Will this "risk adverse" affect our future explorers? Will we have fewer people climbing on top of rockets to go into space or testing state of the art aircraft? We need risk takers, people who push the envelope. Imagine some of the accomplishment that would have been lost if these people didn't take risks.
Of course. I see a younger generation who are terrified of failure, terrified of risk, unable to attempt anything that isn't
a 100% guaranteed success. Not to mention the fragile-as-eggshells mentality that
goes with it.
The way I look at it, if you don't risk failure, you don't risk success, either.
When a colleague was at her wits end on a geometry problem relating to a graphical program, we went
out for coffee, drew diagrams and equations on napkins, and solved the problem.
When a colleague asked me for advice on a presentation, we went for coffee and outlined it, complete with important
diagrams, on napkins.
At a trade show I got talking to some people at the hotel who were attending the same show, and when I drew a map on
a napkin showing how to get from the hotel to the show location, they thought it was a work of art and asked me to sign it.
Passwords with patterns are easy for humans to remember, but any short password
i vulnerable to a bruteforce attack.
My favourite way to generate passwords is the first letter of each word in a phrase. Somebody looking
over your shoulder sees you type TbonoTbTitQ, don't see a pattern, and can't remember it. While you think
To be or not To be, That is the Question. Not that this makes any difference to a computer that starts at aaaaaaaaa and works up
to zzzzzzzzz.
No, I've never used this password on any computer system. One I did use, though (20-odd years ago, at a company
that has long since ceased to exist), was
MRwitdtEssahtuwws. If you can tell me the underlying phrase I'll be impressed. And scared.:-)
Given a choice between a roundabout and a four-way stop, I'll take the roundabout, thank you. For
moderate traffic volumes, they work well. For heavy traffic volumes they don't, but
that's what we pay the road planners for.
The fact that people don't know how they work is a significant issue, but around here (Vancouver, BC) people don't seem to have
much grasp of any traffic rules or regulations. When I started driving again a few years ago after
not driving for about 10 years, I actually looked up the laws about four way stops, because I had so many
close calls that I wondered if they had changed in the interim. They hadn't. The drivers had.
The first time I drove in England I asked the guy at the car rental counter about the
rules of the road at roundabouts, because I hadn't been able to discern any. I also asked a Melbourne taxi driver
about hook turns, and he said the best thing to do was watch what people did before I tried it myself.
I'm not a hockey fan, but had checked in on the game from time to time to see how it was going,
and when I saw Boston up 4-0 in the 3rd period I knew Vancouver had lost, again.
A little later I looked out my window - I live in Burnaby, but have a panoramic view from Mount Seymour to Metrotown - saw the column
of smoke rising from downtown Vancouver, and knew something had happened. I can't add to what the news
has reported, or what others have said. I was disappointed, disgusted.
Yes, there is lots of excellent imagery that will make it relatively easy to identify and apprehend lots of
the morons who were responsible. But the problem is deeper. Yes, we can try them, get payment for damages, and so on.
The real problem, though, is a social one: how do we have so many people who thought it
was cool (some clearly did) to riot, to loot stores, to destroy the property of others? That's the problem,
and you can't solve it overnight.
So it's just the "night" thing, the fact of the rotation of the earth. Averaged over a year, they would see the same number of eclipses as everyone else.
In fact, I'd have expected them to see fewer eclipses than at the equator, since the moon spends more time near the equator. Is it even possible to get a full solar eclipse at the poles?
Yes. The eclipse on 20 March 2015 will be total at the North Pole. For the South Pole, try 16 January 2094.
In 2004 I looked at maps to see where was the nearest place I might go to see the transit of Venus. The nearest place was Inuvik,
where the transit would be visible during the midnight sun. It looked good until I checked the weather prospects.:-(
I wasn't one of the cool, beautiful people in high school. I was physically and socially awkward, quiet,
kept to myself, and
tended to live in my own little world.
Fashions change. At the time (1970s) I was just viewed as weird. Now I would be viewed as having Asperger's. Whatever
fits, I suppose. I'm still quiet, still keep to myself, still have a skewed view of the world, but have long since lost the awkwardness, since I stopped
pretending to be somebody I wasn't and started to just be myself.
I sometimes wonder what happened to some of the people I knew in high school. I hope some of them turned out
well. I hope some of the got what they deserved. I got what I wanted, and am happy with my life.
Way back when, in my undergrad days, I earned a bit of extra money by
working in the university library. One thing that was always made clear was that you
had to put books and stuff back on the shelf in the right place, because if you put them
in the wrong place it was unlikely anybody would ever find them again. You might as well throw them
away.
The key is searching, finding things. I thought it was pretty obvious that anybody who could
come up with
a better way to find things on the internet would make a buttload of money. That better way,
for the moment at least, is Google.
I've always thought the solution for stuff like this was to hack it so it records what you want it to record. Lessee
now, breakfast in San Francisco, lunch in Paris, where shall I go for dinner?
The usual reasons: not enough bang for the buck, the perception
of a forced upgrade, DVDs work just fine, thank you.
Plus the draconian DRM that goes with all HD stuff.
What was wrong with Windows for Workgroups? I mean how did you know there was something better out there?
Being a Mac programmer might have had something to do with it...:-)
This was the time Apple was moving their product line from 68k to PowerPC. Our first PowerPC compiler didn't
generate fat binaries, but I figured out how to make my own with ResEdit and the 68k compiler.
I bought a used 486 computer in 1997, booted it, saw that it had
Windows for Workgroups on it, marvelled that people actually paid money for it, bought
a Linux book at the local technical bookstore, loaded Slackware 3.3, and was off and running.
I've always liked the way Slackware doesn't try to hide the fact that it's a Unix clone.
I also like the way you can build any sort of system you like with it, desktop, server, whatever.
Mythbusters has done some fascinating work, like Crimes and Myth-Demeanors, and their moon hoax episode.
Too many recent episodes have been what I call "crowd pleasers". Little, if any science. Maximum
use of gratuitous explosives. The Green Hornet special was a particularly pointless example.
I try not to be too hard on COBOL. It dates back to the pre-Cambrian of computing, and they just didn't know any better.
We're still stuck with it, though I count my blessings that nobody has ever tried to get me to write programs in it.
My biggest objection to Java is I've never seen an application written in Java that didn't totally suck shit. The company
I work for went bust because a couple of people took a course in Java, convinced the Powers That Were to use it and Java Server
Pages for a bet-the-company project, went crazy with their newfound knowledge, couldn't make it work, and down the tube we went.
Here in Canada, most of us are far enough north that our summers are bright, DST or not. Here in Vancouver at "only" 49 degrees north, the latest sunset (if we stayed on standard time) is about 2025 PST, with twilight until nearly 2200 PST in June and July. Further north it's brighter, later. I've been in Yukon (63 degrees north) in May when it was like a bright overcast day at 0100. How much more do people want?
By the same token, our winters are dark, no matter what we do. The earliest sunset in Vancouver is about 1600 PST, and the latest sunrise is about 0800 PST.
I think messing with the clocks is pointless. There may be a sweet spot, say, around 40 degrees north, but Canada is well north of that.
I agree, except for the fact that too many people have the idea that, "The computer matched them up, so it must be correct."
Case in point: facial recognition software (e.g. iPhoto) can't tell my younger sister and I apart. There are pictures where I'm the blonde
and she's the brunette, which makes it even more complicated...
I'm typing this on Chrome right now. I like its zen-like simplicity, a window with a text box across the top.
Type something in to that box and it does something sensible with it. No fuss, no hassle.
At work I switched from Firefox to Chrome. At home I switched from Safari to Chrome.
The newest bridge here in Vancouver, the Golden Ears Bridge,
uses electronic tolling. It's the first toll bridge in these parts since tolls were abolished on other bridges
in the 1960s. I don't use it enough to justify a transponder. Translink send me a bill for a few dollars every 3 months.
Since it goes from nowhere to nowhere,
nobody uses it much at all: it's almost always deserted. It's a handy landmark for the
Pitt Meadows Airport, though the actual reporting
point when approaching from the east is Hammond Mill, on the river right by
Port Hammond.
The new Port Mann Bridge will use the same setup. Unlike Golden Ears, it is a major
part of the road network. It only took them 40 years of gridlock to decide it needed upgrading.
I don't mind electronic tolling, actually. It saves having to fumble for change. My company's head office is in Dallas, not far from
the
George Bush Turnpike. Last time I got a rental car with a transponder, but the system didn't seem to recognize it.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be kind of cramped, and I rather suspect the gravitational pull would be negligible for all practical purposes.
Assuming the same average density as Earth, the surface gravity would be about 1/50000 that of Earth. I make it 0.0002 meters/second squared.
...laura
Will this "risk adverse" affect our future explorers? Will we have fewer people climbing on top of rockets to go into space or testing state of the art aircraft? We need risk takers, people who push the envelope. Imagine some of the accomplishment that would have been lost if these people didn't take risks.
Of course. I see a younger generation who are terrified of failure, terrified of risk, unable to attempt anything that isn't a 100% guaranteed success. Not to mention the fragile-as-eggshells mentality that goes with it.
The way I look at it, if you don't risk failure, you don't risk success, either.
...laura
I've done real work on napkins. Examples:
When a colleague was at her wits end on a geometry problem relating to a graphical program, we went out for coffee, drew diagrams and equations on napkins, and solved the problem.
When a colleague asked me for advice on a presentation, we went for coffee and outlined it, complete with important diagrams, on napkins.
At a trade show I got talking to some people at the hotel who were attending the same show, and when I drew a map on a napkin showing how to get from the hotel to the show location, they thought it was a work of art and asked me to sign it.
...laura
Passwords with patterns are easy for humans to remember, but any short password i vulnerable to a bruteforce attack.
My favourite way to generate passwords is the first letter of each word in a phrase. Somebody looking over your shoulder sees you type TbonoTbTitQ, don't see a pattern, and can't remember it. While you think To be or not To be, That is the Question. Not that this makes any difference to a computer that starts at aaaaaaaaa and works up to zzzzzzzzz.
No, I've never used this password on any computer system. One I did use, though (20-odd years ago, at a company that has long since ceased to exist), was MRwitdtEssahtuwws. If you can tell me the underlying phrase I'll be impressed. And scared. :-)
...laura
I recently bought an Acorn Electron on eBay. It works. Now to think up something super-1337 to do with it.
I also still own the Pentium 233 MMX system I did my Master's thesis on.
...laura
Given a choice between a roundabout and a four-way stop, I'll take the roundabout, thank you. For moderate traffic volumes, they work well. For heavy traffic volumes they don't, but that's what we pay the road planners for.
The fact that people don't know how they work is a significant issue, but around here (Vancouver, BC) people don't seem to have much grasp of any traffic rules or regulations. When I started driving again a few years ago after not driving for about 10 years, I actually looked up the laws about four way stops, because I had so many close calls that I wondered if they had changed in the interim. They hadn't. The drivers had.
The first time I drove in England I asked the guy at the car rental counter about the rules of the road at roundabouts, because I hadn't been able to discern any. I also asked a Melbourne taxi driver about hook turns, and he said the best thing to do was watch what people did before I tried it myself.
...laura
I think Perform This Way is a hoot. The video is weird, but it is Weird Al.
If you didn't know which was the original and which was the parody, it might be hard to tell which was which.
...laura, Lady Gaga fan
In Soviet Russia computer wirewraps you.
I'm not a hockey fan, but had checked in on the game from time to time to see how it was going, and when I saw Boston up 4-0 in the 3rd period I knew Vancouver had lost, again.
A little later I looked out my window - I live in Burnaby, but have a panoramic view from Mount Seymour to Metrotown - saw the column of smoke rising from downtown Vancouver, and knew something had happened. I can't add to what the news has reported, or what others have said. I was disappointed, disgusted.
Yes, there is lots of excellent imagery that will make it relatively easy to identify and apprehend lots of the morons who were responsible. But the problem is deeper. Yes, we can try them, get payment for damages, and so on. The real problem, though, is a social one: how do we have so many people who thought it was cool (some clearly did) to riot, to loot stores, to destroy the property of others? That's the problem, and you can't solve it overnight.
...laura
So it's just the "night" thing, the fact of the rotation of the earth. Averaged over a year, they would see the same number of eclipses as everyone else.
In fact, I'd have expected them to see fewer eclipses than at the equator, since the moon spends more time near the equator. Is it even possible to get a full solar eclipse at the poles?
Yes. The eclipse on 20 March 2015 will be total at the North Pole. For the South Pole, try 16 January 2094.
In 2004 I looked at maps to see where was the nearest place I might go to see the transit of Venus. The nearest place was Inuvik, where the transit would be visible during the midnight sun. It looked good until I checked the weather prospects. :-(
...laura
I wasn't one of the cool, beautiful people in high school. I was physically and socially awkward, quiet, kept to myself, and tended to live in my own little world.
Fashions change. At the time (1970s) I was just viewed as weird. Now I would be viewed as having Asperger's. Whatever fits, I suppose. I'm still quiet, still keep to myself, still have a skewed view of the world, but have long since lost the awkwardness, since I stopped pretending to be somebody I wasn't and started to just be myself.
I sometimes wonder what happened to some of the people I knew in high school. I hope some of them turned out well. I hope some of the got what they deserved. I got what I wanted, and am happy with my life.
OK, so what are us girls supposed to do? That bush doesn't look big enough to squat behind.
Way back when, in my undergrad days, I earned a bit of extra money by working in the university library. One thing that was always made clear was that you had to put books and stuff back on the shelf in the right place, because if you put them in the wrong place it was unlikely anybody would ever find them again. You might as well throw them away.
The key is searching, finding things. I thought it was pretty obvious that anybody who could come up with a better way to find things on the internet would make a buttload of money. That better way, for the moment at least, is Google.
...laura
I've always thought the solution for stuff like this was to hack it so it records what you want it to record. Lessee now, breakfast in San Francisco, lunch in Paris, where shall I go for dinner?
...laura
You don't make bombs with breast milk. Everybody knows it's the secret sweetener of jCola!
...laura
The usual reasons: not enough bang for the buck, the perception of a forced upgrade, DVDs work just fine, thank you. Plus the draconian DRM that goes with all HD stuff.
It all adds up to a non-starter for me.
...laura
What was wrong with Windows for Workgroups? I mean how did you know there was something better out there?
Being a Mac programmer might have had something to do with it... :-)
This was the time Apple was moving their product line from 68k to PowerPC. Our first PowerPC compiler didn't generate fat binaries, but I figured out how to make my own with ResEdit and the 68k compiler.
...laura
I bought a used 486 computer in 1997, booted it, saw that it had Windows for Workgroups on it, marvelled that people actually paid money for it, bought a Linux book at the local technical bookstore, loaded Slackware 3.3, and was off and running.
I've always liked the way Slackware doesn't try to hide the fact that it's a Unix clone. I also like the way you can build any sort of system you like with it, desktop, server, whatever.
...laura
I'm glad I'm not the only one.
Mythbusters has done some fascinating work, like Crimes and Myth-Demeanors, and their moon hoax episode. Too many recent episodes have been what I call "crowd pleasers". Little, if any science. Maximum use of gratuitous explosives. The Green Hornet special was a particularly pointless example.
...laura
That's what I've been wondering. With constant GPS signal all over the place, what do we need land-based atomic clock synchronisation for?
Cost. Clocks that sync to LF signals (WWVB, DCF77, JJY, etc.) are based on cheap off-the-shelf chipsets. GPS sync costs an order of magnitude more.
Availability. GPS needs to see the sky. It doesn't work very well (if at all) inside buildings. LF time signals do.
...laura
I try not to be too hard on COBOL. It dates back to the pre-Cambrian of computing, and they just didn't know any better. We're still stuck with it, though I count my blessings that nobody has ever tried to get me to write programs in it.
My biggest objection to Java is I've never seen an application written in Java that didn't totally suck shit. The company I work for went bust because a couple of people took a course in Java, convinced the Powers That Were to use it and Java Server Pages for a bet-the-company project, went crazy with their newfound knowledge, couldn't make it work, and down the tube we went.
...laura
Here in Canada, most of us are far enough north that our summers are bright, DST or not. Here in Vancouver at "only" 49 degrees north, the latest sunset (if we stayed on standard time) is about 2025 PST, with twilight until nearly 2200 PST in June and July. Further north it's brighter, later. I've been in Yukon (63 degrees north) in May when it was like a bright overcast day at 0100. How much more do people want?
By the same token, our winters are dark, no matter what we do. The earliest sunset in Vancouver is about 1600 PST, and the latest sunrise is about 0800 PST.
I think messing with the clocks is pointless. There may be a sweet spot, say, around 40 degrees north, but Canada is well north of that.
...laura
I agree, except for the fact that too many people have the idea that, "The computer matched them up, so it must be correct."
Case in point: facial recognition software (e.g. iPhoto) can't tell my younger sister and I apart. There are pictures where I'm the blonde and she's the brunette, which makes it even more complicated...
...laura
I'm typing this on Chrome right now. I like its zen-like simplicity, a window with a text box across the top. Type something in to that box and it does something sensible with it. No fuss, no hassle.
At work I switched from Firefox to Chrome. At home I switched from Safari to Chrome.
...laura
The newest bridge here in Vancouver, the Golden Ears Bridge, uses electronic tolling. It's the first toll bridge in these parts since tolls were abolished on other bridges in the 1960s. I don't use it enough to justify a transponder. Translink send me a bill for a few dollars every 3 months. Since it goes from nowhere to nowhere, nobody uses it much at all: it's almost always deserted. It's a handy landmark for the Pitt Meadows Airport, though the actual reporting point when approaching from the east is Hammond Mill, on the river right by Port Hammond.
The new Port Mann Bridge will use the same setup. Unlike Golden Ears, it is a major part of the road network. It only took them 40 years of gridlock to decide it needed upgrading.
I don't mind electronic tolling, actually. It saves having to fumble for change. My company's head office is in Dallas, not far from the George Bush Turnpike. Last time I got a rental car with a transponder, but the system didn't seem to recognize it.
...laura