Coming soon - proof that our lungs don't operate like vacuum cleaners, our eyes are not quite the same as digital cameras, and shockingly, our colons function differently from marketing departments...
My brain must be big because I'm smart enough not to take seriously a study of intellect done by a guy who's professor of management in a business school!
So, this is a compiler that can run under Delphi (with help from another FS project), but supports more target CPUs than the native Delphi compiler. Sounds very promising - does this mean that perhaps someday one could use Delphi (or Kylix?) on a PC to write simple apps for palmtops, such as the Zaurus or even a PocketPC?
I'm not talking about anything really fancy, but I'm hired to do a lot of data-gathering apps - glorified highly-customized time tracker programs - and it would help a lot if I could compile them onto a handheld without plumping down 4 figures for CodeWarrior (not to mention the time to (re)learn something other than Object Pascal, which is all I've really worked with for ages now; they don't pay me enough to actually expend the effort necessary for this old brain to learn, say, Java at this late stage of life...)
$628,880,000 exactly? Clearly these experts have somehow obtained data from an orifice more commonly associated with waste elimination, and produced an authoritative result for national publication. Didn't any of these people learn about significant digits??
"Next week, a doctor with a flashlight will show us where sales projections come from..." - Dogbert
To quote (as best I can) Eric Idle: "John Cleese used to say he'd do anything for money, so I offered him a pound to shut up. He took it."
At one time or another in his life, he's done just about everything - movies, TV, books, stage performances, the list goes on - brilliantly. As much as I'd like to see him chained to a desk and forced to write more of my favorite stuff, I think he's earned the right to do whatever the hell he wants for a quid... even crap movies like this.
I looked this up on my library's website catalog, and it's listed in the Young Adult section... perhaps this book isn't quite as scholarly as the reviewer seems to think?
> Can you explain how the already sunk cost of the primitive > block system can be more expensive than new equipment per car?
If you want to frame your argument merely on the bottom line of overall cost, then you're right and we should all go home and write our congresscritters. May I suggest that the reality is more complicated than that - your position has probably occured to almost everyone else involved, for one thing, and money is almost never the sole cause OR solution to a problem involving people, infrastructure and bureaucracy...
If you were in a situation where you were responsible for rail safety but had no control over the attitudes of people on the ground fixing greasy rusting hunks of metal in the rain, would you gripe about it, or try to do something that IS within your control - namely, adding a safety factor which is not dependant on anything that is chronically broken about the current system? Maybe that's what's happening here.
> But when they can't even get basic block controls down right, > and guarantee switches are in the right position, why waste time
It's not necessarily a waste of time merely to investigate whether this approach will improve overall safety (which is all the article stated). If it was simple to fix the basics, as you seem to imply, I reckon it would have happened already. Maybe there are other factors preventing the old-tech moving parts from being "right" in all situations, and a secondary system to monitor conditions and (hopefully) sound an alert when a crisis occurs actually IS "worth beans".
Your argument would have more weight if for some reason it was impossible for a society (or a rail transport administrative body) to work on both ends of the technical spectrum at once. But I doubt a study on the utility of GPS-based safety systems will have any adverse effect on what are doubtless ongoing efforts to improve the maintenance and design of the simpler side of things. And just maybe, given time and a lot of luck, a high-tech safety system might help compensate for the negligence of an underpaid rail mechanic at a crucial time - whereas merely ignoring the possibility of developing such a system won't help him or the passengers one bit.
I leave the resulting lawsuits for either contingency as an exercise for the reader.
> Why do these idiots insist on spending a fortune on high tech solutions > when low tech solutions have been around for a hundred years
Today's idiot is tomorrow's visionary.
The low-tech solutions are pretty expensive too, especially once unions get involved - and the cost of human labor rising is a GOOD thing, in the long run. (A comedian friend of mine suggests that presidents should campaign on a platform of promising "100% unemployment" - after all, who WANTS to work?)
I agree that the high-tech solutions tend to be trouble-prone, at least in the early years, but give 'em time. They didn't even let people dial their own telephone numbers for the first ~50 years or so of phone service, if I recall correctly...
"Is X dead/dying?" questions...
on
Death of the Album?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Why not ask: SHOULD the album be dead? The march of technology produces new devides, formats and gadgetry while message boards, newspapers and water-cooler chats decry the death of one thing or another. Progress does not do this because it ceases to like the old; it simply produces improvements, and the ones which people at large decide represent something "better" survive and flourish.
I don't know much about music, but to me the arguments sound a lot like "is the floppy disk dead?" - well, arguably it is. Do any of us want it back? Game and application manufacturers used to be constrained by the storage capacity of disks, and often came up with ingenius optimizations (or were forced to leave out unnecessary frills) to do so. They don't have to do that any more. The value of the results of this I leave as an exercise to the reader, but I would still not go back to having floppies as my only option.
If musicians could tell a story with the selection of songs on the album as a whole, it was because their talent allowed them to find a means of expressing their thoughts which fit within the boundaries of the medium - an ~hourlong LP that you had to flip over halfway through. I bet those same artists can and will find entirely new means of expression to fit within the boundaries of today, and tomorrow.
You can still buy a spinning wheel if you want to process your own wool. The fact that the vast majority of people in this country prefer not to doesn't mean that we, as a society, have "lost" the spinning wheel.
This was Andy Griffith's idea...
on
Hondas in Space
·
· Score: 1
If anyone remembers Salvage 1... sounds like pretty much the same idea to me.
Yes he could use the RAM; I can't find a way to Email you privately here - please contact me at this temp address: bonsoirfp(at)yahoo(dot)com, and thanks in advance!
I don't mean to minimize your question, but I had to laugh when you described PC2700 as "old"... I've been digging through my closets looking for my plastic bag full of old '486-era SIMMs - perhaps 1-4 meg each? - to send to Central America, where a guy I know helps run a kindergarten. Import duties on anything remotely modern are prohibitive, so he's struggling to keep early-90s PCs online running educational software to teach kids how to read and etc. That's what I thought of when I saw this article heading...
I guess it kinda depends how hard you want to dig for ideas. I think what a previous poster said would be most practical - sell 'em on eBay, use the proceeds for something else, maybe a pizza party? Or, the idea about striking up a relationship by 'donating' to a local storefront PC repair shop is a good one too. Unfortunately, finding outlets for this sort of thing which are more altruistic in their benefit is probably not practical for most people.
Y'know, I bet there's a clearninghouse somewhere on the web for charitable needs and people with surplus equipment... oh wait, no, there's probably a hundred of them, that's usually the problem!
Hey Slashdot, I need a Bluetooth-equipped eggbeater which can distinguish barcodes from Mandarin Chinese, in the dark, but it should run a Posix-compliant OS and not cost more than $74.92 (Australian) - and here's the hard part: because I'm using it in a preschool, it has to be phlegm-proof. Is anything like this shipping now, or soon? (compliance with the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht is optional but would be nice)
It's hard for me to imagine a 'geek frat'... they're for people with spare time, an appetite for socializing and (often) alcohol, and a future need for business contacts. I dunno about anyone else, but regardless of where I am in life now, in college I couldn't have managed any of that even if I had the inclination and a snail's chance in hell of getting into one.
Frats are, as I said, good for making friends you'll need for business contacts in your adult life. But the IT world doesn't really work that way - geeks aren't in competition with one another like MBAs tend to be. Frats are also good for providing an us-vs-them structure that keeps the rowdier students distracted from rebelling against the administration, but geeks are in college to learn rather than to burn things down.
And let's face it, a geek frat would be exactly like a geek dorm - everyone would stay in their rooms clicking 'reload' on Slashdot or coding. There's just no point.
You're not the only one. There are sources of information out there for busy people - my favorite (for the sciences if not programming) is the magazine "Science News" (www.ScienceNews.org), which is a slim weekly magazine containing impressively concise-but-informative articles. Since it's not written for the 5th-grade reading level mandated for general circulation newspapers, they can get a lot of background into a little space. When I subscribed to it (I've had to stop, sadly, see below) I'd keep it in the car and read a few paragraphs every time I hit a red light. I'd bet there's something similar out there for computers.
Tip two - seek out (or create?) ways to LISTEN to your reading. Books on tape are one obvious way, but I read online columns that also come in MP3 format. It's probably quite easy to combine OCR and speech synthesis into something automated, if you have something you really need to listen to on your commute. Any spare time when you're only using part of your brain - while cooking, driving, even showering, just remember that there are two good ways to get info into your head - eyes AND ears.
Finally, prioritize. For years I religiously read the weekly paper, Science News, and a number of other publications. As my online reading increased, and my real-life activities increased, I had to pare down that reading (and drop fiction almost entirely) in order to balance things. TV is now at a bare minimum; I read while I exercise, etc etc. If it's important you'll find a way to get it done, but make sure it's something that IS important!
I'd edit this post for readability but I've just come off 14 hours of work, and I've not had even 4 hours in a row for some while, so... g'night!
> Some of us feel about politics the way others feel about sports.
But with a sporting event, there are actual occurances that can be reported on during the game - such-and-such a player did this-or-that with the ball, resulting in a career-ending injury for someone else, or whatever. With this election, until the polls close all you'll get is an endless parade of talking heads speculating about vapor, filling time pointlessly so that there's something to go in between the commercials. (So in one respect, it's much like any other day for most of the news networks!)
After the polls close, of course, there'll be heaps of biased and often inaccurate reporting on what I suspect will represent the death rattle of representative democracy... but that's another topic. My reaction was to the idea that someone wanted to go out of their way to listen to all the 'pre-game' dross.
"America may be the greatest country in the world, but that's kinda like being the best-looking Denny's waitress." - Doug Stanhope
I personally wish I could just crawl into a cave and leaving a wake-up call for inaguration day. I can't IMAGINE wanting to keep up with the minute-by-minute details of what'll doubtless be only the beginning of a weeks-long debacle. Put it another way - do you really need to go out of your way to get "information" of questionable relevance a few seconds before you would anyway? It's the Presidential election, you'd have to be pretty careful NOT to find out about anything really significant.
Relax. Get a book-on-tape of something you've always wanted to read for your journey. Use the time wisely instead of suckling at the mass-media tit because they've told you that you MUST be INFORMED every MINUTE of the DAY, by US!
Cutting a deal? While I genuinely applaud your impulse towards finding an amicable solution via barter, I don't think you're being anywhere near cynical enough... You didn't read what he quoted them as saying - "We haven't had any trouble in the past" That's a psychology which is very, very difficult to fight against.
If you become a victim of identity theft, it would be difficult if not impossible to trace back to negligence on the part of your landlord (or anyone else in most cases); so unless they are predisposed to worry about it, they're not going to - and they'll probably never really suffer from this attitude. Good luck trying to make a deal with them.
Then again, I live in an area which is just about the most densely populated in the US; it's possible you might find property managers in less expensive areas who have not lost their souls and brains and might be amenable to reasoned argument. I can't count on having hot water, electricity or the hallway outside my front door to be free of homeless people (getting in via the broken security doors), so I've learned a healthy disrespect for landlords.
Years ago at the Aspen Comedy Festival, I was using one of the communal Internet computers (all Macs in the room, that year) and found a floppy disk which happened to belong to Dave Chappelle. I learned this by checking the contents, which included notes on the bits he wanted to do on a forthcoming Leno appearance.
I can't remember why I didn't try harder to get it back to him, nor have I met him since, but I didn't publish the stuff anywhere. So... ho hum.
I think I get it now - it's only a good story if you blab to the world!
I could write paragraphs on pranks you could pull, but frankly if you can't think of your own, it would be pointless - you're not the type.
The only other "meaningful" way to go would be to use the opportunity to give a message to the downtrodden you're leaving behind. Show them just how lazy, insubordinate, and unmotivated one can be without actually getting fired (for the duration of however long you have left) - just be a really bad example to other employees, and watch management squirm in their inability to fire you in today's litigious climate... ideally, the outcome of this act could be that everyone else will realize their true position, begin acting similarly, and perhaps management will be forced into a corner with regards to how they treat their 'human resources'. Businesses treat employees like shit only when they think they can get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Coming soon - proof that our lungs don't operate like vacuum cleaners, our eyes are not quite the same as digital cameras, and shockingly, our colons function differently from marketing departments...
My brain must be big because I'm smart enough not to take seriously a study of intellect done by a guy who's professor of management in a business school!
So, this is a compiler that can run under Delphi (with help from another FS project), but supports more target CPUs than the native Delphi compiler. Sounds very promising - does this mean that perhaps someday one could use Delphi (or Kylix?) on a PC to write simple apps for palmtops, such as the Zaurus or even a PocketPC?
I'm not talking about anything really fancy, but I'm hired to do a lot of data-gathering apps - glorified highly-customized time tracker programs - and it would help a lot if I could compile them onto a handheld without plumping down 4 figures for CodeWarrior (not to mention the time to (re)learn something other than Object Pascal, which is all I've really worked with for ages now; they don't pay me enough to actually expend the effort necessary for this old brain to learn, say, Java at this late stage of life...)
$628,880,000 exactly? Clearly these experts have somehow obtained data from an orifice more commonly associated with waste elimination, and produced an authoritative result for national publication. Didn't any of these people learn about significant digits??
"Next week, a doctor with a flashlight will show us where sales projections come from..." - Dogbert
To quote (as best I can) Eric Idle:
"John Cleese used to say he'd do anything for money, so I offered him a pound to shut up. He took it."
At one time or another in his life, he's done just about everything - movies, TV, books, stage performances, the list goes on - brilliantly. As much as I'd like to see him chained to a desk and forced to write more of my favorite stuff, I think he's earned the right to do whatever the hell he wants for a quid... even crap movies like this.
I looked this up on my library's website catalog, and it's listed in the Young Adult section... perhaps this book isn't quite as scholarly as the reviewer seems to think?
And here - IBM Research - PAN
And I'm pretty sure I read about it on Slashdot at the time, too, but darned if I can find it in a search now.
Is NTT just sooo big that they can take on IBM in a patent fight; or is it a cross-licensing deal?
I can think of a lot of applications for this if they can get it to fit into a Java Ring...
> Can you explain how the already sunk cost of the primitive
> block system can be more expensive than new equipment per car?
If you want to frame your argument merely on the bottom line of overall cost, then you're right and we should all go home and write our congresscritters. May I suggest that the reality is more complicated than that - your position has probably occured to almost everyone else involved, for one thing, and money is almost never the sole cause OR solution to a problem involving people, infrastructure and bureaucracy...
If you were in a situation where you were responsible for rail safety but had no control over the attitudes of people on the ground fixing greasy rusting hunks of metal in the rain, would you gripe about it, or try to do something that IS within your control - namely, adding a safety factor which is not dependant on anything that is chronically broken about the current system? Maybe that's what's happening here.
> But when they can't even get basic block controls down right,
> and guarantee switches are in the right position, why waste time
It's not necessarily a waste of time merely to investigate whether this approach will improve overall safety (which is all the article stated). If it was simple to fix the basics, as you seem to imply, I reckon it would have happened already. Maybe there are other factors preventing the old-tech moving parts from being "right" in all situations, and a secondary system to monitor conditions and (hopefully) sound an alert when a crisis occurs actually IS "worth beans".
Your argument would have more weight if for some reason it was impossible for a society (or a rail transport administrative body) to work on both ends of the technical spectrum at once. But I doubt a study on the utility of GPS-based safety systems will have any adverse effect on what are doubtless ongoing efforts to improve the maintenance and design of the simpler side of things. And just maybe, given time and a lot of luck, a high-tech safety system might help compensate for the negligence of an underpaid rail mechanic at a crucial time - whereas merely ignoring the possibility of developing such a system won't help him or the passengers one bit.
I leave the resulting lawsuits for either contingency as an exercise for the reader.
> Why do these idiots insist on spending a fortune on high tech solutions
> when low tech solutions have been around for a hundred years
Today's idiot is tomorrow's visionary.
The low-tech solutions are pretty expensive too, especially once unions get involved - and the cost of human labor rising is a GOOD thing, in the long run. (A comedian friend of mine suggests that presidents should campaign on a platform of promising "100% unemployment" - after all, who WANTS to work?)
I agree that the high-tech solutions tend to be trouble-prone, at least in the early years, but give 'em time. They didn't even let people dial their own telephone numbers for the first ~50 years or so of phone service, if I recall correctly...
Why not ask: SHOULD the album be dead? The march of technology produces new devides, formats and gadgetry while message boards, newspapers and water-cooler chats decry the death of one thing or another. Progress does not do this because it ceases to like the old; it simply produces improvements, and the ones which people at large decide represent something "better" survive and flourish.
I don't know much about music, but to me the arguments sound a lot like "is the floppy disk dead?" - well, arguably it is. Do any of us want it back? Game and application manufacturers used to be constrained by the storage capacity of disks, and often came up with ingenius optimizations (or were forced to leave out unnecessary frills) to do so. They don't have to do that any more. The value of the results of this I leave as an exercise to the reader, but I would still not go back to having floppies as my only option.
If musicians could tell a story with the selection of songs on the album as a whole, it was because their talent allowed them to find a means of expressing their thoughts which fit within the boundaries of the medium - an ~hourlong LP that you had to flip over halfway through. I bet those same artists can and will find entirely new means of expression to fit within the boundaries of today, and tomorrow.
You can still buy a spinning wheel if you want to process your own wool. The fact that the vast majority of people in this country prefer not to doesn't mean that we, as a society, have "lost" the spinning wheel.
If anyone remembers Salvage 1... sounds like pretty much the same idea to me.
Yes he could use the RAM; I can't find a way to Email you privately here - please contact me at this temp address: bonsoirfp(at)yahoo(dot)com, and thanks in advance!
I don't mean to minimize your question, but I had to laugh when you described PC2700 as "old"... I've been digging through my closets looking for my plastic bag full of old '486-era SIMMs - perhaps 1-4 meg each? - to send to Central America, where a guy I know helps run a kindergarten. Import duties on anything remotely modern are prohibitive, so he's struggling to keep early-90s PCs online running educational software to teach kids how to read and etc. That's what I thought of when I saw this article heading...
I guess it kinda depends how hard you want to dig for ideas. I think what a previous poster said would be most practical - sell 'em on eBay, use the proceeds for something else, maybe a pizza party? Or, the idea about striking up a relationship by 'donating' to a local storefront PC repair shop is a good one too. Unfortunately, finding outlets for this sort of thing which are more altruistic in their benefit is probably not practical for most people.
Y'know, I bet there's a clearninghouse somewhere on the web for charitable needs and people with surplus equipment... oh wait, no, there's probably a hundred of them, that's usually the problem!
Hey Slashdot, I need a Bluetooth-equipped eggbeater which can distinguish barcodes from Mandarin Chinese, in the dark, but it should run a Posix-compliant OS and not cost more than $74.92 (Australian) - and here's the hard part: because I'm using it in a preschool, it has to be phlegm-proof. Is anything like this shipping now, or soon? (compliance with the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht is optional but would be nice)
It's hard for me to imagine a 'geek frat'... they're for people with spare time, an appetite for socializing and (often) alcohol, and a future need for business contacts. I dunno about anyone else, but regardless of where I am in life now, in college I couldn't have managed any of that even if I had the inclination and a snail's chance in hell of getting into one.
Frats are, as I said, good for making friends you'll need for business contacts in your adult life. But the IT world doesn't really work that way - geeks aren't in competition with one another like MBAs tend to be. Frats are also good for providing an us-vs-them structure that keeps the rowdier students distracted from rebelling against the administration, but geeks are in college to learn rather than to burn things down.
And let's face it, a geek frat would be exactly like a geek dorm - everyone would stay in their rooms clicking 'reload' on Slashdot or coding. There's just no point.
You're not the only one. There are sources of information out there for busy people - my favorite (for the sciences if not programming) is the magazine "Science News" (www.ScienceNews.org), which is a slim weekly magazine containing impressively concise-but-informative articles. Since it's not written for the 5th-grade reading level mandated for general circulation newspapers, they can get a lot of background into a little space. When I subscribed to it (I've had to stop, sadly, see below) I'd keep it in the car and read a few paragraphs every time I hit a red light. I'd bet there's something similar out there for computers.
Tip two - seek out (or create?) ways to LISTEN to your reading. Books on tape are one obvious way, but I read online columns that also come in MP3 format. It's probably quite easy to combine OCR and speech synthesis into something automated, if you have something you really need to listen to on your commute. Any spare time when you're only using part of your brain - while cooking, driving, even showering, just remember that there are two good ways to get info into your head - eyes AND ears.
Finally, prioritize. For years I religiously read the weekly paper, Science News, and a number of other publications. As my online reading increased, and my real-life activities increased, I had to pare down that reading (and drop fiction almost entirely) in order to balance things. TV is now at a bare minimum; I read while I exercise, etc etc. If it's important you'll find a way to get it done, but make sure it's something that IS important!
I'd edit this post for readability but I've just come off 14 hours of work, and I've not had even 4 hours in a row for some while, so... g'night!
> Some of us feel about politics the way others feel about sports.
But with a sporting event, there are actual occurances that can be reported on during the game - such-and-such a player did this-or-that with the ball, resulting in a career-ending injury for someone else, or whatever. With this election, until the polls close all you'll get is an endless parade of talking heads speculating about vapor, filling time pointlessly so that there's something to go in between the commercials. (So in one respect, it's much like any other day for most of the news networks!)
After the polls close, of course, there'll be heaps of biased and often inaccurate reporting on what I suspect will represent the death rattle of representative democracy... but that's another topic. My reaction was to the idea that someone wanted to go out of their way to listen to all the 'pre-game' dross.
"America may be the greatest country in the world, but that's kinda like being the best-looking Denny's waitress." - Doug Stanhope
I personally wish I could just crawl into a cave and leaving a wake-up call for inaguration day. I can't IMAGINE wanting to keep up with the minute-by-minute details of what'll doubtless be only the beginning of a weeks-long debacle. Put it another way - do you really need to go out of your way to get "information" of questionable relevance a few seconds before you would anyway? It's the Presidential election, you'd have to be pretty careful NOT to find out about anything really significant.
Relax. Get a book-on-tape of something you've always wanted to read for your journey. Use the time wisely instead of suckling at the mass-media tit because they've told you that you MUST be INFORMED every MINUTE of the DAY, by US!
Sharp has announced plans to produce a backpack-sized version of their big-screen TVs for hiking and other outdoor sports.
Cutting a deal? While I genuinely applaud your impulse towards finding an amicable solution via barter, I don't think you're being anywhere near cynical enough... You didn't read what he quoted them as saying - "We haven't had any trouble in the past" That's a psychology which is very, very difficult to fight against.
If you become a victim of identity theft, it would be difficult if not impossible to trace back to negligence on the part of your landlord (or anyone else in most cases); so unless they are predisposed to worry about it, they're not going to - and they'll probably never really suffer from this attitude. Good luck trying to make a deal with them.
Then again, I live in an area which is just about the most densely populated in the US; it's possible you might find property managers in less expensive areas who have not lost their souls and brains and might be amenable to reasoned argument. I can't count on having hot water, electricity or the hallway outside my front door to be free of homeless people (getting in via the broken security doors), so I've learned a healthy disrespect for landlords.
I wonder -
Is this the first American astronaut to die of natural causes?
"Body heat activated - when the temperature rises, it fuses your arms to your sides so that you can't release any bad armpit smells"
OK, I'm just spitballing here.
Years ago at the Aspen Comedy Festival, I was using one of the communal Internet computers (all Macs in the room, that year) and found a floppy disk which happened to belong to Dave Chappelle. I learned this by checking the contents, which included notes on the bits he wanted to do on a forthcoming Leno appearance.
I can't remember why I didn't try harder to get it back to him, nor have I met him since, but I didn't publish the stuff anywhere. So... ho hum.
I think I get it now - it's only a good story if you blab to the world!
I could write paragraphs on pranks you could pull, but frankly if you can't think of your own, it would be pointless - you're not the type.
The only other "meaningful" way to go would be to use the opportunity to give a message to the downtrodden you're leaving behind. Show them just how lazy, insubordinate, and unmotivated one can be without actually getting fired (for the duration of however long you have left) - just be a really bad example to other employees, and watch management squirm in their inability to fire you in today's litigious climate... ideally, the outcome of this act could be that everyone else will realize their true position, begin acting similarly, and perhaps management will be forced into a corner with regards to how they treat their 'human resources'. Businesses treat employees like shit only when they think they can get away with it.
See the movie "Office Space" for some hints.