You have a point, but I have no mod points at the moment, save the ones I coin myself. Any new ability will invite new abuses (or, at least, new forms of old ones).
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For the regexp challenged, the parent poster was showing how easy it would be to use a rexular expression search engine to harvest e-mail addresses which the Bad Guy could then send spam to.
The point is, some of us like it things to work in a way that suits us, and fear (with some justification) that attempts to make it work "for the masses" will break that. There are other OS that are already targeting the masses. Why should we compeat with them? What does it profit a linux user to win the mass market but lose his OS?
The odd thing is that the people who seem so gung ho to bring linux to the masses are always calling the ones who just want to have it work the way they want it to work "zealots" and "snobs." This is backwards. They think they know what OS is best for everyone else; they are the snobs. They want to beat every other OS just to win; they are the zealots.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I personally expect that linux will eventually be the most frequentky used desktop OS, but only because the people who use it are constantly striving to make it better for themselves. Attempts to make it better for other people (especially vaguely defined demographics) will only slow down the spread.
In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis.
Heck, that's true now. They're called graphs.
But it does bolster my prediction that in five years three nines or better of the pundents attempting to capitalize on our paradigms will be using lingustic chicanery to obsfucate their metheodology.
Because we need to fight the media's power to warp name-of-group to name-of-evil-group at whim. We are not the first, nor the last group to whom this was done. If we all change to distance ourselves from the Bad Guys it appears that we were "harbouring" them and we all know what that leads to. If they succeed in equating Muslim with Terorist, should the vast majority of peaceful Muslims have to change the name of their faith to avoid the taint? Where does it stop?
Changing the language to accomodate / legitimize media stereotypes is, in the long run, a very bad idea.
Stay away from mutual funds (and in fact the stock market as a whole unless you are willing to spend a lot of time researching individual companies, etc.). The market is still way over it's long term base line, and with a glut of baby boomers just waiting for the prices to rise a bit so they call sell (they're hitting retierment soon, if they haven't already), we aren't going to see a bubble like the 90's for another 20+ years--or if we do it will burst a lot worse than this one did at which point having your cash in a jar will turn out to have been the smart move.
I've made a profit in the market every year since I started (including the last three) but it's about the effort level of being a kernel hacker--if you don't do a lot of reading and a lot of thinking you're going to be in a lot of trouble.
--MarkusQ
P.S. The best advise I ever got about the market: ignore press releases. Turn off the sound and watch the money. (e.g. no matter how rosy a picture a company paints, if they are burning money fast enough to be broke in six months, they're in deep do-do. But you won't see this by reading the one line summary of their annual report. You need to read the report, and then research it (where does this number come from?), to figure out what they aren't telling you.)
Sure, I'd hire a hacker. I don't think I'd want a Bad Guy or a Cracker or a Warz D00d or a Script Kid, but a hacker, sure, why not?
After all, I've got a fair amount of crufty lisp code that needs to be tweeked but have yet to meet anyone I'd trust with u+w. (Or rather, anyone I could afford...aye, there's the rub).
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For the ellusive final point, you have to figure out what the duck is for.
This is idiotic. If a very large object is dropped on you, you will die. Does this mean we should stop making large objects? A medium size object can kill you to, as can a small object. Does this mean we should stop making them as well?
I'd be shocked to hear that very very small things couldn't harm you, since this would make them different from objects at every other scale. But the fact that very small things can be harmful (just like everything else) isn't news and certainly isn't a sound basis for making any sort of policy decisions.
It has been decreed that our company is moving from private offices to cubicles. We all know that Peopleware has hard data to warn us away from this, but it cannot be helped at this point. Now that we know that we are going into cubes, what can we do to make it suck less?
Quit now.
Seriously. Get a job at a company that has a clue and doesn't decree stuff like this. You won't regret it, and within a year your present co-workers will be asking you if you can get them hired on there too.
There's nothing at starryskies.com (yes, I read (skimmed) the article) to say where you can view this asteroid from. I wish these astronomy sites would remember that it's possible to view the night sky from Down Under too...
It's in the constellation Virgo (see the diagram at the very end of the article). Virgo can be seen from pretty much anywhere on earth (Think about it: the sun spends one month a year in Virgo, and nobody complains that they can't see it from their home town).
From Melbourne (aka "Mel'b'n") Virgo should be about half way up, to the north, moving across the sky from east to west as the night progresses. Use a southern hemisphere star chart if you need help locating it. The aforementioned diagram tells where to look in Virgo to see the asteroid, depending on the date.
Hey dudes: depending on your time zone, April first is still at least four days away. Please give us a break save your metaphysical metamaterials till the day officially set asside for them.
Just for a minute there I thought this was one of those "(name) dead at (age)" trolls you always see when you browse at -1!
You may have been right. At least, I've not been able to find any other mention of his death on CNN, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, etc.--in fact, the only on-line reference to his death that I have been able to find is the./ article and the the Yahoo story it mentions (by following the link); I'm not even sure how you'd find the link if it wasn't provided, since it doesn't seem to be showing up on the main pages. I'm not saying that he isn't dead, I'm just saying I wouldn't recomend burying him without a tad more evidence.
Patents are a critical part of the foundation of successful free markets. Why would anyone want to innovate if not to profit from his innovations?
While I've generally agreed with your posts, I have to call you on this one. Patents do not assure that you will profit from your inovations. At best, they let you stop others from profiting from your inovations (or even, in many cases, from improving on them). Nowadays, the main thrust seems to have shifted to stopping other people from profiting from their own inovations--which I would hardly call conducive to a free market.
Patents are to free markets what censors are to freedom of the press; not only do they directly limit what can be done, but the threat of them often limits what is attempted.
Why did I bring up Szilard? His conscription program is unconventional, like MarkusQ's. But I think it held a lot more merit.
I would agree. He was, after all, a genius, as opposed to me, some random guy repeating (and quite likely misquoting) the best idea he's heard. It wasn't even my idea, just something I overheard in a bull session between some engineers (note the title of my original post).
So how can the idea be improved? Instead of a draft, have a lottery maybe? So you have to pay a buck for a chance to go up? No one goes against their will, but knowing that your friends and family might play would involve even thouse who don't play. That would still create a lot of interested parties, though perhaps biasing the sample towards the more optimistic. It took me less than thirty seconds to come up with that patch; doubtlessly there are even better alternatves. Any suggestions?
I rolled my own, mostly in Ruby (and ran it in parallel with the previous solution for several months). The main reason? I wanted to know about the things I wanted to know about, and not have to dig the information out of a lot of other cruft. So I do a lot of filtering to supress details that fall within what I define as "normal" for my setup, and only report the exceptions.
The main benifit of this turned out to be that I learned a lot about a configuration that I thought I knew inside and out. Yes, it was more work than dropping in a ready made package, but in retrospect it was well worth it.
I'll pretend you're serious, but I'm not doing to respond to any responses to this message.
I am serious damn it! I'm not asking you to pretend anything, just read to what I wrote instead of slapping a lable on it because it doesn't match your preconcieved notions.
A newborn baby must go on the next shuttle mission! 103 year old Grandma on a resperator is up next!
Newborn babies have to drive over bridges, as do 103 year old grandmothers. That's one of the main reasons bridges are as safe as they are. If the mindset for designing bridges was that they only had to be useable by people in top physical condition, how safe do you think they'd be? If that seems to stretch the point too much, consider comercial aircraft instead. Or elevators. Or cars.
An online discussion forum is the best way to avoid error!
I didn't say anything about an online discussion forum; I said that what was needed was online access to the design details.
Your central point is the accusation that the engineers designing the shuttle simply don't care if the astronauts live or die in the current system- I would have modded that flamebait, but I agree that it could be considered trolling as well. It's certainly deeply offensive to a lot of people.
I didn't say that the engineers don't care; far from it, the ones I've worked with and the greater number that I've known personally all care a great deal. But the system in which they are forced to work is so bogged down in blockheaded management systems that it doen't matter if they care or not. And I'm also not saying that the managers don't care; the managers are stuck in the same disfunctional system and many of them are even more frustrated.
The big problem is that nobody knows what's going on in any effective sense. The ones that have access to the big picture are insulated from the details, and the ones that understand the details of part 163-A(7) don't have access to the people who know subsection R-395.b like the bottom of their coffee cup. I am not saying that they don't care, I'm saying that it doesn't matter if they care or not, because they are hog-tied in red tape and arc welded to a juggernaught.
But I do agree with you on one point: this state of affairs is deeply offensive.
I did this w. Kelly Technical Services a few years back. I had the deal all worked out with the client company, and then contacted a number of shell companies to negotiate who I'd go through. Except for a brief period when they had an idiot working in the office (a problem which they quickly corrcted) they were quite reasonable.
A friend of mine used (IIRC) "T. H. Yoh" and liked them as well.
The market has changed a lot in the last five years, so YMMV.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Even predicting the recent past can be tricky.
on
5595 Days and Counting
·
· Score: 1
If you have a citation that demonstrates otherwise, though, I'd be glad to look it over.
See the link in my first post of this thread. This came up in the presentation of the paper I attended, and the basic answer was (as it often is): process control. IIRC, large area / low temp / slow deposition biases the yield towards longer tubes.
Who was I supposed to be trolling? Are you saying that there are a large number of people reading/. that 1) are involved in the design of the space shuttle and 2) want to keep the system the way it is, so that more people will die, and that I'm therefore trolling them?
And can you give me an example of the "predictable responses" this is supposed to illicit?
Even if you meant it in the less common sense ("a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial") can you explain what is wrong with the idea of opening up the shuttle design process?
If an institution is failing to do its job and people are dying as a consequence, one of the best ways to fix the problem is to enable a large number of people to see (in detail) what is going on, motivate them to care, and motivate the system to listen. Bridge design (to name just one example) improved dramatically when these three conditions were met (large number of people study the designs, they care because they and people they care about use the bridges, and companies that build bad bridges don't prosper). You may disagree but that doesn't mean I'm a troll!
I suppose getting moderated "troll" for suggesting a way to fix problems before someone dies (instead of forming a commitee to investigate each tragedy as it happens) is better than getting moderated "offtopic" for responding to the article instead of to the blather of all the people who didn't read it, but it's just as anoying.
-- MarkusQ
Re:Even predicting the recent past can be tricky.
on
5595 Days and Counting
·
· Score: 1
When I asked a polymer chemist friend about this, he said that longer fibers would solve the problem. This suggests that we cannot yet manufacture fibers long enough to be useful in composites.
AFAIK, that has been a popular theory for some time, and will be hard to quash since it is unfalsifiable; if the fibers aren't working, they must still not be long enough. But at present making longer fibers is literaly "only a matter of time;" with a continious deposition process, the longer you let it run, the longer the fibers are. My understanding is that even with fibers that would have been thought to be long enough (before we could make them), there are problems. In very (overly) simple terms: if the fibers are too tangled, you can't mix them with the bonding agent; if they are too well aligned they either act as fracture features or "pull out" (imagine meshing two brooms end to end, and embedding the meshed heads in jello; let the Jello set; then pull).
The point of my original response aplies here as well; this is an active, fast moving field and what "everybody knows" (we can't make fibers in bulk, we can't make them long enough, etc.) often turns out to be a few months out of date.
The best idea I've heard for building a reliable space transport system:
Publish the entire design or the proposed shuttle and all suport systems online, with wikiesque interface to collect comments and allow people to highlight sections, post RFCs, etc.
Have a national lottery, where every month someone (no age limit) is sellected to go up on it. You are not allowed to refuse the honour.
Part of the paid staff is in charge of moderating the on line discussion. If there is ever a fatality that could have been prevented by acting on information/insight gathered from the public review, the entire paid staff is fired. No warning, no exceptions, no excuses, just like what happened to the people who died.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a point, but I have no mod points at the moment, save the ones I coin myself. Any new ability will invite new abuses (or, at least, new forms of old ones).
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For the regexp challenged, the parent poster was showing how easy it would be to use a rexular expression search engine to harvest e-mail addresses which the Bad Guy could then send spam to.
The point is, some of us like it things to work in a way that suits us, and fear (with some justification) that attempts to make it work "for the masses" will break that. There are other OS that are already targeting the masses. Why should we compeat with them? What does it profit a linux user to win the mass market but lose his OS?
The odd thing is that the people who seem so gung ho to bring linux to the masses are always calling the ones who just want to have it work the way they want it to work "zealots" and "snobs." This is backwards. They think they know what OS is best for everyone else; they are the snobs. They want to beat every other OS just to win; they are the zealots.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I personally expect that linux will eventually be the most frequentky used desktop OS, but only because the people who use it are constantly striving to make it better for themselves. Attempts to make it better for other people (especially vaguely defined demographics) will only slow down the spread.
Can I have some metheodology too?
Sorry, that was a typo.
I meant to say "metheondolodogogollogy."
--MarkusQ
P.S. I love saying that out loud.
And they still won't be using spellcheckers.
Any words that appear to be misspelled are actually new bizzwords I have coined for the occasion.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Real answer: With my 16 mo. old son bouncing on my lap I'm proud of the fact I can type atr all!
In five years, 100 million people will be using an information-visualization tool on a near-daily basis.
Heck, that's true now. They're called graphs.
But it does bolster my prediction that in five years three nines or better of the pundents attempting to capitalize on our paradigms will be using lingustic chicanery to obsfucate their metheodology.
-- MarkusQ
Because we need to fight the media's power to warp name-of-group to name-of-evil-group at whim. We are not the first, nor the last group to whom this was done. If we all change to distance ourselves from the Bad Guys it appears that we were "harbouring" them and we all know what that leads to. If they succeed in equating Muslim with Terorist, should the vast majority of peaceful Muslims have to change the name of their faith to avoid the taint? Where does it stop?
Changing the language to accomodate / legitimize media stereotypes is, in the long run, a very bad idea.
-- MarkusQ
Stay away from mutual funds (and in fact the stock market as a whole unless you are willing to spend a lot of time researching individual companies, etc.). The market is still way over it's long term base line, and with a glut of baby boomers just waiting for the prices to rise a bit so they call sell (they're hitting retierment soon, if they haven't already), we aren't going to see a bubble like the 90's for another 20+ years--or if we do it will burst a lot worse than this one did at which point having your cash in a jar will turn out to have been the smart move.
I've made a profit in the market every year since I started (including the last three) but it's about the effort level of being a kernel hacker--if you don't do a lot of reading and a lot of thinking you're going to be in a lot of trouble.
--MarkusQ
P.S. The best advise I ever got about the market: ignore press releases. Turn off the sound and watch the money. (e.g. no matter how rosy a picture a company paints, if they are burning money fast enough to be broke in six months, they're in deep do-do. But you won't see this by reading the one line summary of their annual report. You need to read the report, and then research it (where does this number come from?), to figure out what they aren't telling you.)
Sure, I'd hire a hacker. I don't think I'd want a Bad Guy or a Cracker or a Warz D00d or a Script Kid, but a hacker, sure, why not?
After all, I've got a fair amount of crufty lisp code that needs to be tweeked but have yet to meet anyone I'd trust with u+w. (Or rather, anyone I could afford...aye, there's the rub).
-- MarkusQ
P.S. For the ellusive final point, you have to figure out what the duck is for.
This is idiotic. If a very large object is dropped on you, you will die. Does this mean we should stop making large objects? A medium size object can kill you to, as can a small object. Does this mean we should stop making them as well?
I'd be shocked to hear that very very small things couldn't harm you, since this would make them different from objects at every other scale. But the fact that very small things can be harmful (just like everything else) isn't news and certainly isn't a sound basis for making any sort of policy decisions.
-- MarkusQ
It has been decreed that our company is moving from private offices to cubicles. We all know that Peopleware has hard data to warn us away from this, but it cannot be helped at this point. Now that we know that we are going into cubes, what can we do to make it suck less?
Quit now.
Seriously. Get a job at a company that has a clue and doesn't decree stuff like this. You won't regret it, and within a year your present co-workers will be asking you if you can get them hired on there too.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
There's nothing at starryskies.com (yes, I read (skimmed) the article) to say where you can view this asteroid from. I wish these astronomy sites would remember that it's possible to view the night sky from Down Under too
It's in the constellation Virgo (see the diagram at the very end of the article). Virgo can be seen from pretty much anywhere on earth (Think about it: the sun spends one month a year in Virgo, and nobody complains that they can't see it from their home town).
From Melbourne (aka "Mel'b'n") Virgo should be about half way up, to the north, moving across the sky from east to west as the night progresses. Use a southern hemisphere star chart if you need help locating it. The aforementioned diagram tells where to look in Virgo to see the asteroid, depending on the date.
-- MarkusQ
If you're using KDE, click on the little gear icon (generally in the lower left corner). Then selected the item "Recent Documents."
Do you suppose that might be how she does it?
-- MarkusQ
Hey dudes: depending on your time zone, April first is still at least four days away. Please give us a break save your metaphysical metamaterials till the day officially set asside for them.
-- MarkusQ
You may have been right. At least, I've not been able to find any other mention of his death on CNN, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, etc.--in fact, the only on-line reference to his death that I have been able to find is the ./ article and the the Yahoo story it mentions (by following the link); I'm not even sure how you'd find the link if it wasn't provided, since it doesn't seem to be showing up on the main pages. I'm not saying that he isn't dead, I'm just saying I wouldn't recomend burying him without a tad more evidence.
-- MarkusQ
While I've generally agreed with your posts, I have to call you on this one. Patents do not assure that you will profit from your inovations. At best, they let you stop others from profiting from your inovations (or even, in many cases, from improving on them). Nowadays, the main thrust seems to have shifted to stopping other people from profiting from their own inovations--which I would hardly call conducive to a free market.
Patents are to free markets what censors are to freedom of the press; not only do they directly limit what can be done, but the threat of them often limits what is attempted.
-- MarkusQ
Is your tagline from Rhapsody in Blue?
Yes.
-- MarkusQ
Why did I bring up Szilard? His conscription program is unconventional, like MarkusQ's. But I think it held a lot more merit.
I would agree. He was, after all, a genius, as opposed to me, some random guy repeating (and quite likely misquoting) the best idea he's heard. It wasn't even my idea, just something I overheard in a bull session between some engineers (note the title of my original post).
So how can the idea be improved? Instead of a draft, have a lottery maybe? So you have to pay a buck for a chance to go up? No one goes against their will, but knowing that your friends and family might play would involve even thouse who don't play. That would still create a lot of interested parties, though perhaps biasing the sample towards the more optimistic. It took me less than thirty seconds to come up with that patch; doubtlessly there are even better alternatves. Any suggestions?
-- MarkusQ
I rolled my own, mostly in Ruby (and ran it in parallel with the previous solution for several months). The main reason? I wanted to know about the things I wanted to know about, and not have to dig the information out of a lot of other cruft. So I do a lot of filtering to supress details that fall within what I define as "normal" for my setup, and only report the exceptions.
The main benifit of this turned out to be that I learned a lot about a configuration that I thought I knew inside and out. Yes, it was more work than dropping in a ready made package, but in retrospect it was well worth it.
-- MarkusQ
I'll pretend you're serious, but I'm not doing to respond to any responses to this message.
I am serious damn it! I'm not asking you to pretend anything, just read to what I wrote instead of slapping a lable on it because it doesn't match your preconcieved notions.
A newborn baby must go on the next shuttle mission! 103 year old Grandma on a resperator is up next!
Newborn babies have to drive over bridges, as do 103 year old grandmothers. That's one of the main reasons bridges are as safe as they are. If the mindset for designing bridges was that they only had to be useable by people in top physical condition, how safe do you think they'd be? If that seems to stretch the point too much, consider comercial aircraft instead. Or elevators. Or cars.
An online discussion forum is the best way to avoid error!
I didn't say anything about an online discussion forum; I said that what was needed was online access to the design details.
Your central point is the accusation that the engineers designing the shuttle simply don't care if the astronauts live or die in the current system- I would have modded that flamebait, but I agree that it could be considered trolling as well. It's certainly deeply offensive to a lot of people.
I didn't say that the engineers don't care; far from it, the ones I've worked with and the greater number that I've known personally all care a great deal. But the system in which they are forced to work is so bogged down in blockheaded management systems that it doen't matter if they care or not. And I'm also not saying that the managers don't care; the managers are stuck in the same disfunctional system and many of them are even more frustrated.
The big problem is that nobody knows what's going on in any effective sense. The ones that have access to the big picture are insulated from the details, and the ones that understand the details of part 163-A(7) don't have access to the people who know subsection R-395.b like the bottom of their coffee cup. I am not saying that they don't care, I'm saying that it doesn't matter if they care or not, because they are hog-tied in red tape and arc welded to a juggernaught.
But I do agree with you on one point: this state of affairs is deeply offensive.
-- MarkusQ
I did this w. Kelly Technical Services a few years back. I had the deal all worked out with the client company, and then contacted a number of shell companies to negotiate who I'd go through. Except for a brief period when they had an idiot working in the office (a problem which they quickly corrcted) they were quite reasonable.
A friend of mine used (IIRC) "T. H. Yoh" and liked them as well.
The market has changed a lot in the last five years, so YMMV.
-- MarkusQ
See the link in my first post of this thread. This came up in the presentation of the paper I attended, and the basic answer was (as it often is): process control. IIRC, large area / low temp / slow deposition biases the yield towards longer tubes.
-- MarkusQ
I fail to see why this was moderated troll.
Who was I supposed to be trolling? Are you saying that there are a large number of people reading /. that 1) are involved in the design of the space shuttle and 2) want to keep the system the way it is, so that more people will die, and that I'm therefore trolling them?
And can you give me an example of the "predictable responses" this is supposed to illicit?
Even if you meant it in the less common sense ("a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial") can you explain what is wrong with the idea of opening up the shuttle design process? If an institution is failing to do its job and people are dying as a consequence, one of the best ways to fix the problem is to enable a large number of people to see (in detail) what is going on, motivate them to care, and motivate the system to listen. Bridge design (to name just one example) improved dramatically when these three conditions were met (large number of people study the designs, they care because they and people they care about use the bridges, and companies that build bad bridges don't prosper). You may disagree but that doesn't mean I'm a troll!
I suppose getting moderated "troll" for suggesting a way to fix problems before someone dies (instead of forming a commitee to investigate each tragedy as it happens) is better than getting moderated "offtopic" for responding to the article instead of to the blather of all the people who didn't read it, but it's just as anoying.
-- MarkusQ
The point of my original response aplies here as well; this is an active, fast moving field and what "everybody knows" (we can't make fibers in bulk, we can't make them long enough, etc.) often turns out to be a few months out of date.
-- MarkusQ
The best idea I've heard for building a reliable space transport system:
- Publish the entire design or the proposed shuttle and all suport systems online, with wikiesque interface to collect comments and allow people to highlight sections, post RFCs, etc.
- Have a national lottery, where every month someone (no age limit) is sellected to go up on it. You are not allowed to refuse the honour.
- Part of the paid staff is in charge of moderating the on line discussion. If there is ever a fatality that could have been prevented by acting on information/insight gathered from the public review, the entire paid staff is fired. No warning, no exceptions, no excuses, just like what happened to the people who died.
-- MarkusQ