I remember a few years ago seeing the 1960s Canadian TV series
Wojeck,
and it carried a viewer discretion warning that the standards for personal and professional relationships
had changed since the program was produced. There was a certain
element of "like, duh!", but somebody had thought about it, and I had no problem with it.
Fast forward to the present day. I'm watching Swedish sci-fi show
Äcta Människor
("Real Humans" in English).
It quietly avoids any gratuitous sex or violence, but there is lots of non-gratuitous sex and violence, as integral
parts of the plot. Like all Scandinavian shows it has interesting female characters who do in fact
talk to each other about something other than men. That's the sort of culture they want, it's
one I admire, and I'm cool with it.
At the latitude where I live, the sun sets after 2100 PDT in the summer. That would still be 2000 PST, with
an hour and a half of twilight after
that. What more do people want?
In the winter the sun sets at 1600 PST. Even 1700 PDT wouldn't buy much, particularly since that would mean sunrise at 0900 PDT.
I looked carefully at my viewing habits, concluded I was paying a fortune for the two or three channels I
actually watched, and decided there had to be a better way. The major drop in the quality of the content didn't help.
I now have over-the-air TV for local news, iTunes, Netflix and Acorn, DVDs, and stream stuff. This includes a U.K. VPN account
to circumvent BBC and ITV geoblocking. It all works fine.
There's probably a business in making retro computers as DIY kits. Sure, some company would have to re-manufacture the parts that couldn't be made at home and with small runs the parts wouldn't be cheap, but there is a hobbyist market out there.
My flying background must be showing. I always review the safety information
card, confirm safety equipment in my vicinity, and, yes, I actually do pay attention
to the safety briefing.
I've seen some really cool ads that were right on target - like the time
I played a James May video on YouTube and the ad that popped up
was for an electron microscope. I couldn't begin to afford the one
the advertiser wanted me to buy, but I actually did poke around eBay
to see if there were any old ones out there I might be able to afford.
I've hit paydirt many times when Amazon and others pointed out
"people who bought this also bought..."
That's the way it's supposed to work.
Then there are the way off base ads. I wonder if they are genuinely being
blasted out to everybody, or if I fall off too many if-then-elses for anything
more relevant to come up. These ads are invariably back-of-the-comics
and/or cable tv infomercial quality, like the perennial "weird trick for belly fat" ads.
I suppose I get those because Facebook et al know I'm a woman.
That's the deal we made, I suppose. A quasi-free internet supported by
advertising. And, like all things, 99% of internet advertising is crap.
I view Tesla as the best bet for a completely new American car company in a long time.
The U.S. Big Three have been around for eons. After World War 2 Hudson and Nash were hurting,
merged to form American Motors, and went bust. Packard and Studebaker were hurting, merged, and went bust.
Kaiser/Frazer tried, and went bust. De Lorean tried and got in to all sorts of trouble. Nobody seemed
to be able to launch a new car company and make it work.
Tesla, on the other hand, seem to have cracked it. They're selling all the cars they can make.
I see lots of them around here (Vancouver).
I'm guided by the experience of the airlines. While you must, obviously, have the right
sort of pilot's license, they also want a four year university degree. Not because
it necessarily enhances your flying, but because it shows you can
learn and accomplish things. If you can learn and accomplish things,
and know your way around computers, I'd love to talk to you.
The big problem at most places I've worked is getting promising resumes past HR
people who only count buzzwords.
I've followed Minix development with interest. The internal architecture is different from most OSs out there.
Not different for the sake of being different, but different to show different solutions to problems. The way we
do things in Linux et al is powerful, but it's not the only way.
I haven't come up with a compelling reason to use it in my work (yet...:-), but I install each new release on a virtual machine
and play with it.
We have trolleybuses here in Vancouver, too. Vancouver isn't as hilly as San Francisco, but it's far from flat.
Our electricity is relatively cheap and comes from dams. So no carbon footprint.
The quality of service no longer meets customer requirements, and customers are rebelling. The airlines
and airports have done their best to remove any aspect of comfort or pleasure from air travel, and customers,
the people who actually pay the bills, have had enough.
Entitled attitudes don't help. I ended up with bruised knees on a British Airways flight from the person
ahead of me refusing to negotiate on seat reclining, with the flight attendants refusing to mediate. On a American flight
the passenger next to me went ballistic and very loudly demanded to be reseated, because I was wearing perfume.
On my last long-haul flight (Vancouver to London) I did an on-the-spot upgrade to premium economy and had a good flight. I had
cashed in credit card points for the ticket, so the extra $$$ was money well-spent.
I think diverting is a lousy way to handle customer disputes, but it scares me that the airlines may start accepting this
as part of the cost of doing business...
I'm nearsighted and have worn glasses on and off since I was about 10. I wore contacts through most of my 20s, but returned to glasses
in my 30s.
Now that I'm in my 50s I'm in that stage where my near vision is starting to deteriorate and I'm slowly becoming
far-sighted. The first real manifestation of this
was when flying at night, when I was experiencing massive eyestrain reading charts in my lap, but could see outside the plane just fine. So
I got progressives the last time I got new glasses, and I'm fine.
I don't wear glasses when I'm not driving or flying.
I prefer a soft-focus world.:-)
Am I a candidate for laser eye surgery? According to the web sites, not really. I could get good distant correction, but would then
need glasses for reading. Since I need glasses to drive and to fly anyway, I'm not
sure this would buy me anything.
The problem with crazily-complex passwords is that if you can't remember them you write
them down, and, at a stroke, have compromised security. One of the worst I've encountered is the U.S. Customs
eAPIS web site, for sending advance information when you want to fly a private plane or sail a private boat to the U.S.
The other issue is that you risk locking out legitimate access.
My bank does the password plus security question thing. My security questions (you can make up your own)
are more than a little interesting.:-)
The visibility from the cockpit of many planes is actually quite mediocre. This was an issue, for example, for
American flight 191. The pilots couldn't actually see the DC-10's engines from the cockpit, and did the wrong thing
in response a perceived engine failure. Anything that helps pilots process and interpret information
is A Good Thing.
Another bit of fictional prior art: the Far Star's control system in Foundation's Edge.
I always insist on a clean compile with the warning level turned up
as high as it will go. If the compiler is cool with my code,
I have a better chance it will do the right thing with it.
Once I have an application that works I see if it meets performance goals (if any). If it
does, I'm done. If it doesn't, profile, find the hot spots, optimize as
needed. Compiling an entire application with -O3 is idiotic, and misses the point.
My boss and I routinely look at new tools and technology with an eye to solving our company's problems
and build cool new stuff.
Our goal is not to embrace flavour-of-the-month technology. It's to identify better solutions to old problems,
or find good solutions to new problems. Tools have to work, or they serve no purpose. Everything else follows from there.
We do most of our development in C on Linux, but have incorporated virtualization and cloud computing, new technologies that
provide better solutions to old problems. The jury is still
out on other goodies. I like python, while my boss prefers perl. I like Django, while he prefers PHP. He's the boss, so I write lots of perl and PHP...:-}
I did my first year Computer Science in Algol W with punched cards.
The system required a blue "ticket card" to do anything other than list your card deck. We were issued a supply of
ticket cards, and could (and did) buy more at the campus bookstore.
We punched our cards ourselves. We were very careful to write everything out, to walk through our programs to make sure the program was
syntactically correct and might have a chance of doing what it was supposed to do before spending a ticket card to find out what
the compiler thought of it. We had immediate turnaround, which meant you could go through ticket cards that much faster.
I now program mainly in C on Linux boxes. The programs I create are orders of magnitude more complicated than what I created then.
My interactive productivity is much higher too. I'm not sure I'd even attempt much of what I do now
if I didn't have much more powerful computing and debugging facilities available.
I am reminded of a TOS episode where two warring planets had made their war so clean and clinical that they
had no real reason to stop it. Until Captain Kirk came in and showed them what war really was, something
horrifying, to be avoided. Even if it meant talking peace with your enemy.
Capital punishment is such an atrocity. Maybe if it was shown to be that atrocity, there would be less support for it.
Public hanging,
firing squad, maybe even dust off the electric chair. Show that it's gross and disgusting, and that civilized people
have better ways to keep their societies working.
Yup. Declare normal human variation pathological, make money by "treating" it, laugh all the way to the bank.
I would also add that many of the "autistic" children I see aren't autistic at all, not
by any standard I understand. They are children desperate for attention, and have found
a way to get that attention.
Some may even be jumping on the autism bandwagon to be trendy. I've seen this with allergies,
where kids want inhalers and shit so they fit in with their over-medicated peers.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember a few years ago seeing the 1960s Canadian TV series Wojeck, and it carried a viewer discretion warning that the standards for personal and professional relationships had changed since the program was produced. There was a certain element of "like, duh!", but somebody had thought about it, and I had no problem with it.
Fast forward to the present day. I'm watching Swedish sci-fi show Äcta Människor ("Real Humans" in English). It quietly avoids any gratuitous sex or violence, but there is lots of non-gratuitous sex and violence, as integral parts of the plot. Like all Scandinavian shows it has interesting female characters who do in fact talk to each other about something other than men. That's the sort of culture they want, it's one I admire, and I'm cool with it.
...laura
I think it's completely pointless.
At the latitude where I live, the sun sets after 2100 PDT in the summer. That would still be 2000 PST, with an hour and a half of twilight after that. What more do people want?
In the winter the sun sets at 1600 PST. Even 1700 PDT wouldn't buy much, particularly since that would mean sunrise at 0900 PDT.
...laura
I looked carefully at my viewing habits, concluded I was paying a fortune for the two or three channels I actually watched, and decided there had to be a better way. The major drop in the quality of the content didn't help.
I now have over-the-air TV for local news, iTunes, Netflix and Acorn, DVDs, and stream stuff. This includes a U.K. VPN account to circumvent BBC and ITV geoblocking. It all works fine.
...laura
There's probably a business in making retro computers as DIY kits. Sure, some company would have to re-manufacture the parts that couldn't be made at home and with small runs the parts wouldn't be cheap, but there is a hobbyist market out there.
Yup.
There are often limits on authenticity, either due to parts availability (e.g. TTL ICs), or for convenience (modern monitors, keyboards).
...laura
Well, then you're a pretty crappy pilot if you don't have it memorized by now.
I've made a point of not memorizing checklists. Good pilots always work from their printed checklists. It lessens the chance of missing something.
...laura
My flying background must be showing. I always review the safety information card, confirm safety equipment in my vicinity, and, yes, I actually do pay attention to the safety briefing.
But that's just me.
...laura
I've seen some really cool ads that were right on target - like the time I played a James May video on YouTube and the ad that popped up was for an electron microscope. I couldn't begin to afford the one the advertiser wanted me to buy, but I actually did poke around eBay to see if there were any old ones out there I might be able to afford. I've hit paydirt many times when Amazon and others pointed out "people who bought this also bought..."
That's the way it's supposed to work.
Then there are the way off base ads. I wonder if they are genuinely being blasted out to everybody, or if I fall off too many if-then-elses for anything more relevant to come up. These ads are invariably back-of-the-comics and/or cable tv infomercial quality, like the perennial "weird trick for belly fat" ads. I suppose I get those because Facebook et al know I'm a woman.
That's the deal we made, I suppose. A quasi-free internet supported by advertising. And, like all things, 99% of internet advertising is crap.
...laura
I view Tesla as the best bet for a completely new American car company in a long time.
The U.S. Big Three have been around for eons. After World War 2 Hudson and Nash were hurting, merged to form American Motors, and went bust. Packard and Studebaker were hurting, merged, and went bust. Kaiser/Frazer tried, and went bust. De Lorean tried and got in to all sorts of trouble. Nobody seemed to be able to launch a new car company and make it work.
Tesla, on the other hand, seem to have cracked it. They're selling all the cars they can make. I see lots of them around here (Vancouver).
...laura
Umm... JSON is a pretty significant force behind modern Web design. Without it, the Web would still be a pretty static place.
Judging by the number of broken web sites I've seen lately, we could use a bit more staticness and a bit less dynamicness. :-}
...laura
I'm guided by the experience of the airlines. While you must, obviously, have the right sort of pilot's license, they also want a four year university degree. Not because it necessarily enhances your flying, but because it shows you can learn and accomplish things. If you can learn and accomplish things, and know your way around computers, I'd love to talk to you.
The big problem at most places I've worked is getting promising resumes past HR people who only count buzzwords.
...laura
I've followed Minix development with interest. The internal architecture is different from most OSs out there. Not different for the sake of being different, but different to show different solutions to problems. The way we do things in Linux et al is powerful, but it's not the only way.
I haven't come up with a compelling reason to use it in my work (yet... :-), but I install each new release on a virtual machine
and play with it.
...laura
We have trolleybuses here in Vancouver, too. Vancouver isn't as hilly as San Francisco, but it's far from flat. Our electricity is relatively cheap and comes from dams. So no carbon footprint.
The new diesel buses are all hybrids.
...laura
The quality of service no longer meets customer requirements, and customers are rebelling. The airlines and airports have done their best to remove any aspect of comfort or pleasure from air travel, and customers, the people who actually pay the bills, have had enough.
Entitled attitudes don't help. I ended up with bruised knees on a British Airways flight from the person ahead of me refusing to negotiate on seat reclining, with the flight attendants refusing to mediate. On a American flight the passenger next to me went ballistic and very loudly demanded to be reseated, because I was wearing perfume.
On my last long-haul flight (Vancouver to London) I did an on-the-spot upgrade to premium economy and had a good flight. I had cashed in credit card points for the ticket, so the extra $$$ was money well-spent.
I think diverting is a lousy way to handle customer disputes, but it scares me that the airlines may start accepting this as part of the cost of doing business...
...laura
Israel's policy has always been "Don't fuck with us or we will destroy you." I wonder what part of this Hamas et al don't understand.
I'm nearsighted and have worn glasses on and off since I was about 10. I wore contacts through most of my 20s, but returned to glasses in my 30s.
Now that I'm in my 50s I'm in that stage where my near vision is starting to deteriorate and I'm slowly becoming far-sighted. The first real manifestation of this was when flying at night, when I was experiencing massive eyestrain reading charts in my lap, but could see outside the plane just fine. So I got progressives the last time I got new glasses, and I'm fine.
I don't wear glasses when I'm not driving or flying. I prefer a soft-focus world. :-)
Am I a candidate for laser eye surgery? According to the web sites, not really. I could get good distant correction, but would then need glasses for reading. Since I need glasses to drive and to fly anyway, I'm not sure this would buy me anything.
...laura
The problem with crazily-complex passwords is that if you can't remember them you write them down, and, at a stroke, have compromised security. One of the worst I've encountered is the U.S. Customs eAPIS web site, for sending advance information when you want to fly a private plane or sail a private boat to the U.S.
The other issue is that you risk locking out legitimate access.
My bank does the password plus security question thing. My security questions (you can make up your own) are more than a little interesting. :-)
...laura
I'm intrigued.
The visibility from the cockpit of many planes is actually quite mediocre. This was an issue, for example, for American flight 191. The pilots couldn't actually see the DC-10's engines from the cockpit, and did the wrong thing in response a perceived engine failure. Anything that helps pilots process and interpret information is A Good Thing.
Another bit of fictional prior art: the Far Star's control system in Foundation's Edge.
...laura
Example?
I always insist on a clean compile with the warning level turned up as high as it will go. If the compiler is cool with my code, I have a better chance it will do the right thing with it.
Once I have an application that works I see if it meets performance goals (if any). If it does, I'm done. If it doesn't, profile, find the hot spots, optimize as needed. Compiling an entire application with -O3 is idiotic, and misses the point.
...laura
My boss and I routinely look at new tools and technology with an eye to solving our company's problems and build cool new stuff. Our goal is not to embrace flavour-of-the-month technology. It's to identify better solutions to old problems, or find good solutions to new problems. Tools have to work, or they serve no purpose. Everything else follows from there.
We do most of our development in C on Linux, but have incorporated virtualization and cloud computing, new technologies that provide better solutions to old problems. The jury is still out on other goodies. I like python, while my boss prefers perl. I like Django, while he prefers PHP. He's the boss, so I write lots of perl and PHP... :-}
...laura
I did my first year Computer Science in Algol W with punched cards.
The system required a blue "ticket card" to do anything other than list your card deck. We were issued a supply of ticket cards, and could (and did) buy more at the campus bookstore. We punched our cards ourselves. We were very careful to write everything out, to walk through our programs to make sure the program was syntactically correct and might have a chance of doing what it was supposed to do before spending a ticket card to find out what the compiler thought of it. We had immediate turnaround, which meant you could go through ticket cards that much faster.
I now program mainly in C on Linux boxes. The programs I create are orders of magnitude more complicated than what I created then. My interactive productivity is much higher too. I'm not sure I'd even attempt much of what I do now if I didn't have much more powerful computing and debugging facilities available.
...laura
I am reminded of a TOS episode where two warring planets had made their war so clean and clinical that they had no real reason to stop it. Until Captain Kirk came in and showed them what war really was, something horrifying, to be avoided. Even if it meant talking peace with your enemy.
Capital punishment is such an atrocity. Maybe if it was shown to be that atrocity, there would be less support for it. Public hanging, firing squad, maybe even dust off the electric chair. Show that it's gross and disgusting, and that civilized people have better ways to keep their societies working.
...laura
Please drop this idiotic phrase.
Besides, total lunar eclipses aren't red at all, at least, none I've ever seen. They're a neat copper colour.
...laura
...and the world is all the better for it!
...laura
Yup. Declare normal human variation pathological, make money by "treating" it, laugh all the way to the bank.
I would also add that many of the "autistic" children I see aren't autistic at all, not by any standard I understand. They are children desperate for attention, and have found a way to get that attention.
Some may even be jumping on the autism bandwagon to be trendy. I've seen this with allergies, where kids want inhalers and shit so they fit in with their over-medicated peers.
...laura