If you had any idea of the hell transsexual people go through growing up you would feel differently about this.
I went through that hell. I'm not genetically female, but I was always a girl in my heart, where it counts. Physically,
I'm as female as the doctors could make me. I have to tell doctors I'm transsexual, because they can't tell.
It may not blind a pilot, but being startled when you're on approach is Not A Good Thing. The plane
is close to the ground and not going very fast. It's right on the edge of falling out of the sky. In a sense, it
is falling out of the sky...
I have the Kindle app on my iPad, and my main observation is that I read a lot faster. The amount
of text per screen is less than on a printed page, but it's just about right to read at a glance. It's a shame the battery
life sucks compared to a real Kindle.
Because they offer the best bang for the buck.
Because pilots are trained to use them. Because they work. Because aviation is totally anal about
"if it ain't broke, don't fix it". This is A Good Thing.
I'm learning to fly in Piper Cherokees, and I have a magnetic compass and gyroscopic heading indicator at my disposal. Both are accurate, but both have idiosyncrasies.
The magnetic compass is subject to errors when accelerating or decelerating on east/west courses. It also misbehaves when turning to/from north or south.
The heading indicator slowly drifts as Earth rotates underneath it. On long flights you have to periodically
re-set the heading indicator.
The pre-takeoff checklist includes setting the heading indicator to the magnetic compass, and verifying that both read
correctly when you pull on to the runway. In the future Runway 01 (13 degrees) will become Runway 36 or Runway 02.
I've worked with lots of prickly, anything-but-well-rounded people. Some of them have been a joy
to work with. Some I would rather cross the street to avoid. But they have the ideas, the insights that
keep companies going. Good companies know that if you want people who think differently,
you need people who are themselves different. I'm certainly different.
Then there are the assholes. I've never met any who were as good as they thought they were,
let alone good enough to get away with being such assholes. Because there really is no
excuse for such behaviour in the workplace.
I've never
met a female asshole. Prickly women, yes. I'm one myself. Asshole women, no. I wonder why?
...One effect of this is that the dyes in Kodachrome are much longer lasting than those in other transparency films (the ones developed using the E-6 process).
In the 1960s, this was correct. In the meantime Kodachrome has stayed much the same, while E-6 films have
improved. Modern slide film is as fade-resistant as Kodachrome was, and is much easier to live with. I
develop Ektachrome in my bathroom with a daylight tank. And a big tub of warm water and a thermometer.
I've tried my own C-41 processing, but it's a bit temperamental. Since you develop for 3 minutes 15 seconds at 38 degrees,
your agitation must be perfect to avoid streaks and spots and stuff.
I maintain a legacy system that migrated from 8" to 5.25" to 3.5" floppies in the early 1990s.
Our experience now is that the oldest floppies have bit-rotted and are no longer readable. There
is a sweet spot where the data are readable, before floppy quality took a nosedive
when floppies ceased to be the main portable storage medium.
Just to make things interesting, the system uses its own unique file system, complete with itsown ideas on
tracks and sectors. I figured out how to make Linux boxes read and write such floppies,
and made a bootable CD we can give to customers for disaster recovery.
Thanks to hardware and budget restraints, I can't update the system to use more modern storage,
like USB.
I remember when Top Gear tested the Tesla on their track, and the loudest sound it made
was the whir of its tires. It was a bit spooky, but I suppose people will get used to it eventually.
As others have mentioned, the makers of gasoline-engined cars used this as marketing FUD
to discredit electric vehicles (which were viewed as quiet and civilized, as well as reliable)
in the early part of the 20th century.
There is an active electric vehicle club here in Vancouver, and their vehicles are all
very nearly silent. Again, the loudest sound they usually make is their tires.
The new electric trolley buses here are actually quite noisy. Their chopper controllers
make a distinctive groaning sound. The old Brill trolleys, once again, the only sound they made was their tires.
I've seen too many written dress codes where 99% of the don'ts apply only to women. This one is about 50/50 on what's
right for both men and women. I like that it shows what's right, it's not just a shopping list
of what's wrong. They want a plain but classy look. I could live with it if I worked there.
Me? I'm showing a bit of cleavage today, and, yes, my bra is showing. If it's going to show anyway, wear
a nice one.
In the late '90s I was making plans to go back to school for my Masters,
and this was very much an issue I looked at.
I looked at the possibility of going to a relatively unknown school where i could quietly do something
really interesting. I also looked at some Big Name schools. I ended up going to a Big Name (University of Toronto),
who had more funding. I was poor enough that I had no choice: I took the money and ran, and ended up doing some
really interesting stuff.
Since a graduate degree is so much more what you put in to it, doing your own research,
do people feel names are as important for grad students?
One-time pad encryption doesn't care how much compute power, quantum or otherwise, you throw at it. If you don't
have the key, you don't have the message. Period.
I've sometimes thought it would be fun to hook something really random (like a geiger counter) up to my computer,
generate a DVD full of really random encryption keys, send a copy to my Mom, and we could
send email that even the NSA couldn't read.
My classic example of this was The Matrix. Everybody
raved about the special effects. Nobody could ever tell me what it was about. I concluded
it wasn't actually about anything.
My van, a Mitsubishi L300 Delica privately imported from Japan, has a "periscope" mirror on the rear hatch
so I can see the vicinity of the rear bumper from the driver's seat. It has a similar mirror in front so I
can see the vicinity of the front bumper as well.
It also has a 2.5 litre turbocharged diesel engine, shift on the fly 4 wheel drive, seats 7, and is wonderful
on road trips. The stereo
has a karaoke microphone input...
Stability and a predictable environment are more important to me and my work
than having the latest bells and whistles.
Just because Windows is constantly slipstreaming updates doesn't mean Linux needs to do it too. If
something is really really really important, by all means tell me about it, but let me make the
decision whether to upgrade or not.
Upgrades for the sake of upgrades are not the answer. My main development box is Slackware 10.2,
albeit with upgrades to many development-related packages (kernel, gcc, python, etc.). It works. It has to work,
and it has to stay working.
I do lots of stuff with DSP, playing with various sorts of digital modulation and demodulation. While the
crappiest sound
interface can capture everything there is to capture from a communications-quality audio signal, it's handy
to have some extra signal-to-noise ratio or sampling rate for particular applications. I've played with
PSK31,
HF weather fax and
weather satellites.
I always politely but firmly decline the "offer" to use the scanner.
Technical issues aside, security is based on people, on human intelligence.
The person doing the pat down can
talk to me all they like and if they have any common sense at all will quickly conclude I'm harmless.
Long before 9/11, I took a memorable trip to England. My passport had a woman's name on it,
the picture was of a woman, but it still had an M on it. The person
carrying it looked like a tall, skinny girl (with a funny-looking little thing between her legs if she took
her clothes off). Nobody gave
me a second glance.
The trip back could have been interesting, since my passport still said M, but my body was now right.
I was still sitting down very carefully, so I got stinking drunk on the flight back and slept most of the way...
I don't want to go back to carrying gender changes...
Changing gender is a life-long thing. While I got my new birth certificate with an F on it
nearly 25 years ago, I will need a new hormone prescription
(if nothing else) from my doctor every year as long as I live.
Gas turbines are light and powerful and can run on just about any flammable liquid. Good.
Gas turbines require exotic materials, are thirsty, and have (by car standards) dismal acceleration. Bad.
If you gave them some research money I'm sure the aerospace people could come up with better answers on the materials, and maybe
rethink the fuel systems for better fuel consumption. The solution for the acceleration is probably a serial hybrid - imagine a Chevy Volt with a
miniature PT6
under the hood...
My concern isn't so much flat pay - I have more money than
I know what to do with - but flat technology. I spend my days fixing idiotic bugs
in legacy systems, with few prospects for learning anything new.
Realistically, the shuttle, at inception, did have potential to meet some level of desired service criteria but Congress ensured that was never going to be possible.
There's a deeper issue: the Shuttle was conceived as part of a larger project, hence the name, Space Transportation
System. Most of the System was cancelled, leaving only the Shuttle, an isolated component
with no real function.
The first Mac I ever played with was a Mac Plus, circa 1986. When I found myself in the market for a computer
of my own shortly afterwards I looked at a Mac, but didn't end up buying one. Silly me. My girlfriend at the time
needed to buy a computer for her company, and when she saw how blown away I was by an Amiga,
she figured if I was impressed by it it had to be good, and that's what she bought. I played with a NeXT cube
and was impressed by it, but couldn't begin to even think about buying one. I sent my resume to
NeXT and got a nice letter back, but no interview.
Fast-forward to 1995 and I'm doing Mac development, System 7, in the transition from 68k to Power PC.
My development box was a Quadra 650 with a PowerPC daughter board, so I could boot and run it either way. Our
first PowerPC compiler didn't support fat binaries, but I had no difficulty figuring out how to use ResEdit to paste
in CODE resources from 68k executables to make my own fat binaries. I had fun tracking down
some memory management issues, the usual crash when switching back to your app in
MultiFinder. Am I showing my age or what?
A couple of years ago I saw a Mac Mini in a store, thought it was cute (always a good reason to buy a computer!),
played with it a bit, was impressed, and bought one. After a couple of years I bought an iMac, which is my current home
computer. At work I have all the Linux and Solaris boxes I want, plus an XP box to
read email on, but the computer I spend my own money on at home is a Mac.
I've always wanted a PDP-11. They looked like a real computer, a rackmount box
with a front panel, switches and
flashing lights. Their architecture remains one of the classics.
I did an operating systems course back in the '80s on LSI-11s.
...laura
Re:try running Windows 95 on modern hardware...
on
Windows 95 Turns 15
·
· Score: 1
Replace Windows 95 with Windows 2000 and I agree. Windows 2000 was the apex of the Microsoft Operating systems. If it weren't for the ubiquity of wireless (and the non-support of Windows 2000 of it), I think I could still use it productively today. Windows XP brought two things that were worthwhile: Fast User Switching and Wireless support out of the box... which many wireless chipset manufacturers don't seem to understand given the unneeded crap they bundle. A third, but mostly for corporate use, would be Remote Desktop... but my memory might be hazy and W2k might have had it.
Until not that long ago I steered non-technical computer users to Windows 98. It was stable enough that you could live with it, did what
people needed to do, didn't require ridiculous amounts of CPU or memory, and had USB that worked. Some people
claim there is USB support
in Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.
Now, of course, I suggest they buy a Mac Mini. When my Mom saw mine she flipped over it and
promptly bought herself one. The killer app for her was Garage Band, since she's a musician.
As an undergrad I worked in the university library to earn a bit of spending money,
and one of my tasks was sorting books to put them back on the shelves. My colleagues
used selection sort. I didn't.
I did a first pass through the books. Two piles, typically A-L, M-Z. Then a second pass, A-D, E-L, M-R, S-Z.
And so on, until the piles were small enough I could go through them and put them on the shelf in order.
How many people do you know who actually use quicksort to sort real objects?
Slashdot Mirror
Sad.
If you had any idea of the hell transsexual people go through growing up you would feel differently about this.
I went through that hell. I'm not genetically female, but I was always a girl in my heart, where it counts. Physically, I'm as female as the doctors could make me. I have to tell doctors I'm transsexual, because they can't tell.
I'm me.
It may not blind a pilot, but being startled when you're on approach is Not A Good Thing. The plane is close to the ground and not going very fast. It's right on the edge of falling out of the sky. In a sense, it is falling out of the sky...
...laura, who did circuits this afternoon
I have the Kindle app on my iPad, and my main observation is that I read a lot faster. The amount of text per screen is less than on a printed page, but it's just about right to read at a glance. It's a shame the battery life sucks compared to a real Kindle.
...laura, unashamed Apple fangirl
Because they offer the best bang for the buck. Because pilots are trained to use them. Because they work. Because aviation is totally anal about "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". This is A Good Thing.
I'm learning to fly in Piper Cherokees, and I have a magnetic compass and gyroscopic heading indicator at my disposal. Both are accurate, but both have idiosyncrasies.
The magnetic compass is subject to errors when accelerating or decelerating on east/west courses. It also misbehaves when turning to/from north or south. The heading indicator slowly drifts as Earth rotates underneath it. On long flights you have to periodically re-set the heading indicator.
The pre-takeoff checklist includes setting the heading indicator to the magnetic compass, and verifying that both read correctly when you pull on to the runway. In the future Runway 01 (13 degrees) will become Runway 36 or Runway 02.
...laura
I've worked with lots of prickly, anything-but-well-rounded people. Some of them have been a joy to work with. Some I would rather cross the street to avoid. But they have the ideas, the insights that keep companies going. Good companies know that if you want people who think differently, you need people who are themselves different. I'm certainly different.
Then there are the assholes. I've never met any who were as good as they thought they were, let alone good enough to get away with being such assholes. Because there really is no excuse for such behaviour in the workplace.
I've never met a female asshole. Prickly women, yes. I'm one myself. Asshole women, no. I wonder why?
...laura
...One effect of this is that the dyes in Kodachrome are much longer lasting than those in other transparency films (the ones developed using the E-6 process).
In the 1960s, this was correct. In the meantime Kodachrome has stayed much the same, while E-6 films have improved. Modern slide film is as fade-resistant as Kodachrome was, and is much easier to live with. I develop Ektachrome in my bathroom with a daylight tank. And a big tub of warm water and a thermometer.
I've tried my own C-41 processing, but it's a bit temperamental. Since you develop for 3 minutes 15 seconds at 38 degrees, your agitation must be perfect to avoid streaks and spots and stuff.
...laura
I maintain a legacy system that migrated from 8" to 5.25" to 3.5" floppies in the early 1990s.
Our experience now is that the oldest floppies have bit-rotted and are no longer readable. There is a sweet spot where the data are readable, before floppy quality took a nosedive when floppies ceased to be the main portable storage medium.
Just to make things interesting, the system uses its own unique file system, complete with itsown ideas on tracks and sectors. I figured out how to make Linux boxes read and write such floppies, and made a bootable CD we can give to customers for disaster recovery.
Thanks to hardware and budget restraints, I can't update the system to use more modern storage, like USB.
...laura
I remember when Top Gear tested the Tesla on their track, and the loudest sound it made was the whir of its tires. It was a bit spooky, but I suppose people will get used to it eventually. As others have mentioned, the makers of gasoline-engined cars used this as marketing FUD to discredit electric vehicles (which were viewed as quiet and civilized, as well as reliable) in the early part of the 20th century.
There is an active electric vehicle club here in Vancouver, and their vehicles are all very nearly silent. Again, the loudest sound they usually make is their tires.
The new electric trolley buses here are actually quite noisy. Their chopper controllers make a distinctive groaning sound. The old Brill trolleys, once again, the only sound they made was their tires.
...laura
I've seen too many written dress codes where 99% of the don'ts apply only to women. This one is about 50/50 on what's right for both men and women. I like that it shows what's right, it's not just a shopping list of what's wrong. They want a plain but classy look. I could live with it if I worked there.
Me? I'm showing a bit of cleavage today, and, yes, my bra is showing. If it's going to show anyway, wear a nice one.
...laura
In the late '90s I was making plans to go back to school for my Masters, and this was very much an issue I looked at.
I looked at the possibility of going to a relatively unknown school where i could quietly do something really interesting. I also looked at some Big Name schools. I ended up going to a Big Name (University of Toronto), who had more funding. I was poor enough that I had no choice: I took the money and ran, and ended up doing some really interesting stuff.
Since a graduate degree is so much more what you put in to it, doing your own research, do people feel names are as important for grad students?
...laura
One-time pad encryption doesn't care how much compute power, quantum or otherwise, you throw at it. If you don't have the key, you don't have the message. Period.
I've sometimes thought it would be fun to hook something really random (like a geiger counter) up to my computer, generate a DVD full of really random encryption keys, send a copy to my Mom, and we could send email that even the NSA couldn't read.
...laura
My classic example of this was The Matrix. Everybody raved about the special effects. Nobody could ever tell me what it was about. I concluded it wasn't actually about anything.
...laura
My van, a Mitsubishi L300 Delica privately imported from Japan, has a "periscope" mirror on the rear hatch so I can see the vicinity of the rear bumper from the driver's seat. It has a similar mirror in front so I can see the vicinity of the front bumper as well.
It also has a 2.5 litre turbocharged diesel engine, shift on the fly 4 wheel drive, seats 7, and is wonderful on road trips. The stereo has a karaoke microphone input...
It may not be imported to the U.S.A. Why?
...laura
Stability and a predictable environment are more important to me and my work than having the latest bells and whistles.
Just because Windows is constantly slipstreaming updates doesn't mean Linux needs to do it too. If something is really really really important, by all means tell me about it, but let me make the decision whether to upgrade or not.
Upgrades for the sake of upgrades are not the answer. My main development box is Slackware 10.2, albeit with upgrades to many development-related packages (kernel, gcc, python, etc.). It works. It has to work, and it has to stay working.
...laura, Slackware fangirl
I do lots of stuff with DSP, playing with various sorts of digital modulation and demodulation. While the crappiest sound interface can capture everything there is to capture from a communications-quality audio signal, it's handy to have some extra signal-to-noise ratio or sampling rate for particular applications. I've played with PSK31, HF weather fax and weather satellites.
...laura
Slackware users build their own kernels, so we can put it in any time we like.
...laura
I always politely but firmly decline the "offer" to use the scanner.
Technical issues aside, security is based on people, on human intelligence. The person doing the pat down can talk to me all they like and if they have any common sense at all will quickly conclude I'm harmless.
Long before 9/11, I took a memorable trip to England. My passport had a woman's name on it, the picture was of a woman, but it still had an M on it. The person carrying it looked like a tall, skinny girl (with a funny-looking little thing between her legs if she took her clothes off). Nobody gave me a second glance.
The trip back could have been interesting, since my passport still said M, but my body was now right. I was still sitting down very carefully, so I got stinking drunk on the flight back and slept most of the way...
I don't want to go back to carrying gender changes...
Changing gender is a life-long thing. While I got my new birth certificate with an F on it nearly 25 years ago, I will need a new hormone prescription (if nothing else) from my doctor every year as long as I live.
Gas turbines are light and powerful and can run on just about any flammable liquid. Good.
Gas turbines require exotic materials, are thirsty, and have (by car standards) dismal acceleration. Bad.
If you gave them some research money I'm sure the aerospace people could come up with better answers on the materials, and maybe rethink the fuel systems for better fuel consumption. The solution for the acceleration is probably a serial hybrid - imagine a Chevy Volt with a miniature PT6 under the hood...
...laura
My concern isn't so much flat pay - I have more money than I know what to do with - but flat technology. I spend my days fixing idiotic bugs in legacy systems, with few prospects for learning anything new.
...laura
Realistically, the shuttle, at inception, did have potential to meet some level of desired service criteria but Congress ensured that was never going to be possible.
There's a deeper issue: the Shuttle was conceived as part of a larger project, hence the name, Space Transportation System. Most of the System was cancelled, leaving only the Shuttle, an isolated component with no real function.
...laura
The first Mac I ever played with was a Mac Plus, circa 1986. When I found myself in the market for a computer of my own shortly afterwards I looked at a Mac, but didn't end up buying one. Silly me. My girlfriend at the time needed to buy a computer for her company, and when she saw how blown away I was by an Amiga, she figured if I was impressed by it it had to be good, and that's what she bought. I played with a NeXT cube and was impressed by it, but couldn't begin to even think about buying one. I sent my resume to NeXT and got a nice letter back, but no interview.
Fast-forward to 1995 and I'm doing Mac development, System 7, in the transition from 68k to Power PC. My development box was a Quadra 650 with a PowerPC daughter board, so I could boot and run it either way. Our first PowerPC compiler didn't support fat binaries, but I had no difficulty figuring out how to use ResEdit to paste in CODE resources from 68k executables to make my own fat binaries. I had fun tracking down some memory management issues, the usual crash when switching back to your app in MultiFinder. Am I showing my age or what?
A couple of years ago I saw a Mac Mini in a store, thought it was cute (always a good reason to buy a computer!), played with it a bit, was impressed, and bought one. After a couple of years I bought an iMac, which is my current home computer. At work I have all the Linux and Solaris boxes I want, plus an XP box to read email on, but the computer I spend my own money on at home is a Mac.
...laura, long time Mac enthusiast and fangirl
I've always wanted a PDP-11. They looked like a real computer, a rackmount box with a front panel, switches and flashing lights. Their architecture remains one of the classics.
I did an operating systems course back in the '80s on LSI-11s.
...laura
Replace Windows 95 with Windows 2000 and I agree. Windows 2000 was the apex of the Microsoft Operating systems. If it weren't for the ubiquity of wireless (and the non-support of Windows 2000 of it), I think I could still use it productively today. Windows XP brought two things that were worthwhile: Fast User Switching and Wireless support out of the box... which many wireless chipset manufacturers don't seem to understand given the unneeded crap they bundle. A third, but mostly for corporate use, would be Remote Desktop... but my memory might be hazy and W2k might have had it.
Until not that long ago I steered non-technical computer users to Windows 98. It was stable enough that you could live with it, did what people needed to do, didn't require ridiculous amounts of CPU or memory, and had USB that worked. Some people claim there is USB support in Windows 95, but after careful study I have come to the conclusion that they are mistaken.
Now, of course, I suggest they buy a Mac Mini. When my Mom saw mine she flipped over it and promptly bought herself one. The killer app for her was Garage Band, since she's a musician.
...laura
As an undergrad I worked in the university library to earn a bit of spending money, and one of my tasks was sorting books to put them back on the shelves. My colleagues used selection sort. I didn't.
I did a first pass through the books. Two piles, typically A-L, M-Z. Then a second pass, A-D, E-L, M-R, S-Z. And so on, until the piles were small enough I could go through them and put them on the shelf in order.
How many people do you know who actually use quicksort to sort real objects?
...laura