Thanks to Canada's strict (i.e. insane) vehicle import laws the best we can do at the
moment are early '90s R32 Skylines. Not my kind
of vehicle anyway; I'll stick with my
grey market Mitsubishi
L300 Delica.
I tried a couple toward the bottom of the list. The train station in White Plains, NY is indeed blurred, as is the GE campus in Schenectady.
Some locations in the vicinity of Goonhilly Downs in England used to be blurred, but they aren't any more. You might expect this from countries with different ideas on security and privacy, but places like Buckingham Palace and Vauxhall Cross show up just fine, and you can count how many subs are moored in Polyarnyy.
...laura
Re:Can we please talk about physics now?
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hear, hear.
How long until some results are known? IIRC one of the saddest outcomes of this experiment would be to find nothing new, because new bigger colliders would not get funded.
The challenge in that case will be explaining
to The Authorities that the very best
science comes from somebody looking at
experimental data, scratching their head and thinking "That's funny..."
If the LHC doesn't find the Higgs Boson (among other
things) the challenge will be to revamp physics,
up to and including the Standard Model, to explain
why. It has guided physics for decades, but
if it proves to be wrong, we'll need new physics.
This would be a spectacular result in its own
right, though it might be hard to explain
why to non-scientific people.
...laura
Re:Can we please talk about physics now?
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The big problem is the media reporting a
tiny group of crackpots as if they represented
mainstream views. They don't.
I think the LHC is the best thing to
happen to science in a long time. Three cheers
for CERN!
To be fair though, in those cases it was more about Safety (translate Liability) as they could heavily damage road safety and Law Enforcement's ability to police it. Its like how in most fiction Ive seen, they always misquote the proportions of charcoal, sulfur, and salt peter that go into gunpowder, so the young and/or stupid won't go out and blow off fingers.
I've seen variations on that a number of times, like when they've made carefully obscured the key ingredients
for making nitrocellulose. Sometimes
they make a joke of it: "Mythbusters brand Blur!",
other times they just don't talk about it.
The one I've always wondered about was when
they cracked the thumbprint lock. They carefully
mentioned that they had omitted one crucial
step. I wonder who was responsible for that?
Same here. Once a month a push the payments out from
my bank account. No hassle. Canada, BTW.
The only time I screwed up a payment was accidentally adding
an extra zero to a credit card payment. I phoned the bank, pleaded stupidity, and they reversed the payment. Since I was buying a car in a couple of weeks anyway, I considered just leaving the overpayment
on and putting the car on my credit card...
Control the things that are closest to your application. Let outside vendors cover the infrastructure that isn't. That's just good engineering practice.
I agree. Using a generic build of any mission-critical software wastes resources, and every unused-but-still-enabled feature is a potential security problem.
I'm typing this on my development Linux box. It runs a custom kernel, precisely matched to the hardware and my requirements. My policy is that stuff I use all the time
(e.g. networking) is compiled in to the kernel, while stuff I don't
use all the time (e.g. usb mass storage, udf file system) is
modules that I can load as needed. My main applications (apache, python, gcc) are all up to date, and compiled from source. They
are a precise match for what I need.
Another fun relationship is between Mersenne Primes and Perfect Numbers, numbers whose factors add up to themselves.
If 2^n-1 is prime, (2^n-1)(2^(n-1)) is perfect (and has a
distinctive pattern of digits in binary, to boot...). The proof in this direction is easy. Proving that all even perfect numbers are of this form is a little harder, but doable.
The hard one is proving whether or not there are any odd
perfect numbers, and, if so, what form they might take.
Nobody has done this yet.
We have an active
electric vehicle
group here in Vancouver. Their cars
are almost all DIY conversions. We don't
have Boeing jet engine starter motors, but we have an active
group and cheap electricity.
The cars are all usable on the road, 100+ km/h top speed, none of this golf cart neighbourhood vehicle nonsense. The range varies from 70 km per charge for lead acid batteries to 200+ km per charge for the fancy stuff. Since my commute is 10 km each way,
I have followed this with interest.
Allegation is not proof. The allegations in
question were made by an irresponsible journalist,
investigated by the Sri Lankan authorities,
and found to be totally without merit. The newspaper in question
apologized.
I recently had a look at web application frameworks for some new
development and ended up doing it with Django.
I find it handy. It's logically put together,
the Python back end is fast, and, once you figure out a few
basic concepts, you can put web apps together very
quickly. The template system is particularly clever. I find that I like to set up my database tables
first, then let Django create the model classes. Not the other
way around. I also like to do table joins as views in the database,
rather than gluing things together in Django. YMMV.
My last experience with web application development
was with Tomcat. I still have nightmares.:-(
One of the best things for a programmer: learn to type. Among other things,
it becomes natural
to use longer variable names that might actually
be half-assed descriptive. A current project has
procedures with names like SetDefaultConfiguration(). Three guesses what that does.:-)
One bizarre coding standard from an earlier project set a maximum length on variable
names, Since they had mandatory prefixes to say what component they came from, this did not enhance
readability.
This stuff is here to serve us, not to bind
us. If coding standards become too onerous, the advantages in development and maintenance effort
are lost.
Following on a recent discussion of
"doe snot" in New Scientist, I noticed
"bill shave" in the article, passes spell
check, but is still the wrong word.
OK, so I need to get a life. Please tell me
something I don't know.
I like the idea of solar power, but the economics
(and weather, in this part of the world)
aren't quite compelling enough. Yet.
I got my developer stuff a couple of days after the iPhone 3G was released, have been playing with the SDK sample apps
ever since, and am considering what I might do
for my own applications.
Yes, I typed in the name of my employers when Apple asked
the name of my company. So what? I work for them, and if
I can find a way to make more money with an iPhone or iPod Touch,
they want to know about it. They expect me to be on top of
things.
This is tame compared with the hoops we had to jump
through to become Brew developers so we could play
with a local OEM who were in bed with Qualcomm. That
required a Verisign cerficate, Dunn & Bradstreet
references, and a whole pile more red tape.
The question a prospective employer needs to ask is not "Does this candidate know XYZ version 1.5.3?", but
"Can this person learn XYZ version 1.5.3?
Can they learn it fast enough and well enough to do
useful things with it for us?" If they can, and
it's a gut-feeling judgement call (always!), they are worth hiring.
Thanks to some shockingly incompetent marketing by the local
carrier (Rogers), I shall be ignoring the iPhone for the forseeable future.
Reading between the lines, Apple aren't amused either. Nevertheless, there were the usual legions
of fanboys lining up to get them, only to find out
that the available stock was ludicrously low and the
entire national supply of iPhones sold out in an hour.
I'm still hoping, some day, to be able to build applications
for my iPod Touch...
A while back I started getting emails from a French dating web site, gushingly
inviting me to all
sorts of events. Needless to say, I had never
signed up, and since the email was a spam honeypot address,
there was nobody there to sign up anyway.
I sent them nice email asking to be removed. No dice.
I sent them nasty email asking to be removed. Ditto.
I looked around their web site for unsubscribe information. You kidding?
So I got nasty and updated "my" profile, after making an educated guess on what the password I had never
set was. I went on at some length about my fondness
for bestiality and pedophilia, with a bit of necrophilia on the side.
My first experience with this, back when we thought our Sun 3s were as cool as digital watches had once been,
was cheese. The server was cheddar, and other hosts were edam, gouda, and so on. Yawn.
My current employers have two themes going. Lab machines have the names of stars (merak, rigel, alcyone, etc.). Desktop and production machines are the names of cars,
so our server is veyron (fastest and most powerful
car we could think of),
my desktop machines have been model-t (a Sparc 5:-), twingo (Ultra 5), tatra (first Linux box on our production network; we had been 100% Sun prior to that) and now monaro (a little crude but brutally fast).
Our original file server was kenny. Eventually we really did kill kenny...
This is why we do it. We haven't paid much attention to Mercury, so almost everything there is
new, just waiting to be discovered. Who knows what
else we will find?
Slashdot Mirror
When you see the interior it's obvious the same people did the GT-R's interior as did GT4/GT5.
How fast could you drive one across Japan?
Thanks to Canada's strict (i.e. insane) vehicle import laws the best we can do at the moment are early '90s R32 Skylines. Not my kind of vehicle anyway; I'll stick with my grey market Mitsubishi L300 Delica.
...laura
I tried a couple toward the bottom of the list. The train station in White Plains, NY is indeed blurred, as is the GE campus in Schenectady.
Some locations in the vicinity of Goonhilly Downs in England used to be blurred, but they aren't any more. You might expect this from countries with different ideas on security and privacy, but places like Buckingham Palace and Vauxhall Cross show up just fine, and you can count how many subs are moored in Polyarnyy.
...laura
Hear, hear.
How long until some results are known? IIRC one of the saddest outcomes of this experiment would be to find nothing new, because new bigger colliders would not get funded.
The challenge in that case will be explaining to The Authorities that the very best science comes from somebody looking at experimental data, scratching their head and thinking "That's funny..."
If the LHC doesn't find the Higgs Boson (among other things) the challenge will be to revamp physics, up to and including the Standard Model, to explain why. It has guided physics for decades, but if it proves to be wrong, we'll need new physics.
This would be a spectacular result in its own right, though it might be hard to explain why to non-scientific people.
...laura
The big problem is the media reporting a tiny group of crackpots as if they represented mainstream views. They don't.
I think the LHC is the best thing to happen to science in a long time. Three cheers for CERN!
...laura
The usual format is NASA 2-line format. People (including me) have been using it to track satellites for years.
The orbital models have been refined over the years. The latest version I've seen is this one.
...laura
To be fair though, in those cases it was more about Safety (translate Liability) as they could heavily damage road safety and Law Enforcement's ability to police it. Its like how in most fiction Ive seen, they always misquote the proportions of charcoal, sulfur, and salt peter that go into gunpowder, so the young and/or stupid won't go out and blow off fingers.
I've seen variations on that a number of times, like when they've made carefully obscured the key ingredients for making nitrocellulose. Sometimes they make a joke of it: "Mythbusters brand Blur!", other times they just don't talk about it.
The one I've always wondered about was when they cracked the thumbprint lock. They carefully mentioned that they had omitted one crucial step. I wonder who was responsible for that?
...laura
Same here. Once a month a push the payments out from my bank account. No hassle. Canada, BTW.
The only time I screwed up a payment was accidentally adding an extra zero to a credit card payment. I phoned the bank, pleaded stupidity, and they reversed the payment. Since I was buying a car in a couple of weeks anyway, I considered just leaving the overpayment on and putting the car on my credit card...
...laura
You can't do anything with Tcl? How about BitKeeper?
I didn't say I agreed with that particular colleague. :-)
...laura
What's your beef with Tcl?
As a former colleague put it, "A theoretically perfect computer science language you can't actually do anything with."
I'm writing lots of python nowadays. It's almost as handy as perl, without perl's write-only tendencies.
...laura
Control the things that are closest to your application. Let outside vendors cover the infrastructure that isn't. That's just good engineering practice.
I agree. Using a generic build of any mission-critical software wastes resources, and every unused-but-still-enabled feature is a potential security problem.
I'm typing this on my development Linux box. It runs a custom kernel, precisely matched to the hardware and my requirements. My policy is that stuff I use all the time (e.g. networking) is compiled in to the kernel, while stuff I don't use all the time (e.g. usb mass storage, udf file system) is modules that I can load as needed. My main applications (apache, python, gcc) are all up to date, and compiled from source. They are a precise match for what I need.
Needless to say, this box rocks.
...laura
Another fun relationship is between Mersenne Primes and Perfect Numbers, numbers whose factors add up to themselves.
If 2^n-1 is prime, (2^n-1)(2^(n-1)) is perfect (and has a distinctive pattern of digits in binary, to boot...). The proof in this direction is easy. Proving that all even perfect numbers are of this form is a little harder, but doable.
The hard one is proving whether or not there are any odd perfect numbers, and, if so, what form they might take. Nobody has done this yet.
...laura
I find I usually end up with 3 levels of logging:
Normal operation, often with some notion of "Yes, I'm still running even though I haven't done anything else lately".
Details. Usually corresponding to processing steps.
Algorithm tracing. This includes things like logging SQL queries. This is usually only of interest to me.
...laura
We have an active electric vehicle group here in Vancouver. Their cars are almost all DIY conversions. We don't have Boeing jet engine starter motors, but we have an active group and cheap electricity.
The cars are all usable on the road, 100+ km/h top speed, none of this golf cart neighbourhood vehicle nonsense. The range varies from 70 km per charge for lead acid batteries to 200+ km per charge for the fancy stuff. Since my commute is 10 km each way, I have followed this with interest.
...laura
Allegation is not proof. The allegations in question were made by an irresponsible journalist, investigated by the Sri Lankan authorities, and found to be totally without merit. The newspaper in question apologized.
...laura
I thought it was the war we weren't supposed to talk about?
...laura, confused
I recently had a look at web application frameworks for some new development and ended up doing it with Django.
I find it handy. It's logically put together, the Python back end is fast, and, once you figure out a few basic concepts, you can put web apps together very quickly. The template system is particularly clever. I find that I like to set up my database tables first, then let Django create the model classes. Not the other way around. I also like to do table joins as views in the database, rather than gluing things together in Django. YMMV.
My last experience with web application development was with Tomcat. I still have nightmares. :-(
...laura
One of the best things for a programmer: learn to type. Among other things, it becomes natural to use longer variable names that might actually be half-assed descriptive. A current project has procedures with names like SetDefaultConfiguration(). Three guesses what that does. :-)
One bizarre coding standard from an earlier project set a maximum length on variable names, Since they had mandatory prefixes to say what component they came from, this did not enhance readability.
This stuff is here to serve us, not to bind us. If coding standards become too onerous, the advantages in development and maintenance effort are lost.
I still think Hungarian Notation is a crock.
...laura
Following on a recent discussion of "doe snot" in New Scientist, I noticed "bill shave" in the article, passes spell check, but is still the wrong word. OK, so I need to get a life. Please tell me something I don't know.
I like the idea of solar power, but the economics (and weather, in this part of the world) aren't quite compelling enough. Yet.
...laura
I got my developer stuff a couple of days after the iPhone 3G was released, have been playing with the SDK sample apps ever since, and am considering what I might do for my own applications.
Yes, I typed in the name of my employers when Apple asked the name of my company. So what? I work for them, and if I can find a way to make more money with an iPhone or iPod Touch, they want to know about it. They expect me to be on top of things.
This is tame compared with the hoops we had to jump through to become Brew developers so we could play with a local OEM who were in bed with Qualcomm. That required a Verisign cerficate, Dunn & Bradstreet references, and a whole pile more red tape.
...laura
That's what's cool... if you don't know any better, the way it was done, was as good as any.
In industry we call this "re-inventing the wheel". Writing an FSK demodulator is really not a major achievement.
...laura
Yup.
The question a prospective employer needs to ask is not "Does this candidate know XYZ version 1.5.3?", but "Can this person learn XYZ version 1.5.3? Can they learn it fast enough and well enough to do useful things with it for us?" If they can, and it's a gut-feeling judgement call (always!), they are worth hiring.
...laura
Thanks to some shockingly incompetent marketing by the local carrier (Rogers), I shall be ignoring the iPhone for the forseeable future.
Reading between the lines, Apple aren't amused either. Nevertheless, there were the usual legions of fanboys lining up to get them, only to find out that the available stock was ludicrously low and the entire national supply of iPhones sold out in an hour.
I'm still hoping, some day, to be able to build applications for my iPod Touch...
...laura
A while back I started getting emails from a French dating web site, gushingly inviting me to all sorts of events. Needless to say, I had never signed up, and since the email was a spam honeypot address, there was nobody there to sign up anyway.
I sent them nice email asking to be removed. No dice. I sent them nasty email asking to be removed. Ditto. I looked around their web site for unsubscribe information. You kidding?
So I got nasty and updated "my" profile, after making an educated guess on what the password I had never set was. I went on at some length about my fondness for bestiality and pedophilia, with a bit of necrophilia on the side.
They nuked my account within the hour. :-)
...laura
My first experience with this, back when we thought our Sun 3s were as cool as digital watches had once been, was cheese. The server was cheddar, and other hosts were edam, gouda, and so on. Yawn.
My current employers have two themes going. Lab machines have the names of stars (merak, rigel, alcyone, etc.). Desktop and production machines are the names of cars, so our server is veyron (fastest and most powerful car we could think of), my desktop machines have been model-t (a Sparc 5 :-), twingo (Ultra 5), tatra (first Linux box on our production network; we had been 100% Sun prior to that) and now monaro (a little crude but brutally fast).
Our original file server was kenny. Eventually we really did kill kenny...
...laura
This is why we do it. We haven't paid much attention to Mercury, so almost everything there is new, just waiting to be discovered. Who knows what else we will find?
...laura