FYI, Australia was established with convicts that Britain couldn't send to America any more because some uppity colonialists there objected to the taxation regime. I understand there were about 50,000 sent.
While the MythBusters is entertaining, it's not exactly science.
Its "Science entertainment", much as the super 12, rugby 7's or one day cricket are "Sports entertainment". Hey, It's Super 14 Rugby now. I take it you are a British Rugby supporter:)
Lysenkoism spread widely under one regime where oppression and political patronage could trump scientific thought.
Evolution is accepted as fact by scientists and in countries where scientific fact is publically acknowledged across the social strata. Where else in the world can public figures like Ann Coulter get an opportunity to not only display their ignorance but a large percentage of the population endorses that ignorance? It seems this false war is being waged against science as it threatens the power base of Christian sect leaders who's basic means of power is strident, willful ignorance.
My feeling is those threatened by the fact that global temperatures are rising and global CO2 levels are rising with a distinct anomaly since the Industrial Revolution, have everything to gain by opposing the dissemination of facts and reasoned inference.
My hypothesis is that science thrives in liberal (not the US definition) societies with clear controls that minimise concentration of power and provides fundamental services to its populace such as health education etc. To do otherwise gives too many opportunities to would-be despots to control others.
I inherited a Korean Dell Latitude with my new job. I set it to dual boot with OpenSUSE.
My keyboard developed the habit of randomly sending my cursor to either top right or bottom left of the screen. I suspected the "torsion bar?" on the keyboard. A brief look at the KDE desktop did not show where to easily disable the bar nor the X config. I booted into XP and disabled it there. The phone support was satisfied with my diagnosis, not fazed at all about the dual boot setup and arranged for a tech to come and replaced the keyboard. They even arranged to replace it with a US/En one.
I lost the hard drive and installed Fedora Core 4 on it (CDs lying around a nearby office). My cursor now displays as a square on boot and there is a lot of fly-back lines on the windows making it impossible to use in X, but works OK in console mode. The tech did not refuse support with my Fedora Core only laptop, but he did not accept my diagnosis of a faulty display chip on the motherboard. Even though this symptom appeared only after some time. A colleague saw the problem and said he got his motherboard replaced as it was exhibiting the same symptoms. The tech got me to boot with an external monitor attached and the problem went away. He took it as proof that the display chip was OK.
One day I will spend some more of my company's time on diagnosing the problem.
Untestable? There is plenty of fossible evidence for burrowing. In fact fossil burrows show up all the time in littoral sediments. Same principle applies on land but they are much rarer. For example they can be "mummified" in dry conditions or rapidly buried in ash or mud (and no, not one big one-off flood event either).
Dead right. My most memorable moment was writing a playing card shuffling routine and I put some debugging statements in. An hour or so after submitting my cards, I turned up to the operators and they said all they had was my cards. They said they would submit it again. I came back later and they gave me the output. Then they gave me the first output they could not find previouly. Turns out that both printouts couldn't fit in the pigeon holes so were stacked on top, out of the way.
It was then I learned the power of an infinite loop:-) I had enough paper for two years worth of notes!
That's why I began a part-time science degree and now have a job supporting HPC. Much for interesting and fulfilling than protecting websites from themselves.
A proper education will teach you to adapt to the latest ephemeral piece of software your latest employer happens to use. Skilling up on the latest piece of software only gets you so far. If you are a University grad and all they want you for are your word processing skills with a particular piece of software then you may be in the wrong job.
A specific comment followed by a few general points.
Back in the 80s in COBOL we coded all our dates as PIC S9(5) COMP-3 which would be stored in 3 bytes. That is YYJJJC (IIRC) YY- year JJJ - julian day and C - sign as hex values. These dates also have the advantage of being easily sorted. This made a big difference in space and processing efficiency, especially when there were a large amount of tapes involved. They were also easy to pick out in dump printouts when you code abended as there was no binary conversion required. When I enquired about what happens in 2000, the response was that all the code would have been rewritten by then. I guess that happened but maybe not in the way envisaged.
With respect to date storage issue now, as long as there is a clear method of converting the stored date to the localtime (like POSIX epoch time) then it is a matter of keeping your OS up-to-date.
Surely embedded devices are not programmed to work in one time zone. Unless your devices hooks in with a time service that can update the localtime mapping
information, manual intervention is required.
In Australia, we are used to the state governments fiddling with the DST start and finish dates on a nearly annual basis. Me, I love mornings so I can live without DST.
Couldn't agree more with the majority of file server NAS/SAN solutions.
On the other hand, high performance Data I/O such as media rendering, supercomputing applications, high-rate transactional database management needs as much bandwidth as possible (multi GB/sec).
IANAL, however for a person or department to contradict what transpired as part of your employment negotiations is effectively a breach of contract. If it isn't in writing, then it is difficult to enforce it. You ARE right to call it "bait and switch".
I have meekly accepted similar things in the past as I really wanted a particular job. It did however diminish the level of trust I had for that organisation which compounded into further problems down the track. It is important to discuss this matter with whoever hired you and make sure they are aware of this injustice. How you do it is up to you, but my approach would be polite and frank.
Almost the same here. Word Processors never appealed to me once I got past the "this key combination turns the word bold in-front of your eyes" which was novel at the time. I do all my correspondence in Emacs/LaTeX including invoices.
Spreadsheets were more of a fascination because I used a printing calculator many years ago and remember wishing it would be good to be able to go back and fix up an entered number and redo the calculation. There are a number of ways that could have been implemented in a calculator, but Visicalc came out a few months later! Once every few years I have a need for spreadsheet.
It might be a curmudgeonly thing, eschewing these tools. On the other hand, it might be that Office Apps don't fit with my way of thinking/creating.
Just installed Firebug a couple of days ago to look at a wierd "works in IE, not in firefox" problem. Haven't nailed it yet as is could be server-side but was impressed by the comprehensive coverage of the tool.
Not much. Darwin to the western edge of Arnhem land and back in one day. Plenty of vegetation there.
I have, however driven around a lot of semi-arid South Australia. Old Man Saltbush gets tall and you can hide a kangaroo in them. My brother and I were working on a station when he hit an emu that took a right instead of a left when we got it caught between the track and a fence.
You don't have to go west of the divide to find good corrugations. Have you travelled the Nerrigan Road from Braidwood to Nowra? The corrugations were about 40 cm wide and 10 cm deep. Going fast was not an option with family Tarago and a narrow, winding road. It is going to be sealed sometime in the near future IIRC. The steak sandwich at the Nerrigan pub was worth the stress though.
After hitting 5 of them, I have to call myself experienced. When they jump out from bushes on the side of the road, you don't always get to see them in time. My first collision caused the most car damage. Too dark to see if the roo survived. Last one was in my Jazz and both the Honda Jazz and the roo were shaken but not injured. I had roo bars on my Toyota Tarago and that was my only confirmed kill. Instant roo death at 80km/hr braking to impact at about 60km/hr.
BTW, there is no need to travel to the outback to see kangaroos. All of these incidents have occurred over the last 20 or so years in Canberra.
Amdahl was the first to offer physical machine partitioning in the mid to late eighties. IBM finally came out with PR/SM (Processor Resource/Systems Manager) some years later. MDF provided complete isolation of resources between two or more partitions. There were no shared channels, intercommunication was done with a Channel-To-Channel connector. This provided a secure, isolated development/test/QA systems at a reasonable price. It was all managed at the macrocode level, which had a Unix-like shell.
Slashdot Mirror
Oi! You'll ruin the stereotype with posts like that. Everyone KNOWS the phrase "Whinging Pom" is a tautology :)
FYI, Australia was established with convicts that Britain couldn't send to America any more because some uppity colonialists there objected to the taxation regime. I understand there were about 50,000 sent.
Its "Science entertainment", much as the super 12, rugby 7's or one day cricket are "Sports entertainment".
Hey, It's Super 14 Rugby now. I take it you are a British Rugby supporter
Clouds have a hard time forming in high pressure zones.
Erm. Have you travelled outside the contiguous states? Were your HS geography lessons restricted to one country? 9.6 million square kilometres compared to 10.18 square kilometres
Lysenkoism spread widely under one regime where oppression and political patronage could trump scientific thought.
Evolution is accepted as fact by scientists and in countries where scientific fact is publically acknowledged across the social strata. Where else in the world can public figures like Ann Coulter get an opportunity to not only display their ignorance but a large percentage of the population endorses that ignorance? It seems this false war is being waged against science as it threatens the power base of Christian sect leaders who's basic means of power is strident, willful ignorance.
My feeling is those threatened by the fact that global temperatures are rising and global CO2 levels are rising with a distinct anomaly since the Industrial Revolution, have everything to gain by opposing the dissemination of facts and reasoned inference.
My hypothesis is that science thrives in liberal (not the US definition) societies with clear controls that minimise concentration of power and provides fundamental services to its populace such as health education etc. To do otherwise gives too many opportunities to would-be despots to control others.
I inherited a Korean Dell Latitude with my new job. I set it to dual boot with OpenSUSE.
My keyboard developed the habit of randomly sending my cursor to either top right or bottom left of the screen. I suspected the "torsion bar?" on the keyboard. A brief look at the KDE desktop did not show where to easily disable the bar nor the X config. I booted into XP and disabled it there. The phone support was satisfied with my diagnosis, not fazed at all about the dual boot setup and arranged for a tech to come and replaced the keyboard. They even arranged to replace it with a US/En one.
I lost the hard drive and installed Fedora Core 4 on it (CDs lying around a nearby office). My cursor now displays as a square on boot and there is a lot of fly-back lines on the windows making it impossible to use in X, but works OK in console mode. The tech did not refuse support with my Fedora Core only laptop, but he did not accept my diagnosis of a faulty display chip on the motherboard. Even though this symptom appeared only after some time. A colleague saw the problem and said he got his motherboard replaced as it was exhibiting the same symptoms. The tech got me to boot with an external monitor attached and the problem went away. He took it as proof that the display chip was OK.
One day I will spend some more of my company's time on diagnosing the problem.
Untestable? There is plenty of fossible evidence for burrowing. In fact fossil burrows show up all the time in littoral sediments. Same principle applies on land but they are much rarer. For example they can be "mummified" in dry conditions or rapidly buried in ash or mud (and no, not one big one-off flood event either).
Looks like the 10 year visionary project paid off right at the end. Long term financing was required along with faith in the project's people.
Dead right. My most memorable moment was writing a playing card shuffling routine and I put some debugging statements in. An hour or so after submitting my cards, I turned up to the operators and they said all they had was my cards. They said they would submit it again. I came back later and they gave me the output. Then they gave me the first output they could not find previouly. Turns out that both printouts couldn't fit in the pigeon holes so were stacked on top, out of the way.
It was then I learned the power of an infinite loop :-) I had enough paper for two years worth of notes!
By the time I was clacking out my tragic FORTRAN programs on a card punch machine, the language was already over 20 years old.
That's why I began a part-time science degree and now have a job supporting HPC. Much for interesting and fulfilling than protecting websites from themselves.
A proper education will teach you to adapt to the latest ephemeral piece of software your latest employer happens to use. Skilling up on the latest piece of software only gets you so far. If you are a University grad and all they want you for are your word processing skills with a particular piece of software then you may be in the wrong job.
I thought his explanation was a bit terse and "hand-wavy". It seems it was actually a description of his research methods.
A specific comment followed by a few general points.
Back in the 80s in COBOL we coded all our dates as PIC S9(5) COMP-3 which would be stored in 3 bytes. That is YYJJJC (IIRC) YY- year JJJ - julian day and C - sign as hex values. These dates also have the advantage of being easily sorted. This made a big difference in space and processing efficiency, especially when there were a large amount of tapes involved. They were also easy to pick out in dump printouts when you code abended as there was no binary conversion required. When I enquired about what happens in 2000, the response was that all the code would have been rewritten by then. I guess that happened but maybe not in the way envisaged.
With respect to date storage issue now, as long as there is a clear method of converting the stored date to the localtime (like POSIX epoch time) then it is a matter of keeping your OS up-to-date.
Surely embedded devices are not programmed to work in one time zone. Unless your devices hooks in with a time service that can update the localtime mapping information, manual intervention is required.
In Australia, we are used to the state governments fiddling with the DST start and finish dates on a nearly annual basis. Me, I love mornings so I can live without DST.
Couldn't agree more with the majority of file server NAS/SAN solutions. On the other hand, high performance Data I/O such as media rendering, supercomputing applications, high-rate transactional database management needs as much bandwidth as possible (multi GB/sec).
IANAL, however for a person or department to contradict what transpired as part of your employment negotiations is effectively a breach of contract. If it isn't in writing, then it is difficult to enforce it. You ARE right to call it "bait and switch".
I have meekly accepted similar things in the past as I really wanted a particular job. It did however diminish the level of trust I had for that organisation which compounded into further problems down the track. It is important to discuss this matter with whoever hired you and make sure they are aware of this injustice. How you do it is up to you, but my approach would be polite and frank.
Good Luck
Almost the same here. Word Processors never appealed to me once I got past the "this key combination turns the word bold in-front of your eyes" which was novel at the time. I do all my correspondence in Emacs/LaTeX including invoices.
Spreadsheets were more of a fascination because I used a printing calculator many years ago and remember wishing it would be good to be able to go back and fix up an entered number and redo the calculation. There are a number of ways that could have been implemented in a calculator, but Visicalc came out a few months later! Once every few years I have a need for spreadsheet.
It might be a curmudgeonly thing, eschewing these tools. On the other hand, it might be that Office Apps don't fit with my way of thinking/creating.
Just installed Firebug a couple of days ago to look at a wierd "works in IE, not in firefox" problem. Haven't nailed it yet as is could be server-side but was impressed by the comprehensive coverage of the tool.
Not much. Darwin to the western edge of Arnhem land and back in one day. Plenty of vegetation there.
I have, however driven around a lot of semi-arid South Australia. Old Man Saltbush gets tall and you can hide a kangaroo in them. My brother and I were working on a station when he hit an emu that took a right instead of a left when we got it caught between the track and a fence.
You don't have to go west of the divide to find good corrugations. Have you travelled the Nerrigan Road from Braidwood to Nowra? The corrugations were about 40 cm wide and 10 cm deep. Going fast was not an option with family Tarago and a narrow, winding road. It is going to be sealed sometime in the near future IIRC. The steak sandwich at the Nerrigan pub was worth the stress though.
After hitting 5 of them, I have to call myself experienced. When they jump out from bushes on the side of the road, you don't always get to see them in time. My first collision caused the most car damage. Too dark to see if the roo survived. Last one was in my Jazz and both the Honda Jazz and the roo were shaken but not injured. I had roo bars on my Toyota Tarago and that was my only confirmed kill. Instant roo death at 80km/hr braking to impact at about 60km/hr.
BTW, there is no need to travel to the outback to see kangaroos. All of these incidents have occurred over the last 20 or so years in Canberra.
You left out parsimonious
Amdahl was the first to offer physical machine partitioning in the mid to late eighties. IBM finally came out with PR/SM (Processor Resource/Systems Manager) some years later. MDF provided complete isolation of resources between two or more partitions. There were no shared channels, intercommunication was done with a Channel-To-Channel connector. This provided a secure, isolated development/test/QA systems at a reasonable price. It was all managed at the macrocode level, which had a Unix-like shell.
My understanding was that MS turned to the Samba documentation at one stage because it was a more complete description of the protocol.