I live in the Netherlands, and with the exchange rates as they are, the US is definately no longer 'cheapo city' for worshipping the great god 'Consumer Electronics'.
But I still buy suff when I'm there because in my experience you can walk into a store and get instant satisfaction on cool new stuff about 6 months earlier than over here (unless you can wait for Mail-Order, which I can't, dammit I want stuff NOW)
I'm in Philly next month, and my credit card is cleared and ready to go again;)
Unfortunately a lot of religous bigots -do- consider it evil not to have children, even if they will have a sad and short life. A senior cleric in the UK recently went on record saying that it was 'selfish' of couples not to have children (sorry, no ref's to hand). And a certain large church has a long-established practice of prohibiting it's adherents any form of contraception.
As I look at the problems overpopulation is creating, I have made my own mind up where the true evil lies.
It was on the surveyor (?) craft that landed in the pre-apollo buildup, this was visited by astronauts from a late apollo mission (14 or 15). They brought back some selected parts to test how materials have faired after long space exposure, but viable microbes where also found (it also caused wobbles at NASA since it was supposed to have been sterilised before launch as usual).
In a pinch the global internet would survive without the US, it would just get slower
I wonder about this, if the load that the US puts on the Internet is also removed, then maybe the status-quo would be maintained, or at least the slowdown would not be so extreme. Also remember that lots of p0rn and Napster traffic would disappear, so that's another huge saving;)
I wouldn't be at all surprised if whoever thought of the acronym (for TPC that is, not M$) also had in mind the fact that 'fin' is used at the end of a lot of arthouse and French films. it is pretty much synomous with 'The End'.
Sort of hard to explain. It is meant to be interperated -both- ways as it reads. It is both a statement of fact, and a sarcastic reference to the fact that -you- (in a generic sense, most/. readers are excempt;) are welcome to NT (just count me out).
Last I used was 4.0 If you no longer have to ctrl-alt-del to get into W2K, is this some kind of innovation??
I prefer Terry Pratchetts concept of 'Hermit Elephants' (from the Discworld Companion).
"These poor creatures lack the thick skins of normal Elephants, and use abandoned mud huts to provide camoflage and protection instead. They have not problem obtaining abandoned mud huts since the previous occupants move out very rapidly when a hermit Elephant moves in."
This is accompanied by a hysterical picture of a mud hut with two mad eye's and a trunk peering out the window.
And a complete history of everything you've brought using that card, how often, wether you prefer coke/pepsi/perrier etc.. And possibly your credit card number, (but I'm not sure if they are allowed to keep that). This is still usefull to them, even if they cannot tie it to a name, it still gives them useful demographics.
I have to say that when I see companies fighting like this, I want to bang -everbody's- heads together.
It is just so sad and pathetic. Most of us don't care about the advertising anyway, some of us will never see it (webwasher/junkbuster/etc..) Think of all the resources, people, money, time, bandwidth being wasted on this trivial shit. Why don't they all grow up and do something useful with their sad little lives.
I got the following in a private email, and thought I'd pass it along:
JHC> I have replied personally because I had moderated the discussion and JHC> couldn't post...
JHC> You asked: JHC> be honest I have never heard of it happening in the OSource community JHC> (there must be some examples?...>>
JHC> One that is close to my heart is ALSA (www.alsa-project.org). It's a JHC> project to completely rewrite digital audio and music support in the JHC> Linux kernel. It will replace the crufty and outdated OSS architecture JHC> which is cross-UNIX and very entrenched; so this decision seems pretty JHC> gutsy (to me, at least).
JHC> I'm sure there are probably other examples.
Email address hidden to protect the innocent from spammers..
I have seen references saying that you believe the lack of peer review to be a closed-source weakness. I have personally been on closed-source projects where a large degree of peer review happened. It is an integral part of the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) from the SEI. While this level of review does not seem generally used by 'desktop market' developers, it is in heavy use by safety and mission critical system development.
How do you see peer review done to Open-Source as improving on the sort of strict review demanded by good commercial software 'process'?
(Note, I was involved in a discussion of this here.)
-Who- make the big -painful- decisions with OSource code? Does anyone have the strength and power to say 'This section of code is lousy, lets accept the 'hit' of re-writing it.'?
This must be an area where OSource can score over closed models, but to be honest I have never heard of it happening in the OSource community (there must be some examples? I have a vague memory of Mr Carmack saying he wanted to rewrite some Linux network code?). Is it a case of you do it, and then hope that your changes are accepted by the wider community, does this encourage you to start?
OTOH I have seen it twice in a closed context (admittidly in a 'quality over quantity' embedded controller market). Legacy code was looked at and a decision made that "we spend man-years dealing with all the problems from this, it is a bottomless pit of bugs and we pay a fortune to the one geek who understands it, if he ever leaves we're stuffed!". Suddenly a corporation will invest in fixing it up-front because they can see a payback in the mid-term, (obviously we're not talking M$oft here..)
It uses fuel injectors mounted in the combusion chamber wall, removing the intake valve entirely.
How does the air charge get in??
I thought that they still had a intake valve, and the TDI merely referred to the clever positioning of the injectors.
Auto intake valves have been used (no cam, they just open on demand) but have problems because they don't necessarily close when you want, i.e. before ignition...
TDI systems on a 2-stroke engine are a interesting idea, I know some manufacturer is working on, or has released, such a beast.
Seem to be getting a lot of interest from some in the aero industry, the AirCar for instance. There is a definate advantage to being able to answer the question 'How many moving parts does your engine have?" with the answer '2'. Compare that to 7 for the simplest four-stroke I have ever met (in a lawnmower). 2 strokes can be nearly as simple I suppose, but the rotary is jsut neat!
Things get much worse as you add more combustion chambers. Gowd knows how many moving parts in a modern v6/8, and a Honda Vtec, just pray the cambelt never snaps..
In Truck and Car (used a lot in cars here in europe) applications this might be no bad thing, so long as they get it right, camshafts are a very well developed and understood technology.
But one of my fathers favorite stories is from when he worked for British Gas (Note for American speakers, here I mean gaseous gas, not petrol). The Thames river in flooded, flooding the gasworks. They got a boat and paddled rounbd the site to the pumphouse, where the big diesel pumps were still chugging along, five feet underwater, keeping the gas pressure up and preventing the pipes flooding, just as they were designed to.
The point is that the pure mechanical nature of a conventional diesel is a advantage in some situations. Offroaders often like them for their power characteristics, but also because they are very tough compared to petrol units. Similar in boats, you can get away with immersing them in a warm salt mist, that would eat any electronics not immensely shielded, and get away with it.
A nice thing about CMM is that it is not binary, there are differetn levls of 'following' it. We were level5, pretty hard to achieve. This was audited on several occasions. Peer review again. Internal, cross-divisonal internal and external (we passed audits at L5 from all three). The toughest was the cross-divisional, nothing like a bunch of engineers from a L2 division trying to prove that our rating was a pack of lies.
Would you know if there was something dangerous like this lurking in your closed source code?
Probably, at L5 we had tight configuration management, in a package a wee-bit more secure than CVS (cough *ClearCase* cough). It would take a reasonable conspiracy because coder, and integrator are different. Review is done on the files once they are under CM control, and the perp's would be traceable even years down the line, unless you could get a savvy sysadmin to join in.
It's not impossible, but pretty damn difficult, and the same can be said for open-source, as other posters have pointed out.
Eric S. Raymond said just this week that the open source model has one strength that closed source truly lacks, and can never have - peer review. All other "professional" endeavours of this magnitude have it (civil engineering was his example) and those professions are all the better for it.
Closed source development where quality is a focus does have quite a lot of review, by peers, and others. And the whole process (architecture, design, code and test) is fully reviewed in a structured method that ensures that everything is covered, not just the 'gee wizz' bits.
HOWEVER, this is not how Micro$oft and most other 'software houses' work.. It is used by places that truely care about software quality (NASA for instance). I used to work for Motorola developing for safety-critical systems, and peer review was very strong. I was a sysadmin and I was subject to review!
Check out the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) from the SEI. Compare it with the list of things that most of us consider open source strengths, you might be surprised. If done right, it allows bug free (and I do mean free, as in no signifigent bugs at all!) development.
Just because the likes of Micro$oft cannot be bothered to use this stuff, does not mean that closed source can -never- deliver quality or security. It just costs more.
Google may, or may not use banners (I honestly don't know, I normally run under webwasher so I wont see them anyway. But the Google factsheet certainly leaves the option open (see the 2nd paragraph in the 'Business Model' section).
Slashdot Mirror
I live in the Netherlands, and with the exchange rates as they are, the US is definately no longer 'cheapo city' for worshipping the great god 'Consumer Electronics'.
;)
But I still buy suff when I'm there because in my experience you can walk into a store and get instant satisfaction on cool new stuff about 6 months earlier than over here (unless you can wait for Mail-Order, which I can't, dammit I want stuff NOW)
I'm in Philly next month, and my credit card is cleared and ready to go again
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
Unfortunately a lot of religous bigots -do- consider it evil not to have children, even if they will have a sad and short life. A senior cleric in the UK recently went on record saying that it was 'selfish' of couples not to have children (sorry, no ref's to hand). And a certain large church has a long-established practice of prohibiting it's adherents any form of contraception.
As I look at the problems overpopulation is creating, I have made my own mind up where the true evil lies.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
IIRC
It was on the surveyor (?) craft that landed in the pre-apollo buildup, this was visited by astronauts from a late apollo mission (14 or 15). They brought back some selected parts to test how materials have faired after long space exposure, but viable microbes where also found (it also caused wobbles at NASA since it was supposed to have been sterilised before launch as usual).
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
In a pinch the global internet would survive without the US, it would just get slower
;)
I wonder about this, if the load that the US puts on the Internet is also removed, then maybe the status-quo would be maintained, or at least the slowdown would not be so extreme. Also remember that lots of p0rn and Napster traffic would disappear, so that's another huge saving
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
I wouldn't be at all surprised if whoever thought of the acronym (for TPC that is, not M$) also had in mind the fact that 'fin' is used at the end of a lot of arthouse and French films. it is pretty much synomous with 'The End'.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
Errr..
/. readers are excempt ;) are welcome to NT (just count me out).
Sort of hard to explain. It is meant to be interperated -both- ways as it reads. It is both a statement of fact, and a sarcastic reference to the fact that -you- (in a generic sense, most
Last I used was 4.0 If you no longer have to ctrl-alt-del to get into W2K, is this some kind of innovation??
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
Here:
EU probes Echelon spy net
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
I prefer Terry Pratchetts concept of 'Hermit Elephants' (from the Discworld Companion).
"These poor creatures lack the thick skins of normal Elephants, and use abandoned mud huts to provide camoflage and protection instead. They have not problem obtaining abandoned mud huts since the previous occupants move out very rapidly when a hermit Elephant moves in."
This is accompanied by a hysterical picture of a mud hut with two mad eye's and a trunk peering out the window.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
And a complete history of everything you've brought using that card, how often, wether you prefer coke/pepsi/perrier etc.. And possibly your credit card number, (but I'm not sure if they are allowed to keep that). This is still usefull to them, even if they cannot tie it to a name, it still gives them useful demographics.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
I have to say that when I see companies fighting like this, I want to bang -everbody's- heads together.
It is just so sad and pathetic. Most of us don't care about the advertising anyway, some of us will never see it (webwasher/junkbuster/etc..) Think of all the resources, people, money, time, bandwidth being wasted on this trivial shit. Why don't they all grow up and do something useful with their sad little lives.
Sorry.. in a pissed mood today. Life's too short.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
Surreal.. I'm reading this while listening to Pink Floyds 'Set the controls for thge heart of the sun', I don't know if it's appropriate or not.
Anyway, my question is if anybody knows how this is manoevered and set / kept on course? Will it still need giro's and manoevering thrusters?
Do they plan to actually 'sail' it to make course corrections (which would be quite 'trick')?
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
I got the following in a private email, and thought I'd pass it along:
JHC> I have replied personally because I had moderated the discussion and
JHC> couldn't post...
JHC> You asked:
JHC> be honest I have never heard of it happening in the OSource community
JHC> (there must be some examples?...>>
JHC> One that is close to my heart is ALSA (www.alsa-project.org). It's a
JHC> project to completely rewrite digital audio and music support in the
JHC> Linux kernel. It will replace the crufty and outdated OSS architecture
JHC> which is cross-UNIX and very entrenched; so this decision seems pretty
JHC> gutsy (to me, at least).
JHC> I'm sure there are probably other examples.
Email address hidden to protect the innocent from spammers..
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
I have seen references saying that you believe the lack of peer review to be a closed-source weakness. I have personally been on closed-source projects where a large degree of peer review happened. It is an integral part of the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) from the SEI. While this level of review does not seem generally used by 'desktop market' developers, it is in heavy use by safety and mission critical system development.
How do you see peer review done to Open-Source as improving on the sort of strict review demanded by good commercial software 'process'?
(Note, I was involved in a discussion of this here.)
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
This is a well-made point.
-Who- make the big -painful- decisions with OSource code? Does anyone have the strength and power to say 'This section of code is lousy, lets accept the 'hit' of re-writing it.'?
This must be an area where OSource can score over closed models, but to be honest I have never heard of it happening in the OSource community (there must be some examples? I have a vague memory of Mr Carmack saying he wanted to rewrite some Linux network code?). Is it a case of you do it, and then hope that your changes are accepted by the wider community, does this encourage you to start?
OTOH I have seen it twice in a closed context (admittidly in a 'quality over quantity' embedded controller market). Legacy code was looked at and a decision made that "we spend man-years dealing with all the problems from this, it is a bottomless pit of bugs and we pay a fortune to the one geek who understands it, if he ever leaves we're stuffed!". Suddenly a corporation will invest in fixing it up-front because they can see a payback in the mid-term, (obviously we're not talking M$oft here..)
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
It uses fuel injectors mounted in the combusion chamber wall, removing the intake valve entirely.
How does the air charge get in??
I thought that they still had a intake valve, and the TDI merely referred to the clever positioning of the injectors.
Auto intake valves have been used (no cam, they just open on demand) but have problems because they don't necessarily close when you want, i.e. before ignition...
TDI systems on a 2-stroke engine are a interesting idea, I know some manufacturer is working on, or has released, such a beast.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
Rotary engines rule...
Amen.
Seem to be getting a lot of interest from some in the aero industry, the AirCar for instance. There is a definate advantage to being able to answer the question 'How many moving parts does your engine have?" with the answer '2'. Compare that to 7 for the simplest four-stroke I have ever met (in a lawnmower). 2 strokes can be nearly as simple I suppose, but the rotary is jsut neat!
Things get much worse as you add more combustion chambers. Gowd knows how many moving parts in a modern v6/8, and a Honda Vtec, just pray the cambelt never snaps..
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
In Truck and Car (used a lot in cars here in europe) applications this might be no bad thing, so long as they get it right, camshafts are a very well developed and understood technology.
But one of my fathers favorite stories is from when he worked for British Gas (Note for American speakers, here I mean gaseous gas, not petrol). The Thames river in flooded, flooding the gasworks. They got a boat and paddled rounbd the site to the pumphouse, where the big diesel pumps were still chugging along, five feet underwater, keeping the gas pressure up and preventing the pipes flooding, just as they were designed to.
The point is that the pure mechanical nature of a conventional diesel is a advantage in some situations. Offroaders often like them for their power characteristics, but also because they are very tough compared to petrol units. Similar in boats, you can get away with immersing them in a warm salt mist, that would eat any electronics not immensely shielded, and get away with it.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
tries to follow the CMM
A nice thing about CMM is that it is not binary, there are differetn levls of 'following' it. We were level5, pretty hard to achieve. This was audited on several occasions. Peer review again. Internal, cross-divisonal internal and external (we passed audits at L5 from all three). The toughest was the cross-divisional, nothing like a bunch of engineers from a L2 division trying to prove that our rating was a pack of lies.
Would you know if there was something dangerous like this lurking in your closed source code?
Probably, at L5 we had tight configuration management, in a package a wee-bit more secure than CVS (cough *ClearCase* cough). It would take a reasonable conspiracy because coder, and integrator are different. Review is done on the files once they are under CM control, and the perp's would be traceable even years down the line, unless you could get a savvy sysadmin to join in.
It's not impossible, but pretty damn difficult, and the same can be said for open-source, as other posters have pointed out.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
Eric S. Raymond said just this week that the open source model has one strength that closed source truly lacks, and can never have - peer review. All other "professional" endeavours of this magnitude have it (civil engineering was his example) and those professions are all the better for it.
Closed source development where quality is a focus does have quite a lot of review, by peers, and others. And the whole process (architecture, design, code and test) is fully reviewed in a structured method that ensures that everything is covered, not just the 'gee wizz' bits.
HOWEVER, this is not how Micro$oft and most other 'software houses' work.. It is used by places that truely care about software quality (NASA for instance). I used to work for Motorola developing for safety-critical systems, and peer review was very strong. I was a sysadmin and I was subject to review!
Check out the CMM (Capability Maturity Model) from the SEI. Compare it with the list of things that most of us consider open source strengths, you might be surprised. If done right, it allows bug free (and I do mean free, as in no signifigent bugs at all!) development.
Just because the likes of Micro$oft cannot be bothered to use this stuff, does not mean that closed source can -never- deliver quality or security. It just costs more.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
In general, people with a good case, don't lose.
Can I come and join you under the rock? must be nice there.
People with good causes but no money/lobbying power/or just a bit incompetent, loose all the time.
To (mis)quote Terry Pratchett: 'It's not just the cream that floats to the top'.
Methinks you are a karmawhore sir.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
Anybody have a clue who the sponsors of this are? is there any way to find out?
I've been trying to imagine a 'worst case' sponsor list, but funnily enough it has only one name on it...
EZ
-'Press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to log on..'
Google may, or may not use banners (I honestly don't know, I normally run under webwasher so I wont see them anyway. But the Google factsheet certainly leaves the option open (see the 2nd paragraph in the 'Business Model' section).
EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'
I'm sorry, but everytime I see a picture of the Launch platform I just want to stroke a white cat and say 'Good Evening Mr.Bond..'
It just looks like a 60's Bond evil genius's secret base..
EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'
I doubt if thi is prior art, since it does not track you during your session.
So it's neat, but only for geeks. Whereas the patent app. is neat, but only for 'expletive-deleted' marketeers.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'
Actually you can blow excellent soap bubbles with them..
I expect.. I've only ever seen them (along with owners) on the Amsterdam metro, but they look up to the job.
EZ
-'Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to log in..'