Deja vu. My supervisor told me he had the code for his model from 20 years ago. Not surprisingly, not one of the 5 1/2 floppies found were readable and I doubt all of the floppies were locatable. My project changed from "translate the code and amend it with additional equations", to "reimplement the model from scratch and then amend it for the new equations".
Battletech on the SNES was my favourite. It had a story line and you could customise your mechs for each mission. Mechwarrior I on the PC was clunky in comparrison, but it did have Inner Sphere Mechs which was great. Mech II had awesome cut scenes but no real customisability. FASA selling to MS sent it over the edge. I can understand the financial reasons, but the passion for the Battletech universe was never there.
VR Battle Tech was fun, but it died in Australia. Never got to gain full control of the cockpit.
I would play a game that had the tactical and build flexibility of the tabletop game but kept track of conditions etc.
In earler Slashdot times, creationsts were rife and the same tired rubbish that had been done to death on talk.origins was argued vehemently for kilometres of threads. I think they either did get educated or left for forums steeped in ignorance.
I agree with tb()ne. While I am impressed with FORTRAN and its durability, Python is the tool for my scientific programming. The Sage notebook to be precise, with its access to a raft of mathematical tools and libraries. If you are going to teach programming to science and engineering students, you could do a lot worse than teaching them to do it in Python.
That being said, I have punched cards in FORTRAN IV and slaved over a vt100 with FORTRAN 77 and most recently written some code in FORTRAN 95. When the times comes to do some heavy-lifting with MPI, FORTRAN will be the choice. [With a bit of work on Sage, perhaps writing something to use MPI from Sage that played nicely with schedulers such as PBS and derivatives would be worth looking into.]
Funny you should mention that. I fired up my supervisor's old Windows 95 box just the other week. [The box was earmarked as an instrument control system "one day"]. It had a 5 1/4 drive that I tried unsuccessfully to read some floppies with.
In my 28 year career I implemented a sorting algorithm once. I chose bubble sort in COBOL because n was small so the difference in performance compared to a more sophistcated algorithm was not going to be noticable.
Oi. As a tail-end baby boomer I would like to offer an alternative view. Every survey of Australians has shown an overwhelming distaste for this filtering. On the other hand, there was always an undercurrent of social conservatism from the 60s until now. With the rise of politicised religious groups and the election of a socially conservative Prime Minister, this sort of crap is bound to happen. The major reason the current PM got in was he was not John Howard, the previous social conservative leader. Internet filtering was a very minor part of Labor party policy along with a bunch of other waffle that would never get up in Parliament.
The ex-free love generation does not want censorship now, anymore than they did then. They do not want governments dictating their private lives.
40 years ago I bought crackers to school. I let a string off down at the playing fields before school, just as a teacher drove up behind me. He rolled down the window, pointed at me and told me to report to the principal's office. I then wandered up to the office and waited outside. After about fifteen minutes, the principal noticed me, asked me what I was there for. He described the consequences and dispassionately opened the drawer with his cane in it. I held out my hand, he hit it twice and I headed off. End of story. To me, the consequences fitted the action, so I accepted it. Getting caned was also a "badge of honour".
Your story is one, to me, of over-reaction on the part of the principals. That goes to the heart of the discussion of the topic of discission.
Getting caned certainly didn't stop me letting off crackers around the neighborhood, but I did stop me letting them off at school.
We generally respected teachers who meted out corporal punishment, unless it was enacted out of anger. Once in farm mechanics class (It was an agricultural high school) the teacher lashed out with a yard stick, hitting a boy across the head. Not a good move. The teacher apologised to the student. No idea if there were any consequences.
And I still like lighting crackers. Pity they aren't on the list of publically available fireworks in my territory anymore.
I have a couple of anecdotes to back you up. As a system admin I saw two projects, one Java and one.NET, where the managers were panicking about slow applications. The system admins checked out the performance and, at least on the Solaris box, a memory leak was probably the cause. The delivery date was looming. Both managers were seriously looking at spending another 30-40% on top of their hardware budget to "speed things up". In both cases, a day's work by their lead programmer discovered the memory leaks and plugged them. Millions of dollars saved by a day's work.
You just described a selection of drivers around my city! It is amazing to see people sliding around because they drove the same way in the rain as they did during the last 3 months with no rain.
On the topic of hypermilling, I had never heard the term before. I do 'hypermill' on occasion, but I am always mindful of other road users. My best was 4.5 litres(ULP)/100km in my 1.3L CVT Honda Jazz for one round trip including up and down two escarpments.
Dad had crates of them and he picked up cheap players at fetes that you could wind up.
Sadly us young boys wrecked a number of the records and I ruined one of the players with my half-arsed engineering skills. I tried to slow the player down enough to play at 45rpms. The styluses were brass? or silver and would destroy the newer vinyl anyway. We grew up playing the Andrews Sisters, Glen Miller Band and Mario Lanza.
When I was twelve, I visited a friend who played his "Fireball" Album and I left the 78s behind.
Two stories from the seventies in South Australia.
Kids under twelve sometimes had slug guns, especially those in rural and semi-rural areas.
One kid told me of slug gun fights they would have, hiding behind logs and taking shots at each other. Once during a "game" one kid stood up and shot just as another poked his head around a tree. He lost an eye.
Another boy was sitting in his bedroom with his Dad's.22 aiming it all over the place. He then lined up his mum through an open window. She was putting washing out. He pulled the trigger. Why the gun was loaded, noone knew. One shot through the eye killed his mother.
I myself at about the same age found an uncle's slug gun and despearately tried to find slugs for it. I settled for cocking and firing it unloaded, even though I heard it was not good for it.
I don't know what guidance these boys had about gun safety. Sometimes it is lost when a bunch of young boys goad each other on.
Shooting at pixels on a screen sure beats real life for irresponsible boys.
Rudd is still having his "honeymoon period" in government. This has been extended by the ineptness of the Opposition and some toadying on behalf of the media. He has said a lot about what his government will do and has not made a complete fool of himself overseas. The budget comes out next month and it will be the first real test of policies and practice.
The major worrying factor is that he will have to make deals with a number of people in after June when the new Senate sits. Most have dubious track records. Steve Fielding (Family First) is the biggest worry. We have already seen ISP filtering being declared an essential service for all Australians. The morons have also caved into pressure from Fielding to arrange for an Internet filter to be installed in Parliament House so members can no longer visit reproductive health sites and a whole bunch of other sites that are essential for staffer research.
He may also have to try to do deals with the Greens. They have shown little aptitude for deal-making or legislative creativity so we may even see a double-dissolution of Parliament within a year. They generally vote with the ALP on social and economic issues however so the threat may be small. Headline-grabbing environmental issues will be the sticking point.
Finally there is the Independent Nick Xenophon who ran on a popular anti-poker machine campaign. Already Rudd has made noises about limiting their spread which is a bit late. I for one see benefits in limiting these discretionary taxation devices.
Slashdot Mirror
Deja vu. My supervisor told me he had the code for his model from 20 years ago. Not surprisingly, not one of the 5 1/2 floppies found were readable and I doubt all of the floppies were locatable. My project changed from "translate the code and amend it with additional equations", to "reimplement the model from scratch and then amend it for the new equations".
Merry merry king of the bush is he
Laugh kookaburra laugh kookaburra
Gay you life must be.
Sung to the flute riff on "Land Down Under"
What have alligators got to do with Australia?
Battletech on the SNES was my favourite. It had a story line and you could customise your mechs for each mission. Mechwarrior I on the PC was clunky in comparrison, but it did have Inner Sphere Mechs which was great. Mech II had awesome cut scenes but no real customisability. FASA selling to MS sent it over the edge. I can understand the financial reasons, but the passion for the Battletech universe was never there. VR Battle Tech was fun, but it died in Australia. Never got to gain full control of the cockpit. I would play a game that had the tactical and build flexibility of the tabletop game but kept track of conditions etc.
In earler Slashdot times, creationsts were rife and the same tired rubbish that had been done to death on talk.origins was argued vehemently for kilometres of threads. I think they either did get educated or left for forums steeped in ignorance.
The old SGI/Silicon Graphics hadn't been in the Graphics game seriously for years. HPC was their main grame.
http://www.vizworld.com/2009/08/breaking-sgi-terminates-graphics-division/
but where's your support for Solaris 8? Or Irix? Or OpenVMS?
Can't talk for the others, but SGI still sell IRIX support.
Sad Really. I'll let my .sig do the talking.
Everything warmer than ??? K behaves as a fluid, given enough time.
I agree with tb()ne. While I am impressed with FORTRAN and its durability, Python is the tool for my scientific programming. The Sage notebook to be precise, with its access to a raft of mathematical tools and libraries. If you are going to teach programming to science and engineering students, you could do a lot worse than teaching them to do it in Python.
That being said, I have punched cards in FORTRAN IV and slaved over a vt100 with FORTRAN 77 and most recently written some code in FORTRAN 95. When the times comes to do some heavy-lifting with MPI, FORTRAN will be the choice. [With a bit of work on Sage, perhaps writing something to use MPI from Sage that played nicely with schedulers such as PBS and derivatives would be worth looking into.]
Funny you should mention that. I fired up my supervisor's old Windows 95 box just the other week. [The box was earmarked as an instrument control system "one day"]. It had a 5 1/4 drive that I tried unsuccessfully to read some floppies with.
In my 28 year career I implemented a sorting algorithm once. I chose bubble sort in COBOL because n was small so the difference in performance compared to a more sophistcated algorithm was not going to be noticable.
Oi. As a tail-end baby boomer I would like to offer an alternative view. Every survey of Australians has shown an overwhelming distaste for this filtering. On the other hand, there was always an undercurrent of social conservatism from the 60s until now. With the rise of politicised religious groups and the election of a socially conservative Prime Minister, this sort of crap is bound to happen. The major reason the current PM got in was he was not John Howard, the previous social conservative leader. Internet filtering was a very minor part of Labor party policy along with a bunch of other waffle that would never get up in Parliament.
The ex-free love generation does not want censorship now, anymore than they did then. They do not want governments dictating their private lives.
Where are my modpoints for "Funny" when I need them.
40 years ago I bought crackers to school. I let a string off down at the playing fields before school, just as a teacher drove up behind me. He rolled down the window, pointed at me and told me to report to the principal's office. I then wandered up to the office and waited outside. After about fifteen minutes, the principal noticed me, asked me what I was there for. He described the consequences and dispassionately opened the drawer with his cane in it. I held out my hand, he hit it twice and I headed off. End of story. To me, the consequences fitted the action, so I accepted it. Getting caned was also a "badge of honour".
Your story is one, to me, of over-reaction on the part of the principals. That goes to the heart of the discussion of the topic of discission.
Getting caned certainly didn't stop me letting off crackers around the neighborhood, but I did stop me letting them off at school.
We generally respected teachers who meted out corporal punishment, unless it was enacted out of anger. Once in farm mechanics class (It was an agricultural high school) the teacher lashed out with a yard stick, hitting a boy across the head. Not a good move. The teacher apologised to the student. No idea if there were any consequences.
And I still like lighting crackers. Pity they aren't on the list of publically available fireworks in my territory anymore.
Preview is wasted on me sometimes ;-)
Good pint, and Paul Graham seems to think that starting in a bad economy has benefits. Apple and Microsoft started the the 70s.
I have a couple of anecdotes to back you up. As a system admin I saw two projects, one Java and one .NET, where the managers were panicking about slow applications. The system admins checked out the performance and, at least on the Solaris box, a memory leak was probably the cause. The delivery date was looming. Both managers were seriously looking at spending another 30-40% on top of their hardware budget to "speed things up". In both cases, a day's work by their lead programmer discovered the memory leaks and plugged them. Millions of dollars saved by a day's work.
In Australia we do not put power in the hands of one man. We have a Parliament that enacts legislation.
You just described a selection of drivers around my city! It is amazing to see people sliding around because they drove the same way in the rain as they did during the last 3 months with no rain.
On the topic of hypermilling, I had never heard the term before. I do 'hypermill' on occasion, but I am always mindful of other road users. My best was 4.5 litres(ULP)/100km in my 1.3L CVT Honda Jazz for one round trip including up and down two escarpments.
Dad had crates of them and he picked up cheap players at fetes that you could wind up.
Sadly us young boys wrecked a number of the records and I ruined one of the players with my half-arsed engineering skills. I tried to slow the player down enough to play at 45rpms. The styluses were brass? or silver and would destroy the newer vinyl anyway. We grew up playing the Andrews Sisters, Glen Miller Band and Mario Lanza.
When I was twelve, I visited a friend who played his "Fireball" Album and I left the 78s behind.
Two stories from the seventies in South Australia.
Kids under twelve sometimes had slug guns, especially those in rural and semi-rural areas.
One kid told me of slug gun fights they would have, hiding behind logs and taking shots at each other. Once during a "game" one kid stood up and shot just as another poked his head around a tree. He lost an eye.
Another boy was sitting in his bedroom with his Dad's .22 aiming it all over the place. He then lined up his mum through an open window. She was putting washing out. He pulled the trigger. Why the gun was loaded, noone knew. One shot through the eye killed his mother.
I myself at about the same age found an uncle's slug gun and despearately tried to find slugs for it. I settled for cocking and firing it unloaded, even though I heard it was not good for it.
I don't know what guidance these boys had about gun safety. Sometimes it is lost when a bunch of young boys goad each other on.
Shooting at pixels on a screen sure beats real life for irresponsible boys.
My sympathies. Workplaces like yours confirm that Dilbert is more of a documentary than a fanciful cartoon.
Rudd is still having his "honeymoon period" in government. This has been extended by the ineptness of the Opposition and some toadying on behalf of the media. He has said a lot about what his government will do and has not made a complete fool of himself overseas. The budget comes out next month and it will be the first real test of policies and practice.
The major worrying factor is that he will have to make deals with a number of people in after June when the new Senate sits. Most have dubious track records. Steve Fielding (Family First) is the biggest worry. We have already seen ISP filtering being declared an essential service for all Australians. The morons have also caved into pressure from Fielding to arrange for an Internet filter to be installed in Parliament House so members can no longer visit reproductive health sites and a whole bunch of other sites that are essential for staffer research.
He may also have to try to do deals with the Greens. They have shown little aptitude for deal-making or legislative creativity so we may even see a double-dissolution of Parliament within a year. They generally vote with the ALP on social and economic issues however so the threat may be small. Headline-grabbing environmental issues will be the sticking point.
Finally there is the Independent Nick Xenophon who ran on a popular anti-poker machine campaign. Already Rudd has made noises about limiting their spread which is a bit late. I for one see benefits in limiting these discretionary taxation devices.