My current commute is entirely practical to do with an electric car now.
The only issue is availability of a charging point in my apartment
building's garage. Here in B.C. most of our electricity comes from hydro power,
so I'm not overly concerned about greenhouse gases.
The Vancouver
public transit
system has one of the larger
fleets of electric
trolley buses in North America. Assuming they pay more or less what I
pay for electricity (they'll get a better bulk/industrial rate, but
have distribution costs that I don't have), the running costs for
the trolley buses are about the same as a
Kei car.
We have hybrid buses in several cities in B.C. as well. They're the
GM/Allison
hybrids, which act very much like a giant Prius.
Calories in greater than calories out => gain weight.
Calories in less than calories out => lose weight.
At least, that's how I thought it worked. I decided late last year,
as a new years resolution, to start Operation Flab. My weight had
crept up, ours is not a physically active field to begin with,
and middle age (I'm 46) didn't help.
I've made some healthier choices in my diet, cut back on portions,
exercise vigorously 3 times a week, and have lost significant weight. I feel
100% better. There is no magic: I didn't gain it overnight, and I'm not going
to lose it overnight either. Heroics never work, because too great
a lifestyle/diet change will never last.
I didn't bother with a health club membership or anything like that.
My sole expense was an MP3 player.
They can solve two problems at once if they make QRay bracelets out of
speaker wire. Just think of the ancient audio principles involved!
The QRay ads are so stupid as to be embarassing. And, yes, I too have had
to fend off Radio Shack sales droids who try to sell me audio cables that
cost 10 times as much as plain old speaker wire. Their pitch to me was
partly the Amway pitch ("It's expensive, so it has to be good"),
and some gibberish that appeared to suggest that the velocity factor
of audio signals was so strongly frequency dependent that only special
super duper cables could produce anything worth listening to.
You would think the telemarketers would realize that answering the phone and hearing nothing
is a
dead giveaway that it's a telemarketer, and change their tactics. If they hit my answering
machine they get dead air, because
the (fairly brief) outgoing message has long since finished by the time they pick up. This results in recordings of confused
telemarketers saying "Hello...hello...hello...". Serves the dumb f**ks right.
I'm in the phone book as "L. Halliday",
and the cold calls always ask for Mr. or Mrs. Halliday, to which my answer is "No!". It doesn't seem to occur to them
that the head of the household might be single and female.
Then there are the folks who keep phoning and leaving messages on
my answering machine about my free security consultation, free vacation, or whatever.
They block their caller ID, so I have no idea where they are phoning from. Nor
do they ever call when I'm home, so I can't "Press 1 to hear more details". Grrr...
Which is precisely why Unix matters and MULTICS doesn't. The simplifications in Unix are its most important contribution to the art of OS design. For example, we now take it for granted that the OS should implement a disk file as a simple byte stream, with bigger structures, such as records or indexes, being implemented on the application level. But when Unix appeared, that idea was novel and controversial.
The fact is, Unix was a fresh start, and a damned important one. Unix's creators' biggest accomplishment was clearing out all the feature crud and creating a simple model that has influenced computer science on many levels.
MULTICS, by contrast, was doomed by its own complexity. The fact that Unix was created from the ashes of Bell Labs' participation in the MULTICS project is just a historical accident.
I beg to differ.
At the time of Multics people were just figuring out what a computer should do
in an interactive time-sharing environment. People had lots of ideas, and since
Multics was, fundamentally, a research OS, they threw them in. Only with experience
could they decide which were the good ideas and which were the bad ones. They couldn't
know, in advance, which were the winners. They had to try them and see.
That is the legacy of Multics.
I guess at 46 I qualify as "older". I have two university degrees, lots
of experience, a bit of grey hair (which I see no reason to dye),
and have found the work/life balance that works for me. It's
not 70 hours a week, but I'm not some clock-watching union droid, either.
If you have no life apart from your work, how do you come up with new ideas, anyway?
From painful past experience, I now cringe when companies talk about their culture.
I'm also 99% likely to be looking for a new job in the new year, and am not
looking forward to it. I'm far too young to retire, but I do not rule out
career change.
One of the biggest cultural things I've come up against in my current
position is consistency of environments. There is a reason why people
need to use the same OS, compiler, runtime tools, etc.
It's not old fuddy-duddy stuff: how can you track
down bugs otherwise?
In Canada (sorry, not Soviet Russia), we have the
Rhinoceros Party
for political humour.
They have had some fun policies, like bulldozing the Rocky Mountains
as a makework project to reduce unemployment, and paying off Canada's national
debt by putting it on Visa.
In one election some years back I was so disgusted with the mainstream candidates
(I had 4 to choose from) that I voted Rhinoceros. Lots of other people
did too, and they came very close to electing an MP.
They have gotten really strict about tires and headlights and things lately. Possibly
stricter than they need to be, but if you want to register and license your
prize here, you have to play by their rules.
The Japanese imports come over on car ferry ships with shipments of new cars
(mine came this way), or get put in to containers.
I don't know what the details are for cars across the Atlantic.
The Feds make sure the paperwork is in order, including de-registration from
the country of origin (depends on the country; required for Japan). They verify
the date of manufacture (15 years is 15 years, to the day),
make sure there is no
dirt or foreign plants on the car, collect GST like any other
item at the border, then the car is yours. It really is that easy.
Registration and licensing in B.C. means passing an out-of-province vehicle inspection
This includes things like headlights, tires, and so on, which must be
both serviceable and have all the correct DOT/SAE approvals (a minor concern for
most Japanese stuff). Some vehicles need
extra reflectors and things, and many need daytime running lights. RHD vehicles need
headlights that dip to the right on low beam for driving on the right side of the road. In
the case of the Delica this means headlights from the European version Mitsubishi
L300 commercial van. They come with speedometers in kilometers,
which is one less thing to do.
I also got the owner's manual, dealer service history and Shaken reports. All
in Japanese, of course, but I can still look at the pictures. The owner's manual
is in a very distinctive anime style.:-)
Vehicle import laws in Canada are pretty protectionist too, though our exemption for private imports is
"only" 15 years. Once landed, it's not difficult to register and license just about anything.
We currently have a lot of early 1990s Japanese imports running around
B.C. Hell, I bought
one myself (1992 Mitsubishi Delica, a 4x4 diesel minivan). The Authorities
are certain
something is terribly wrong
with the situation, but can't quite figure out what,
no matter how much money the car dealers give them to come up with something.
Import enthusiasts are
dead set against any change to the law, unless it involves lowering or abolishing the age limit.
The very first non-government satellite was AMSAT's own OSCAR-1.
The very first secondary payload was OSCAR-1. When other people thought they might
be able to hitch a ride in to orbit the way AMSAT did, the Authorities suggested they
look at how AMSAT did it.
The free rides in to orbit aren't as plentiful as they once were, but are based
on one of two things: either stuff little satellites in to areas of the launch vehicle
where "real" satellites won't fit, or take advantage of launch vehicles
having excess capacity, since it's easier to build a really big rocket and launch a few
tonnes of sand in to orbit along with your satellite than to have to reengineer your rockets every couple
of years as satellites get bigger.
The launch system manuals are all available on line and make interesting reading - lobbing
a satellite in to orbit is not trivial.
You can read about little ones like Pegasus
or great big ones
like Ariane 5.
There are also people who make payloads that look and behave like satellites, but send them up on balloons instead.
The spies who really act like James Bond
don't last. They attract attention to themselves and get caught. The
last thing a spy wants to do is attract attention.
I'm reminded of the introductory speech in the first episode
of
Spy: the
recruits wouldn't be doing any combat or firearms training,
because if they ever needed such in real life, it would be too
late anyway, and the chainsaw would probably already be warmed up.
This guy is obviously f**king nuts, but without the nutcases to
show what's possible and make
things interesting, the world
would be a far duller place, and a far poorer one too.
Harumph!
...laura, who occasionally indulges in nutsness, just not this particular kind
I wonder if the out of memory is for real. I wouldn't be at all
surprised if it was out of some other resource, but couldn't come up with
anything more meaningful to say - like an infamous version of Microsoft
Word many moons ago that said it was out of memory when you didn't have
a default printer defined in Windows.
What is this XP you speak of? Is it some sort of DOS shell?
It's not just visa officers: U.S. immigration law assumes that all who set foot on U.S. soil seeking
admission to the country are intending immigrants, until proven otherwise.
Visa requirements are very much a tit-for-tat affair. If people from Country A need a visa to visit
Country B, Country A will insist on a visa for visitors from Country B.
...laura who need a visa for Turkey last year, because Turks need a visa to visit Canada
I first encountered Slashdot in 2000 when I started a new
job. We did, among other things, two-way paging systems, and
had a setup that forwarded various things to our pagers. This included
new headlines, weather forecasts, and something
new and mysterious (to me) called Slashdot.
In 1997 I had not yet heard of Slashdot, but was a regular customer of a new upstart
Internet business called amazon.com. I first started playing with the
Internet in 1987, when I considered myself fortunate indeed to have a 9600 baud SLIP line
so I could access email, newsgroups and ftp sites.
7 - BREW: BREW is designed to discourage hobbyists. The point is to make it so that mobile operators only have to deal with pros or companies that put money into the bucket.
Any schmuck can download the SDK and play with Brew apps on the
emulator, but only a company can get the access you need to run apps, even for testing,
on a real device. I think this is a shame; Brew does some genuinely interesting
things.
(Yes, I do Brew for a living. I can (and do) run apps on real devices on real networks.)
My choice for a hobbyist-friendly mobile platform is probably still Palm OS.
Some of the free gcc-based toolchain is antiquated, but as long as it builds things
that run on real devices, I don't care.
I save my pennies the year I graduated from high school and splurged on a TI-59,
which not only served me well, but factored numbers too (one of my favourite programs
I wrote for it). Cards, spaghetti code, the works. I actually defined a small virtual
processor, wrote an emulator for it that ran on the TI-59, and hand-assembled
programs for that virtual processor (which resembled a PIC in a number of ways, now
that I think of it). Geek city, huh?
It was only much later that I confirmed that 52579 is prime, because I was
never patient enough to let it finish trying factors. A prize for who can tell me
what number I was factoring.:-)
I wish I still had that thing. Haven't seen it in years.
The whole point of stuff like this is being somebody else, assuming a role
in an online fantasy.
There was a good article in New Scientist recently looking at people and their Second Life avatars.
Some people have very good reasons for wanting to be somebody else, whether it's folks
in wheelchairs who want to walk around, or transgendered folks who want to try on
a new gender.
Slashdot Mirror
My current commute is entirely practical to do with an electric car now. The only issue is availability of a charging point in my apartment building's garage. Here in B.C. most of our electricity comes from hydro power, so I'm not overly concerned about greenhouse gases.
The Vancouver public transit system has one of the larger fleets of electric trolley buses in North America. Assuming they pay more or less what I pay for electricity (they'll get a better bulk/industrial rate, but have distribution costs that I don't have), the running costs for the trolley buses are about the same as a Kei car.
We have hybrid buses in several cities in B.C. as well. They're the GM/Allison hybrids, which act very much like a giant Prius.
...laura
Calories in greater than calories out => gain weight.
Calories in less than calories out => lose weight.
At least, that's how I thought it worked. I decided late last year, as a new years resolution, to start Operation Flab. My weight had crept up, ours is not a physically active field to begin with, and middle age (I'm 46) didn't help.
I've made some healthier choices in my diet, cut back on portions, exercise vigorously 3 times a week, and have lost significant weight. I feel 100% better. There is no magic: I didn't gain it overnight, and I'm not going to lose it overnight either. Heroics never work, because too great a lifestyle/diet change will never last.
I didn't bother with a health club membership or anything like that. My sole expense was an MP3 player.
...laura
Does it run Linux?
Think of it as the Al Capone option. Even if they can't get you on anything else, they can nail you for lying on your immigation form.
...laura
They can solve two problems at once if they make QRay bracelets out of speaker wire. Just think of the ancient audio principles involved!
The QRay ads are so stupid as to be embarassing. And, yes, I too have had to fend off Radio Shack sales droids who try to sell me audio cables that cost 10 times as much as plain old speaker wire. Their pitch to me was partly the Amway pitch ("It's expensive, so it has to be good"), and some gibberish that appeared to suggest that the velocity factor of audio signals was so strongly frequency dependent that only special super duper cables could produce anything worth listening to.
...laura
You would think the telemarketers would realize that answering the phone and hearing nothing is a dead giveaway that it's a telemarketer, and change their tactics. If they hit my answering machine they get dead air, because the (fairly brief) outgoing message has long since finished by the time they pick up. This results in recordings of confused telemarketers saying "Hello...hello...hello...". Serves the dumb f**ks right.
I'm in the phone book as "L. Halliday", and the cold calls always ask for Mr. or Mrs. Halliday, to which my answer is "No!". It doesn't seem to occur to them that the head of the household might be single and female.
Then there are the folks who keep phoning and leaving messages on my answering machine about my free security consultation, free vacation, or whatever. They block their caller ID, so I have no idea where they are phoning from. Nor do they ever call when I'm home, so I can't "Press 1 to hear more details". Grrr...
...laura
Democracy is a fine system. For beginners.
...laura
I beg to differ.
At the time of Multics people were just figuring out what a computer should do in an interactive time-sharing environment. People had lots of ideas, and since Multics was, fundamentally, a research OS, they threw them in. Only with experience could they decide which were the good ideas and which were the bad ones. They couldn't know, in advance, which were the winners. They had to try them and see. That is the legacy of Multics.
...laura
I guess at 46 I qualify as "older". I have two university degrees, lots of experience, a bit of grey hair (which I see no reason to dye), and have found the work/life balance that works for me. It's not 70 hours a week, but I'm not some clock-watching union droid, either. If you have no life apart from your work, how do you come up with new ideas, anyway? From painful past experience, I now cringe when companies talk about their culture.
I'm also 99% likely to be looking for a new job in the new year, and am not looking forward to it. I'm far too young to retire, but I do not rule out career change.
One of the biggest cultural things I've come up against in my current position is consistency of environments. There is a reason why people need to use the same OS, compiler, runtime tools, etc. It's not old fuddy-duddy stuff: how can you track down bugs otherwise?
...laura
In Canada (sorry, not Soviet Russia), we have the Rhinoceros Party for political humour. They have had some fun policies, like bulldozing the Rocky Mountains as a makework project to reduce unemployment, and paying off Canada's national debt by putting it on Visa.
In one election some years back I was so disgusted with the mainstream candidates (I had 4 to choose from) that I voted Rhinoceros. Lots of other people did too, and they came very close to electing an MP.
...laura
You obviously don't live in B.C. :-)
They have gotten really strict about tires and headlights and things lately. Possibly stricter than they need to be, but if you want to register and license your prize here, you have to play by their rules.
...laura
The Japanese imports come over on car ferry ships with shipments of new cars (mine came this way), or get put in to containers. I don't know what the details are for cars across the Atlantic.
The Feds make sure the paperwork is in order, including de-registration from the country of origin (depends on the country; required for Japan). They verify the date of manufacture (15 years is 15 years, to the day), make sure there is no dirt or foreign plants on the car, collect GST like any other item at the border, then the car is yours. It really is that easy.
Registration and licensing in B.C. means passing an out-of-province vehicle inspection This includes things like headlights, tires, and so on, which must be both serviceable and have all the correct DOT/SAE approvals (a minor concern for most Japanese stuff). Some vehicles need extra reflectors and things, and many need daytime running lights. RHD vehicles need headlights that dip to the right on low beam for driving on the right side of the road. In the case of the Delica this means headlights from the European version Mitsubishi L300 commercial van. They come with speedometers in kilometers, which is one less thing to do.
I also got the owner's manual, dealer service history and Shaken reports. All in Japanese, of course, but I can still look at the pictures. The owner's manual is in a very distinctive anime style. :-)
...laura
Vehicle import laws in Canada are pretty protectionist too, though our exemption for private imports is "only" 15 years. Once landed, it's not difficult to register and license just about anything.
We currently have a lot of early 1990s Japanese imports running around B.C. Hell, I bought one myself (1992 Mitsubishi Delica, a 4x4 diesel minivan). The Authorities are certain something is terribly wrong with the situation, but can't quite figure out what, no matter how much money the car dealers give them to come up with something. Import enthusiasts are dead set against any change to the law, unless it involves lowering or abolishing the age limit.
...laura
At least running in 768 MB means you will have lots of time to see the error messages scroll by. :-)
...laura
The very first non-government satellite was AMSAT's own OSCAR-1.
The very first secondary payload was OSCAR-1. When other people thought they might be able to hitch a ride in to orbit the way AMSAT did, the Authorities suggested they look at how AMSAT did it.
The free rides in to orbit aren't as plentiful as they once were, but are based on one of two things: either stuff little satellites in to areas of the launch vehicle where "real" satellites won't fit, or take advantage of launch vehicles having excess capacity, since it's easier to build a really big rocket and launch a few tonnes of sand in to orbit along with your satellite than to have to reengineer your rockets every couple of years as satellites get bigger.
The launch system manuals are all available on line and make interesting reading - lobbing a satellite in to orbit is not trivial. You can read about little ones like Pegasus or great big ones like Ariane 5.
There are also people who make payloads that look and behave like satellites, but send them up on balloons instead.
...laura
The spies who really act like James Bond don't last. They attract attention to themselves and get caught. The last thing a spy wants to do is attract attention.
I'm reminded of the introductory speech in the first episode of Spy: the recruits wouldn't be doing any combat or firearms training, because if they ever needed such in real life, it would be too late anyway, and the chainsaw would probably already be warmed up.
...laura
What's wrong with you people?
This guy is obviously f**king nuts, but without the nutcases to show what's possible and make things interesting, the world would be a far duller place, and a far poorer one too.
Harumph!
...laura, who occasionally indulges in nutsness, just not this particular kind
I wonder if the out of memory is for real. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was out of some other resource, but couldn't come up with anything more meaningful to say - like an infamous version of Microsoft Word many moons ago that said it was out of memory when you didn't have a default printer defined in Windows.
What is this XP you speak of? Is it some sort of DOS shell?
...laura
It's not just visa officers: U.S. immigration law assumes that all who set foot on U.S. soil seeking admission to the country are intending immigrants, until proven otherwise.
Visa requirements are very much a tit-for-tat affair. If people from Country A need a visa to visit Country B, Country A will insist on a visa for visitors from Country B.
...laura who need a visa for Turkey last year, because Turks need a visa to visit Canada
5000 quatloos that it won't work out and all quid will have to be destroyed!
"...not for true gamesters!"
I first encountered Slashdot in 2000 when I started a new job. We did, among other things, two-way paging systems, and had a setup that forwarded various things to our pagers. This included new headlines, weather forecasts, and something new and mysterious (to me) called Slashdot.
In 1997 I had not yet heard of Slashdot, but was a regular customer of a new upstart Internet business called amazon.com. I first started playing with the Internet in 1987, when I considered myself fortunate indeed to have a 9600 baud SLIP line so I could access email, newsgroups and ftp sites.
...laura
Any schmuck can download the SDK and play with Brew apps on the emulator, but only a company can get the access you need to run apps, even for testing, on a real device. I think this is a shame; Brew does some genuinely interesting things.
(Yes, I do Brew for a living. I can (and do) run apps on real devices on real networks.)
My choice for a hobbyist-friendly mobile platform is probably still Palm OS. Some of the free gcc-based toolchain is antiquated, but as long as it builds things that run on real devices, I don't care.
...laura
Correct.
The prize is the admiration of a real live geek girl!
...laura
I save my pennies the year I graduated from high school and splurged on a TI-59, which not only served me well, but factored numbers too (one of my favourite programs I wrote for it). Cards, spaghetti code, the works. I actually defined a small virtual processor, wrote an emulator for it that ran on the TI-59, and hand-assembled programs for that virtual processor (which resembled a PIC in a number of ways, now that I think of it). Geek city, huh?
It was only much later that I confirmed that 52579 is prime, because I was never patient enough to let it finish trying factors. A prize for who can tell me what number I was factoring. :-)
I wish I still had that thing. Haven't seen it in years.
...laura
The whole point of stuff like this is being somebody else, assuming a role in an online fantasy.
There was a good article in New Scientist recently looking at people and their Second Life avatars. Some people have very good reasons for wanting to be somebody else, whether it's folks in wheelchairs who want to walk around, or transgendered folks who want to try on a new gender.
...laura