Are you sure they're actually talking? I figured they were playing Angry Birds/Candy Crush.
They're talking unless their playing the game using their left facial cheek instead of their fingers. Not sure how many butt dial the games with their left butt cheek.
So people do still buy phones to make calls? I thought it was all about the "smart" stuff nowadays. Or was that the actual joke?:)
I take it that you don't drive very much. Still lots of people yakking away on their cell phone and oblivious to traffic around them. I especially like the ones who are so wrapped up in their conversation that they don't notice the light has changed and glare at you if you honk your horn at them with a look of "Can't you see I'm busy with my conversation!" There's a reason why a lot people have a bumper sticker that says, "Shut up, hang up and drive."
Sobbing voice: "I just can't take it anymore. I need someone to talk to."
911 Operator: "That's OK ma'am. I'm here to talk to you. What's your location?"
Simpering voice: "I'm stuck in traffic on the intersate. It seems like hours since I talked to anyone and my phone won't let me call anyone but you."
911 Operator: "You'll be fine ma'am. We're trained to deal with cell phone withdrawl victims. A nice highway patrol officer is on his way to talk to you in person. How long have it been since you made a phone call ma'am?"
Anguished response: "I don't know. I left the office at 5:00 and talked to BFF until I got in my car but the phone dropped the call as soon as I started the engine. What time is it now?"
911 Operator: "It's now 5:15 you poor dear. You've been without cell phone contact for at least 10 minutes. I'll send the paramedics as well as the highway patrol."
Packages A and B both depend on shared library C. A critical bug is discovered in package A that requires a change to library C. Package B releases an update to stay compatible with library C. It turns out that the update to B doesn't work. There is no way to revert B to the previous version since this also requires reverting library C and package A to the version with the critical bug.
This sort of thing is why commercial apps try to avoid using system shared libraries where practical. The issue is that you just never know what sort of crappy system you're going to be dropped into. Bundling as much as you can limits the pain a lot, and the cost is just space (and time when downloading, if relevant).
Of course, if nobody ever shipped buggy updates and never broke backward compatibility, you wouldn't need this sort of thing. But on Planet Earth... <sigh>
I still remember the days of "DLL hell" when everyone shipping Windows products included their own version of various, supposedly shared DLLs. The problem was the first one loaded was expected to work with the others which didn't happen since it didn't have the right customizations. Yeah, that approach worked really well.
The problem with avoiding shared libraries is that the onus for keeping up with updates to the shared libraries transfers to the application developer. You still run into the same problem as my example; just the immediate consequences are hidden. If "B" builds in or statically links to an old version of the library, there is still the possibility that there will be a critical update to the library and it's now up to the application developer to re-build it in, test the new build and release the update. It's possible that the critical bug is in a part of a library their application doesn't use but we're now relying on the application developer to make that determination.
Packages A and B both depend on shared library C. A critical bug is discovered in package A that requires a change to library C. Package B releases an update to stay compatible with library C. It turns out that the update to B doesn't work. There is no way to revert B to the previous version since this also requires reverting library C and package A to the version with the critical bug.
Testing:
Each old reversion point for any sort of shared library means that every package that is dependent on that library has to be fully tested with each version of the shared library. Add in multiple shared libraries and the test case tree becomes very bushy since all permutations and combinations of the shared libraries must be tested.
Probably they settle for the eye tracking. Sensing distraction and sleepiness would prevent a lot of accidents. The car would alarm the driver or gently park by itself.
Something like that (my emphasis in bold) would make it impossible for most guys to get anywhere in a car in most beach cities. Even worse, I can hear my wife now saying, "Would you keep your eyes on the road! We can't get there if the car parks itself every time some eye candy in a bikini is in view."
I liked the way Obama blocked building the keystone pipeline to supposedly placate the greeny types. So instead of shipping the Bracken crude in a fairly non-polluting pipeline, we have trains pulling it to where it can be processed and polluting and sometimes exploding along the way. Same amount of oil gets burned plus you have the pollution from the trains plus a few exploding trains. Real enviromentalism in practice.
No. First you buy the coal stocks and then, after the stock price runs up from the artificial demand created by this goofy scheme to buy out all of coal companies, you sell the coal stocks and then buy natural gas stocks. The coal stocks will go up as soon as the scheme starts buying. Natural gas stocks won't go up that much until the scheme actually starts limiting the coal supply.
My bet is that there are enough unexploited coal deposits that this scheme will mainly result in a bunch of coal mining start ups and will never seriously impact the supply of coal. Same thing happened when Standard Oil tried to create an oil monopoly back in the 19th century. Lots of people got rich starting and selling oil companies.
There is no such thing as economic security. I recognize that and work for a society that lets me keep what I earn.
Your idea of economic security comes at my expense with me at the wrong end of the tax collector's gun. All of the mass murders of the 20th century (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) promised economic security if only their subjects gave them enough power and relinquished their real liberty. You know. The old, "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs." If those are your idea of "civilized standards", I'll pass.
And how many "modern" coal fired plants are being built? Not many due to pollution limits. On the other hand, there are lots of old coal fired plants that were located close to population centers. I usually pass a couple of coal trains each day hauling Wyoming coal down to Colorado Springs (where I work) and points south like Pueblo and on into New Mexico. Quite a few only make it as far as Denver. Not many power plants up near the mines in Wyoming (also not many people).
Another funny thing about that. Recently had a local political flap about plans to build some new high tension transmission lines where there hadn't been any before. You should have heard the outcry against building "ugly power lines". Nobody seems to notice a couple more coal trains on the same tracks though.
Other point... That's "several million new tons of domestic coal". You apparently missed the "new". Can't find a number for how much domestic coal they haul but they ship about 30 to 35 million tons a year for export. Just one railroad.
Are you still dancing on that woman's grave? Jeez, conservatives didn't celebrate this much when Joseph Freaking Stalin died.
Didn't Hate Week sate your hatred? You know, the week after she died when you had hate parades to show just how much you hated her. No, seriously, this really happened. Hate parades.
Liberals hate conservatives but they REALLY hate conservatives like Thatcher and Reagan who got it right. Conservatives like Bush Jr. and Palin are easy targets and ad hominem attacks that discredit the person rather than the ideas. Thatcher and Reagan put their ideas into operation and both countries benefited. That's what really pisses off the liberals. They'd rather have the country going down a rat hole the way GB was under Labour governments than admit a conservative like Thatcher was right.
Most remaining coal plants are, more or less, at the mine. The energy is 'shipped' down a transmission line.
Bzzzzzzzzttttttttt Wrong.
From a CSX press release today (13 March 2014):
"The company said the reduced operations will be partly offset by higher demand for coal to warm homes and businesses, as it carried "several million new tons of domestic coal" during the quarter."
Other railroads such as Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific and BNSF have all said about the same thing. There is an engineering tradeoff between transportation costs of coal (surprisingly cheap) and transmission losses. The solution seems to be to ship the coal to someplace relatively close to where the power will be needed.
1) Easy to remember. 2) Not a word that is in a password compendium like rainbow tables so no dictionary words or simple upper/lower case permutations or simple substitutions of numbers and punctuation for letters. 3) Meets recognized strong password criteria (mix of upper and lower case, numbers and punctuation and symbols) and at least 10 characters long. 4) Not based on something easily obtained socially.
and add your requirements/critique even though they contradict #3. Have at it.
So, suggest a better method. The requirements are:
1) Easy to remember. 2) Not based on a password already in rainbow tables (e.g., dictionary words with all permutations of upper and lower case; simple substitution of letters, numbers or punctuation for letters; etc.) 3) Not easily guessed from social information. 4) Typical strong password requirements like must contain both upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation (I go though this every 90 days where I work for each password system I have to deal with).
and add your requirements/critique which contradicts #4. Have at it...
In addition to just listing their password requirements, sites could provide a link or bubble help to a method of creating a "good" password. I like:
1) Pick a short phrase (e.g., "See Spot run.") but that connects to the site to provide some mneumonic value (so "See Spot hurl." might be for your vet). 2) Do some simple letter to number, symbol or punctuation substitutions (e.g., "S33 Sp0+ hurl."). 3) If you wish, squish out the blanks between words (e.g., S33Sp0+hurl.).
So we now have an easy to remember, eleven character password that includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, a symbol and punctuation.
I'm still waiting for FORTRAN to make a comeback. And none of this sissy FORTRAN 77 or FORTRAM 95 stuff either; real FORTRAN IV. If I wanted to program in something that looks like PL/1, I'd program in PL/1.
In any technical project requiring more than a few people a small number of the people assigned will gradually emerge as the technical leads, the alpha geeks. This isn't by designation. It's a meritocracy in action. Even though there is no official process, the results are fairly objective. Lower levels of management retain some vestiges of requiring technical competence but, the higher you go, the more the results of who gets promoted are governed by how well an individual shmoozes, kisses fanny, acts as their own PR and other subjective qualities. It is very difficult for higher management to differentiate between an easy project and a competent manager or a hard project and an incompetent manager.
If the above situation isn't enough to keep good engineers from becoming engineering managers, the reward you get for moving to the management track is technical obsolescence. The only thing you become qualified to do is be a manager. In larger companies the only thing you may be qualified to do is be a manager at that company since the bulk of you time is consumed by navigating the arcane bureaucracy that you are part of.
My wife and I have been remodeling our house one room at a time so I know exactly what you mean about houses, cars and any number of reasonably complex consumer products. On the other hand, Microsoft is a company that has perfected "close enough" in software. I started off working in the DoD software world where a much higher standard was expected of any product and don't even get me started with regard to "man-rated" software where a failure could mean loss of life.
An even bigger problem is that with software, we don't get to just say "Close Enough". If you look at any building, bridge, wall, whatever, you will find huge numbers of defects. If the bridge doesn't fall down we say "Close Enough". With industries like medicine, standards are even looser.
Software development is just about the only industry where perfection is expected.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure they're actually talking? I figured they were playing Angry Birds/Candy Crush.
They're talking unless their playing the game using their left facial cheek instead of their fingers. Not sure how many butt dial the games with their left butt cheek.
Cheers,
Dave
So people do still buy phones to make calls? I thought it was all about the "smart" stuff nowadays. Or was that the actual joke? :)
I take it that you don't drive very much. Still lots of people yakking away on their cell phone and oblivious to traffic around them. I especially like the ones who are so wrapped up in their conversation that they don't notice the light has changed and glare at you if you honk your horn at them with a look of "Can't you see I'm busy with my conversation!" There's a reason why a lot people have a bumper sticker that says, "Shut up, hang up and drive."
911 Operator: "911. What's your emergency?"
Sobbing voice: "I just can't take it anymore. I need someone to talk to."
911 Operator: "That's OK ma'am. I'm here to talk to you. What's your location?"
Simpering voice: "I'm stuck in traffic on the intersate. It seems like hours since I talked to anyone and my phone won't let me call anyone but you."
911 Operator: "You'll be fine ma'am. We're trained to deal with cell phone withdrawl victims. A nice highway patrol officer is on his way to talk to you in person. How long have it been since you made a phone call ma'am?"
Anguished response: "I don't know. I left the office at 5:00 and talked to BFF until I got in my car but the phone dropped the call as soon as I started the engine. What time is it now?"
911 Operator: "It's now 5:15 you poor dear. You've been without cell phone contact for at least 10 minutes. I'll send the paramedics as well as the highway patrol."
Packages A and B both depend on shared library C. A critical bug is discovered in package A that requires a change to library C. Package B releases an update to stay compatible with library C. It turns out that the update to B doesn't work. There is no way to revert B to the previous version since this also requires reverting library C and package A to the version with the critical bug.
This sort of thing is why commercial apps try to avoid using system shared libraries where practical. The issue is that you just never know what sort of crappy system you're going to be dropped into. Bundling as much as you can limits the pain a lot, and the cost is just space (and time when downloading, if relevant).
Of course, if nobody ever shipped buggy updates and never broke backward compatibility, you wouldn't need this sort of thing. But on Planet Earth... <sigh>
I still remember the days of "DLL hell" when everyone shipping Windows products included their own version of various, supposedly shared DLLs. The problem was the first one loaded was expected to work with the others which didn't happen since it didn't have the right customizations. Yeah, that approach worked really well.
The problem with avoiding shared libraries is that the onus for keeping up with updates to the shared libraries transfers to the application developer. You still run into the same problem as my example; just the immediate consequences are hidden. If "B" builds in or statically links to an old version of the library, there is still the possibility that there will be a critical update to the library and it's now up to the application developer to re-build it in, test the new build and release the update. It's possible that the critical bug is in a part of a library their application doesn't use but we're now relying on the application developer to make that determination.
Cheers,
Dave
Hello Dave.
Cheers,
Hal
OK. As long as you don't say, "I can't do that, Dave," when I ask you to open the door.
Cheers,
Dave
Shared dependencies:
Packages A and B both depend on shared library C. A critical bug is discovered in package A that requires a change to library C. Package B releases an update to stay compatible with library C. It turns out that the update to B doesn't work. There is no way to revert B to the previous version since this also requires reverting library C and package A to the version with the critical bug.
Testing:
Each old reversion point for any sort of shared library means that every package that is dependent on that library has to be fully tested with each version of the shared library. Add in multiple shared libraries and the test case tree becomes very bushy since all permutations and combinations of the shared libraries must be tested.
Cheers,
Dave
Who else on /. (besides me) remembers the Church Committee hearings? Tricky Dicky? The Saturday Night Massacre?
Cheers,
Dave
Probably they settle for the eye tracking. Sensing distraction and sleepiness would prevent a lot of accidents. The car would alarm the driver or gently park by itself.
Something like that (my emphasis in bold) would make it impossible for most guys to get anywhere in a car in most beach cities. Even worse, I can hear my wife now saying, "Would you keep your eyes on the road! We can't get there if the car parks itself every time some eye candy in a bikini is in view."
Cheers,
Dave
I liked the way Obama blocked building the keystone pipeline to supposedly placate the greeny types. So instead of shipping the Bracken crude in a fairly non-polluting pipeline, we have trains pulling it to where it can be processed and polluting and sometimes exploding along the way. Same amount of oil gets burned plus you have the pollution from the trains plus a few exploding trains. Real enviromentalism in practice.
Cheers,
Dave
No. First you buy the coal stocks and then, after the stock price runs up from the artificial demand created by this goofy scheme to buy out all of coal companies, you sell the coal stocks and then buy natural gas stocks. The coal stocks will go up as soon as the scheme starts buying. Natural gas stocks won't go up that much until the scheme actually starts limiting the coal supply.
My bet is that there are enough unexploited coal deposits that this scheme will mainly result in a bunch of coal mining start ups and will never seriously impact the supply of coal. Same thing happened when Standard Oil tried to create an oil monopoly back in the 19th century. Lots of people got rich starting and selling oil companies.
Cheers,
Dave
There is no such thing as economic security. I recognize that and work for a society that lets me keep what I earn.
Your idea of economic security comes at my expense with me at the wrong end of the tax collector's gun. All of the mass murders of the 20th century (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) promised economic security if only their subjects gave them enough power and relinquished their real liberty. You know. The old, "From each according to his abilities to each according to his needs." If those are your idea of "civilized standards", I'll pass.
Cheers,
Dave
No, Thatcher and Reagan got it the most wrong of all. Not as wrong as Mao, but incredibly wrong by liberal standards.
Fixed that for you. You seem to assume that your liberal leanings are Western standards. Not.
Cheers,
Dave
And how many "modern" coal fired plants are being built? Not many due to pollution limits. On the other hand, there are lots of old coal fired plants that were located close to population centers. I usually pass a couple of coal trains each day hauling Wyoming coal down to Colorado Springs (where I work) and points south like Pueblo and on into New Mexico. Quite a few only make it as far as Denver. Not many power plants up near the mines in Wyoming (also not many people).
Another funny thing about that. Recently had a local political flap about plans to build some new high tension transmission lines where there hadn't been any before. You should have heard the outcry against building "ugly power lines". Nobody seems to notice a couple more coal trains on the same tracks though.
Other point... That's "several million new tons of domestic coal". You apparently missed the "new". Can't find a number for how much domestic coal they haul but they ship about 30 to 35 million tons a year for export. Just one railroad.
Cheers,
Dave
Are you still dancing on that woman's grave? Jeez, conservatives didn't celebrate this much when Joseph Freaking Stalin died.
Didn't Hate Week sate your hatred? You know, the week after she died when you had hate parades to show just how much you hated her. No, seriously, this really happened. Hate parades.
Liberals hate conservatives but they REALLY hate conservatives like Thatcher and Reagan who got it right. Conservatives like Bush Jr. and Palin are easy targets and ad hominem attacks that discredit the person rather than the ideas. Thatcher and Reagan put their ideas into operation and both countries benefited. That's what really pisses off the liberals. They'd rather have the country going down a rat hole the way GB was under Labour governments than admit a conservative like Thatcher was right.
Cheers,
Dave
Most remaining coal plants are, more or less, at the mine. The energy is 'shipped' down a transmission line.
Bzzzzzzzzttttttttt Wrong.
From a CSX press release today (13 March 2014):
"The company said the reduced operations will be partly offset by higher demand for coal to warm homes and businesses, as it carried "several million new tons of domestic coal" during the quarter."
Other railroads such as Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific and BNSF have all said about the same thing. There is an engineering tradeoff between transportation costs of coal (surprisingly cheap) and transmission losses. The solution seems to be to ship the coal to someplace relatively close to where the power will be needed.
Cheers,
Dave
If this starts getting any traction, I need to start buying coal company stocks. You and some others get to feel good. I get rich. Win-win.
Cheers,
Dave
So, suggest an alternative. The requirements are:
1) Easy to remember.
2) Not a word that is in a password compendium like rainbow tables so no dictionary words or simple upper/lower case permutations or simple substitutions of numbers and punctuation for letters.
3) Meets recognized strong password criteria (mix of upper and lower case, numbers and punctuation and symbols) and at least 10 characters long.
4) Not based on something easily obtained socially.
and add your requirements/critique even though they contradict #3. Have at it.
Cheers,
Dave
So, suggest a better method. The requirements are:
1) Easy to remember.
2) Not based on a password already in rainbow tables (e.g., dictionary words with all permutations of upper and lower case; simple substitution of letters, numbers or punctuation for letters; etc.)
3) Not easily guessed from social information.
4) Typical strong password requirements like must contain both upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation (I go though this every 90 days where I work for each password system I have to deal with).
and add your requirements/critique which contradicts #4. Have at it...
Cheers,
Dave
In addition to just listing their password requirements, sites could provide a link or bubble help to a method of creating a "good" password. I like:
1) Pick a short phrase (e.g., "See Spot run.") but that connects to the site to provide some mneumonic value (so "See Spot hurl." might be for your vet).
2) Do some simple letter to number, symbol or punctuation substitutions (e.g., "S33 Sp0+ hurl.").
3) If you wish, squish out the blanks between words (e.g., S33Sp0+hurl.).
So we now have an easy to remember, eleven character password that includes upper and lower case letters, numbers, a symbol and punctuation.
Cheers,
Dave
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
My perl looks like my C that looks like my FORTRAN.
Cheers
Dave
I'm still waiting for FORTRAN to make a comeback. And none of this sissy FORTRAN 77 or FORTRAM 95 stuff either; real FORTRAN IV. If I wanted to program in something that looks like PL/1, I'd program in PL/1.
Cheers,
Dave
In any technical project requiring more than a few people a small number of the people assigned will gradually emerge as the technical leads, the alpha geeks. This isn't by designation. It's a meritocracy in action. Even though there is no official process, the results are fairly objective. Lower levels of management retain some vestiges of requiring technical competence but, the higher you go, the more the results of who gets promoted are governed by how well an individual shmoozes, kisses fanny, acts as their own PR and other subjective qualities. It is very difficult for higher management to differentiate between an easy project and a competent manager or a hard project and an incompetent manager.
If the above situation isn't enough to keep good engineers from becoming engineering managers, the reward you get for moving to the management track is technical obsolescence. The only thing you become qualified to do is be a manager. In larger companies the only thing you may be qualified to do is be a manager at that company since the bulk of you time is consumed by navigating the arcane bureaucracy that you are part of.
Cheers,
Dave
http://www.despair.com/consult...
Cheers,
Dave
My wife and I have been remodeling our house one room at a time so I know exactly what you mean about houses, cars and any number of reasonably complex consumer products. On the other hand, Microsoft is a company that has perfected "close enough" in software. I started off working in the DoD software world where a much higher standard was expected of any product and don't even get me started with regard to "man-rated" software where a failure could mean loss of life.
Cheers,
Dave
An even bigger problem is that with software, we don't get to just say "Close Enough". If you look at any building, bridge, wall, whatever, you will find huge numbers of defects. If the bridge doesn't fall down we say "Close Enough". With industries like medicine, standards are even looser.
Software development is just about the only industry where perfection is expected.
You don't use many Microsoft products...
Cheers,
Dave