Perl 6 has got to be the vaporiest vaporware out there, almost. The development on this thing has been going on forever. Six really is going to be the horse developed by committee. How much of the stuff in there was cool back in '00 really matters now?
I can't say if the entire nation operates like this, but the California power industry used to use a billing system based on "Hour Ending". Every power transaction took place in a 60-minute window so rather than saying "time at which this even started", they simply counted the hours.We used a standard database backend (timeval) and stored the actual starting time and then converted to-and-from the HE value.
This is nightmarish around DST. On the "fall back" day there are actually *25* hours in a day. Thus, in Hour-Ending, how to deal with this? Answer: the 25th hour, existing as a singular instance all year is thus decreed to be the second three such that time runs: 1, 2, 3, 25, 4.
Likewise there was a missing hour on the "spring forward" day to accomodate this and make sure the world didn't explode. In essence this made every conversion PST/DST-specific with special handling for the extra hour. That the timechange occurs in the middle of the night rather than, say, midnight makes the conversion-moment determination that much more fun.
Do this UST->HE and HE->UST for a few functions and you will learn the un-triviality of DST tomfoolery.
If its such a big deal, just have everything happen an hour earlier. Today you went to work at eight, but tomorrow you will go to work at nine. Won't that be so much better?
I too was thinking of the flip "well, who cares about fraud, ain't going to hurt *me* any," except then I realized that with this technology there will be scenarios that go like this:
Big Government Agency impliments fingerprint scanning for everyone on their "baddies" list who, presumably, already have their fingerprints on file. Baddy "X" takes a gel-mold of his girlfriend's prints and sails right on by a rather large hole in security...
Any DRSC system would require DRSC technology to be built into new vehicles
I didn't quite follow all the jargon, but assuming DSRC would be accessibly passively like standard RFID, there's nothing to prevent one from plunking the chipset into, say, the license plate itself. I can't see the utility in having a system that will only assist those with the newest vehicles in identifying each other while ignoring the massive block of late-model vehicles that will always be on the road.
There's no reason that DSRC information devices couldn't just plug into the ol' cigarette lighter like a normal radar detector.
This unique opportunity is available only to highly-qualified individuals who are willing to relocate for an extended period of time, are in top physical condition and are capable of surviving with limited access to such modern conveniences as soy low-fat lattes, The Sopranos and a steady supply of oxygen.
I call BS on that -- any data-driven company that can't ship me digital video on-demand while onsite isn't worth a damn.
I love what I do and STILL want to get out of it. I would be one of the six who would not say "very happy". Content? Maybe. Certainly a better career path than many I could have undertaken, but its not exactly a rosy picture for my future in the career.
Current society does not treat programmers very well on a great number of levels, and this disrepect only furthers with age. Skills are very measurable in the IT world and it just doesn't hack it to be a 45 year-old dude with average chops.
Besides keeping up, I worry if that pouring my heart out for a career that may ultimately find itself replaced by better methodology is a bit frightening. There will always be room for my sort of coder -- I'm not worried about all the work going away -- I worry more that it will be in a world where I will want to continue to do it.
Not exactly the best career path for stability and family growth, you know what I mean?
Would I be "very happy" in some other job? If I knew I were I'd be doing *that* now, so maybe not. Just the same -- ain't no bed of roses getting older in IT.
Steadman's message gets weaker and weaker. The world of free software he envisioned has, ironically, now passed him by. Sure, without his work stuff like Linux wouldn't be around today but he's missed the point of his own dialog.
Open Source is about everybody being allowed to come to the party, take what you created and make it better than it was before. Keep it going past the time of your eventual disinterest in the project. Make it bigger than anyone envisioned.
Steadman has so long tied this to his vision of a utopian operating system but he has so far missed the point. That operating system is -written-, though not by him. Not "yet", though since the time he started some near-enough completely GPL'd distributions have come, become hugely popular and disappeared in the time that "he" has been working on GNU/HURD.
Steadman was a visionary, but Steadman is also an egomaniac. The concept that its REALLY _GNU_/YourFavoriteDistro would be like having a Nascar team be a Shell/Nascar team because that's what fuels it.
Steadman should give up the ego battle with trying to relable Linux and having syntactic rule battles lasting weeks and weeks (e.g. "what IS an operating system") rather than addressing the up-to-date, day-to-day issues like, oh, protecting the GPL from its first major legal assault ever.
Or get serious about Gnu/Hurd as a distro.
Otherwise, we'll be soon releasing a distro called Gnu/GoFuckYourself to prove how lame you truly are.
I was listening to an archived version of "This Americal Life" the other day recorded in 1997 called "Tales From the Net". In it they described the weird reaches of this new Internet thing, including Jennifer Ringley. It all sounded so weird then and they responded with such incredulity:
"What?!? You mean you just have this camera going all the time?!? And its -not- necessarily all about sex?"
It was as if it were some sort of big joke that only they appreciated.
Now, when cams are as ubiquitous as teenaged girls with problems, I wonder if they were...
I just got done coding up a Word-targeted document and as "close" as I could come was to work it up in RTF, and that was pretty damned close. I got their full spec and dug through it a bit and it seems like nearly every feature available I could think of that was available word was -also- available in the RTF specification.
Further, modern Word reads it like it was a native document and doesn't complain when you save it back as RTF.
Why is that, I wonder? Made me wonder how much different the binary/"proprietary" format was from the RTF -- just some binary representations of the same things perhaps?
Hey, back in my day, we called that "fun". Be thankful if you don't have to physically unload the records. [ps. What's up with this kompanies that kan't spel?]
Thanks for all who answered the question asked. The information is useful. Dave and I have generally ruled out laptops on a portability basis, but good ideas there as well.
As to the haters -- what question did I ask? What question did you answer? I generally detest the Internet and blogging for the same reasons you do. What can I do about it? Whine?
No. Make it better. I write, its what I do. Relax. Go find something you do well and do that, 'cause clearly lifestyle advice ain't your bag.
For the record, yes -- I do know how to enjoy myself quite well offline and have taken enough photos and jotted notes to suffer the inadequacy of those later: "WHERE is this now?" For my previous trips, I've enjoyed a leather journalette, but where's the challenge in that? Nowhere.
Vis noodlenose's suggestions that "COMPUTERS ARE EVERYWHERE" -- clearly you ain't been where I been, brother, and I'm glad I won't find you there next time I go.
It looks like the international symbol for man attempting to perform autofellatio than the life glider. What system did ESR play on? All mine used blocks.
...it truly is a thing of wonder. Not much biger than your standard NATO round, mine continues to write as it did the day I got it twelve years ago. (Obviously I'm not writing with it all that much, but a true testament to the ink used).
Anybody actually read the spec mentioned? A horrible FPP in that it pointed just at the main page (the reference is here), but the technology behind it is kind of neat.
While there is something to be said for scrounging parts and banging together whatever crap hardware I can find to do the job, its not a very scientific method. Being able to design something that is replicatable is a far more worthy project -- otherwise all your design work gets locked up in -your- project and crap on everyone else.
While this does not mean this hardware = solution to all robot problems, it is a pretty robust setup. The fact that it can handle everything from battle bots to personal transport is pretty impressive. Robot! To the mailbox with me!
I'm rather partial to R. Schwartz's books on the topic, the "pearl" book, the "camel" book -- I've never been a fan of tchrist and the documentation he writes. I secretly suspect him of authoring the awful OOP chapter in the Camel book.
Back in the day the venerable "Perl 5 HOWTO" was the shizzy for doing stuff before there was a billion modules in CPAN to do pretty much everything. I still refer to it when I need to write a server from scratch, even though its probably five years out of date now.
To the author who was confused by regular expressions: Jeff Friedel's book on the subject is excellent.
I'll agree that I've been generally depressed by the state of machinima films. Obviously, one of the most limiting factors is the fact that most fools are just taking the stock characters and making them do funny things.
If Machinima is going to take off, they'll need to do the whole boat -- character rendering, background illustration, custom textures, etc.
The Killer App here would be one that hooked into a stable gaming engine for rendering but gave the illustrators reasonable tools with which to work and not limit them necessarily to the rules and physics of the gaming platform.
Until I can illustrate "real world" scenarios (like what happens outside on the street without a bunch of armor and guns), machinima is going to be marginal tech.
I don't know if I would necessarily trust a mechanical process that is as prone to upset as much as a biological one. A bunch of little carbon spindles will work forever, DNA only works until some gamma ray bisects it and then who KNOWS what the hell your process will start doing.
I prefer knowing that the bugs I introduce to my code are static, thank you...
Slashdot Mirror
Perl 6 has got to be the vaporiest vaporware out there, almost. The development on this thing has been going on forever. Six really is going to be the horse developed by committee. How much of the stuff in there was cool back in '00 really matters now?
Without crackpots this community wouldn't be viable. I mean, who else would spend endless hours devoted to creating UNIX all over again?
I can't say if the entire nation operates like this, but the California power industry used to use a billing system based on "Hour Ending". Every power transaction took place in a 60-minute window so rather than saying "time at which this even started", they simply counted the hours.We used a standard database backend (timeval) and stored the actual starting time and then converted to-and-from the HE value.
This is nightmarish around DST. On the "fall back" day there are actually *25* hours in a day. Thus, in Hour-Ending, how to deal with this? Answer: the 25th hour, existing as a singular instance all year is thus decreed to be the second three such that time runs: 1, 2, 3, 25, 4.
Likewise there was a missing hour on the "spring forward" day to accomodate this and make sure the world didn't explode. In essence this made every conversion PST/DST-specific with special handling for the extra hour. That the timechange occurs in the middle of the night rather than, say, midnight makes the conversion-moment determination that much more fun.
Do this UST->HE and HE->UST for a few functions and you will learn the un-triviality of DST tomfoolery.
If its such a big deal, just have everything happen an hour earlier. Today you went to work at eight, but tomorrow you will go to work at nine. Won't that be so much better?
and either get "666" or "IDIOT" put on there, perhaps with the slashdot logo undercutting it.
That's why you need Mozilla with that handy "Launch This Page in IE" plugin. Referrer=null.
I too was thinking of the flip "well, who cares about fraud, ain't going to hurt *me* any," except then I realized that with this technology there will be scenarios that go like this:
Big Government Agency impliments fingerprint scanning for everyone on their "baddies" list who, presumably, already have their fingerprints on file. Baddy "X" takes a gel-mold of his girlfriend's prints and sails right on by a rather large hole in security...
I didn't quite follow all the jargon, but assuming DSRC would be accessibly passively like standard RFID, there's nothing to prevent one from plunking the chipset into, say, the license plate itself. I can't see the utility in having a system that will only assist those with the newest vehicles in identifying each other while ignoring the massive block of late-model vehicles that will always be on the road.
There's no reason that DSRC information devices couldn't just plug into the ol' cigarette lighter like a normal radar detector.
I call BS on that -- any data-driven company that can't ship me digital video on-demand while onsite isn't worth a damn.
If you don't love what you do then get out of it.
I love what I do and STILL want to get out of it. I would be one of the six who would not say "very happy". Content? Maybe. Certainly a better career path than many I could have undertaken, but its not exactly a rosy picture for my future in the career.
Current society does not treat programmers very well on a great number of levels, and this disrepect only furthers with age. Skills are very measurable in the IT world and it just doesn't hack it to be a 45 year-old dude with average chops.
Besides keeping up, I worry if that pouring my heart out for a career that may ultimately find itself replaced by better methodology is a bit frightening. There will always be room for my sort of coder -- I'm not worried about all the work going away -- I worry more that it will be in a world where I will want to continue to do it.
Not exactly the best career path for stability and family growth, you know what I mean?
Would I be "very happy" in some other job? If I knew I were I'd be doing *that* now, so maybe not. Just the same -- ain't no bed of roses getting older in IT.
Than an entire palate of 'em:
i t/20040109a/minites-box-A7R1.jpg
http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/spir
...to get accidentally shot.
That's the other difference between these guys and real law enforcement: guns and armor.
Steadman's message gets weaker and weaker. The world of free software he envisioned has, ironically, now passed him by. Sure, without his work stuff like Linux wouldn't be around today but he's missed the point of his own dialog.
Open Source is about everybody being allowed to come to the party, take what you created and make it better than it was before. Keep it going past the time of your eventual disinterest in the project. Make it bigger than anyone envisioned.
Steadman has so long tied this to his vision of a utopian operating system but he has so far missed the point. That operating system is -written-, though not by him. Not "yet", though since the time he started some near-enough completely GPL'd distributions have come, become hugely popular and disappeared in the time that "he" has been working on GNU/HURD.
Steadman was a visionary, but Steadman is also an egomaniac. The concept that its REALLY _GNU_/YourFavoriteDistro would be like having a Nascar team be a Shell/Nascar team because that's what fuels it.
Steadman should give up the ego battle with trying to relable Linux and having syntactic rule battles lasting weeks and weeks (e.g. "what IS an operating system") rather than addressing the up-to-date, day-to-day issues like, oh, protecting the GPL from its first major legal assault ever.
Or get serious about Gnu/Hurd as a distro.
Otherwise, we'll be soon releasing a distro called Gnu/GoFuckYourself to prove how lame you truly are.
I was listening to an archived version of "This Americal Life" the other day recorded in 1997 called "Tales From the Net". In it they described the weird reaches of this new Internet thing, including Jennifer Ringley. It all sounded so weird then and they responded with such incredulity:
"What?!? You mean you just have this camera going all the time?!? And its -not- necessarily all about sex?"
It was as if it were some sort of big joke that only they appreciated.
Now, when cams are as ubiquitous as teenaged girls with problems, I wonder if they were...
I just got done coding up a Word-targeted document and as "close" as I could come was to work it up in RTF, and that was pretty damned close. I got their full spec and dug through it a bit and it seems like nearly every feature available I could think of that was available word was -also- available in the RTF specification.
Further, modern Word reads it like it was a native document and doesn't complain when you save it back as RTF.
Why is that, I wonder? Made me wonder how much different the binary/"proprietary" format was from the RTF -- just some binary representations of the same things perhaps?
Hey, back in my day, we called that "fun". Be thankful if you don't have to physically unload the records.
[ps. What's up with this kompanies that kan't spel?]
Thanks for all who answered the question asked. The information is useful. Dave and I have generally ruled out laptops on a portability basis, but good ideas there as well.
As to the haters -- what question did I ask? What question did you answer? I generally detest the Internet and blogging for the same reasons you do. What can I do about it? Whine?
No. Make it better. I write, its what I do. Relax. Go find something you do well and do that, 'cause clearly lifestyle advice ain't your bag.
For the record, yes -- I do know how to enjoy myself quite well offline and have taken enough photos and jotted notes to suffer the inadequacy of those later: "WHERE is this now?" For my previous trips, I've enjoyed a leather journalette, but where's the challenge in that? Nowhere.
Vis noodlenose's suggestions that "COMPUTERS ARE EVERYWHERE" -- clearly you ain't been where I been, brother, and I'm glad I won't find you there next time I go.
I see the Jacki Lantern Girl's Underpants. [http://jacki.cif.rochester.edu/]
It looks like the international symbol for man attempting to perform autofellatio than the life glider. What system did ESR play on? All mine used blocks.
Honestly -- I knew there were worms like this, but I hadn't heard of Welchia...
Clearly what we need is a worm to clean the worm that cleans the worm. And a worm to patch the worm to clean the worm to clean the worm. Etc.
...it truly is a thing of wonder. Not much biger than your standard NATO round, mine continues to write as it did the day I got it twelve years ago. (Obviously I'm not writing with it all that much, but a true testament to the ink used).
While there is something to be said for scrounging parts and banging together whatever crap hardware I can find to do the job, its not a very scientific method. Being able to design something that is replicatable is a far more worthy project -- otherwise all your design work gets locked up in -your- project and crap on everyone else.
While this does not mean this hardware = solution to all robot problems, it is a pretty robust setup. The fact that it can handle everything from battle bots to personal transport is pretty impressive. Robot! To the mailbox with me!
I'm rather partial to R. Schwartz's books on the topic, the "pearl" book, the "camel" book -- I've never been a fan of tchrist and the documentation he writes. I secretly suspect him of authoring the awful OOP chapter in the Camel book.
Back in the day the venerable "Perl 5 HOWTO" was the shizzy for doing stuff before there was a billion modules in CPAN to do pretty much everything. I still refer to it when I need to write a server from scratch, even though its probably five years out of date now.
To the author who was confused by regular expressions: Jeff Friedel's book on the subject is excellent.
I'll agree that I've been generally depressed by the state of machinima films. Obviously, one of the most limiting factors is the fact that most fools are just taking the stock characters and making them do funny things.
If Machinima is going to take off, they'll need to do the whole boat -- character rendering, background illustration, custom textures, etc.
The Killer App here would be one that hooked into a stable gaming engine for rendering but gave the illustrators reasonable tools with which to work and not limit them necessarily to the rules and physics of the gaming platform.
Until I can illustrate "real world" scenarios (like what happens outside on the street without a bunch of armor and guns), machinima is going to be marginal tech.
I don't know if I would necessarily trust a mechanical process that is as prone to upset as much as a biological one. A bunch of little carbon spindles will work forever, DNA only works until some gamma ray bisects it and then who KNOWS what the hell your process will start doing.
I prefer knowing that the bugs I introduce to my code are static, thank you...
Back in the dotcom boom, receptionists who had traded stock options for pay did pretty well...