling actual equipment for musicians. That seems to have been a fad though.
They still are my favorite place to shop for computer games (yeah, I'm old-school that way), but they've countered that by shrinking their selection down to about a shelf or two. :-(
If they honestly don't see any problems with their current operations, policies, or procedures, I don't see how they can expect anything other than more of the same decline.
However, isn't the value of rural farmland almost entirely based on how good it is for growing crops (and the current value of those crops)? I don't see how a nearby windmill affects that at all, unless its so tall it shades your property for a large part of the day or something.
...brought in by a guy who hid the weapon his genital area before getting in a car as a passenger with his wife and kid to visit family, knowing full well that there was a chance he'd get arrested after his wife was stopped for speeding for not paying a fine he had legal documentation on his person attestesting to having paid.
I don't know about you, but I'm sure glad our public servants are spending the time required to protect against such possibilities. Money well spent, that is.
I got thrown in Jail in New Orleans for making an "illegal left hand turn between 12 and 4 PM". I was a bit earlier than normal on my driving route, my GF was griping on me, and I didn't notice.
Yes, I was as polite as can be to the cop who pulled me over. No, I had no other charges or warrants or anything. I had an out-of-state license, and that was enough.
So have fun with your police strip search next time your SO distracts you in traffic at the wrong time.
But if that's the case, then one of the many many countries with no socilization of their health care system at all ought to have better outcomes than the US. So show me one.
Here, I'll even do a little of the legwork. The World Health Organization ranked countries by healthcare efficency here. The USA ranked 37th (of about 190). So if the real culprit, as you folks are claiming, is how "free market" the system is, then which of those 36 more efficient countries has a free-er healthcare market than us?
The reason we have this problem is precisely because healthcare isn't a free market
OK. You seem convinced of this position, and I'm genuinely curious. Can you give an example of a country where there exists a genuine free market in health care, that achieves better health results than the USA does? There are roughtly 200 countries to pick from, and I know some have neither socialized medicine nor insurance systems, so throw me an example please.
Nvidia calls Tegra-powered products 'super,' as in super phones, super tablets, etc, presumably because it believes you'll be more inclined to buy one if you associate it with a red-booted man in blue spandex.
Wayne-powered products will of course be called "bat" instead.
Your anecdotal story is intersting, but it fits right into what he was talking about with the Management failures at NASA. Clearly it wasn't the lack of that test that caused the problem. It was a management decision to not perform it. Probably under the exact same pressures. Even if it had been performed though, who's to say they wouldn't have rationalized away the results like they did all the other failed tests?
"We tested that mirror over and over and over with a different kind of device, the old style refractive null corrector," Pellerin says. The results? "Half wave of error, half wave of error, half wave of error." "So some people sat down and said, 'What's going on?" Pellerin recalls. "The mindset was that the mirror can not be other than perfect. So something else is happening. They concluded that the mirror was sagging under the force of gravity in the three point mount rather than being on the bed of nails by half a wave. "Well it turned out that was wrong. But they rationalised, rationalised, rationalised.
...
The project had suffered other challenges beyond fabricating and mounting the mirror; staff were being "hammered" all the time, Pellerin says. In addition there was constant angst about how far the project had gone over budget. "Hubble's initial budget was $434 million we closed it at $1.8 billion just for the flight segment; big overruns." "So the way it works is you tend to blame the people doing the work," Pellerin says. "So we're hammering on them, hammering on them so they had no free time or no inclination to track down anything that wasn't a critical problem because we have other critical problems. Difficult technical things that we couldn't solve yet." The review board also found that a hostile environment had been created for the contactor, which meant "they told us about any problem at their peril," Pellerin says.
Women's Sufferage wasn't an all-or-nothing thing before and after the 19th ammendment. Most states had some kind of sufferage already, but it was on a state by state basis. At the time of passage, fifteen states (or future states) had full sufferage already, and only seven states had no sufferage at all for women. See this nifty map.
Actually, I'm afraid the GP was quite right here. Women's Sufferage and the progressive income tax among other liberal mainstays were in fact pushed cheifly as a way to allow prohibition to happen. Women were thought to be overwhelmingly votes for prohibition (if only they were allowed to vote), and prior to the income tax the vast majority of government revenue came from liquor takes. It was thought that alcohol could never be banned by the government while it was its cheif source of income.
They will say they do because you can't be THAT exclusionary and get anyone elected and they know that
Sure you can. This is where they break out the "well, the Democrats are really no better ..." arguments. The idea is to get everyone who disagrees with them to feel like there is no point in voting at all. Add in a few more restrictive voting laws to discorage young and poor folk from voting, and their enthused 22% magically becomes a majority on election day.