Re:Used up in the cost to get the electricity, tho
on
Magnetic Space Launches
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I didn't think they launched rockets exactly vertically. To get the orbital speed right, they go off at an angle - possibly after goign straight up for the most dense part of the atmosphere. I suppose for geostationary sattelites they don't need quite the rotation (and they need to go further up). Easier to explain with a picture, but no can do here.
This is why they like to launch from near the equator and always orbit in the same direction as the earth - you get a substantial boost (900 miles an hour according to Monty Python).
That's Pop Idol (I think - don't really watch these things myself). I think that there is an element of the Great British Public which knows that it will annoy the people behind the show so they are voting in droves. They know that the record company doesn't want anything new or original which might be difficult to sell. To paraphrase Pirsig: The whole system cautions against originality. Doing the same thing will get you an 'A', originality will get you anything between an A and an F.
There's a lot of artists over the years who have lasted and haven't been that attractive: Buddy Holly (OK - he didn't last but the work did), Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Shane MacGowan, The Pixies. The record company behind stuff like Popstars clearly do not want anyone with talent or anyone who will last. The reason that the artists behind this protest are mostly the older ones is because they can survive without their record label. A1, Hear'Say, Backdoor Boys etc. cannot.
With stuff like TV's Popstars, the record labels aren't even bothering to hide the fact that "bands" these days are made-up. Do you think that these mime & dance combos can afford to complain to their record labels? No way. They'll dump you and then just phone up the model agency and ask for 5 more people who look OK and can sort-of dance. No singing ability required. If you can read music (much less, write it), then you're probably too clever and might make trouble later. Much as I can't stand the guy, but at least Elton can actually play an instrument.
I bet the labels can't wait until the CG stuff can be done cheaply enough to replace humans altogether.
Key word - "know". I'm sure it would be possible to produce open source versions of stuff like Office which had the same UI etc. so users could pick them up and use them quickly. Possible, yes but you'd be drowned in lawsuits before you could say frost pist.
This is interesting. Imagine if, in the early days of motoring, someone had copyrighted having the gas pedal on the right, the brake in the middle, the clutch on the left, the steering wheel etc. Basically, the user-interface for a car. All the UIs for all the different makes would have to be different. How would that work? Eventually, the car with the most popular UI would become a default monopoly. Either that, or they'd be a lot of wrecks when people changed brands.
People are comfortable with what they know. It's not legally possible to produce something which they can operate in the same way to get the same result - even if, under the hood, it's completely different.
I have a suspicion that the quirky UI is partly a consequence of the cross-platform nature of the product. It looks like it's coded in C/C++ using a cross-platform library of some sort. Since you can replace the entire UI with something custom-written in Java (and I've known people who've done this) then if people find it that offensive then they can do something about it.
The core product is pretty good though. We have a few hundred in-house developed databases which do everything from discussion to complex workflow. We don't have many problems. Once you've got it set up, being able to pick a bunch of people and a room for a meeting, then hitting "find free time" (although, god knows, this is beyond most project managers) is cool. Oh, and our web stuff runs on it as well.
In response to the AC reply, you can fix the daylight saving. I'll admit we did have a problem with the fact that the states and the UK didn't change at the same time, but that's sorted now.
OK, the UI for 4.x was pretty awful. 5 is a lot better - although there are some odd things in there. If it confuses you because you're only used to Outlook, well, too bad.
We use Notes throughout for a lot more than just mail/calendar and we don't get many problems at all. As well as support for all that stuff mentioned above, there's also stuff like S/MIME - with the ability to use the NAB as an LDAP server for picking up public keys etc.
Good administrators can keep it running flawlessly (ours don't do that badly either). We've never had an e-mail virus problem - if you install/configure MAPI to use Notes, then yes, that could be a problem, but why on earth would anyone want to do that?
Certainly large parts of the Silmarillion owed a lot to Christian mythology. The fall of Melkor certainly parallels the Satan thing - and yes, the Wizards to have cetain characteristics of angels.
There are elements of the Norse stuff in there though - the quest of the human hero (sorry, been that long I've forgotten the names) to recover a silmaril so that he can marry the elven princess etc. is a very epic sort of a thing. Mind you, there are parallels to be drawn between many religions. Odin's trial hanging from the tree Yggdrasil for nine days in order to give mankind the secret of the runes could be compared with the crucifiction.
The Silmarillion (nor Marillion - they're bloody rubbish) is well worth a read (although it takes some concentration). Don't judge Tolkien just by LOTR any more than you would judge him just by The Hobbit.
These days, surely being able to understand the technology and communicate is the ideal. Most IT project failures happen in the requirements stage (sorry, can't find good link, but 90% is the figure which sticks in the mind). That's a failure of the IT people to communicate with the customer. Remember that IT is not an end in itself, it is a tool (that should be popular round here). If your requirements are f**ked then your system is not likely to do anything which anyone wants. If that's the case, nobody will use it.
There are a few people commenting on here how autism might actually be an advantage. Well, they clearly haven't come into contact with a seriously autistic child. It's not funny.
The last thing that/. readers should be thinking is "oh, it's a condition with a name - that's alright then". By training and concentrating, it's possible to improve communication skills. Something which, in our industry, we should be doing.
Last point: my authority to comment on this comes from:
Working with actuaries. Most of them make the average IT person look like the life and soul of the party. We have real trouble communicating requirements with them.
Having a stepdaughter with Aspergers. It is a frustrating problem for the child, but therapy can help.
Saying all that, often I'd rather be coding device drivers than talking to people.
Yeah - sorry. Anti US bias showing. Shouldn't really judge you country by the thing which make the papers over here. (Yeah, but some bastard in Tahoe stole my snowboard).
I've had a think since posting and I still worry about cartoon/film violence. I don't know if you guys over there heard about the Jamie Bulger case (too many links, too many biased). Basically, a couple of 9/10 year old kids tortured and killed a toddler - not much older than my own son. I can't help wondering about what they were thinking of. How did they not realise the consequences of what they were doing?
Maybe if kids only see TV violence, they don't get what it really means. I don't know. The whole business is too disturbing for me to write rationally.
Sadly, The Onion don't seem to have archived their story about people adopting children having to pass stringent tests whilst people having children can do as they like (corrections/links/transcripts appreciated).
There's some twisted children out there and parents who try and blame the media or the Internet (is the Internet a medium?) are just trying to dodge responsibility. If your children are cunts, it's because you made them that way.
I have no problem with the games and their content or whatever. I also hate extreme Christian tosspots like this guy. The aim of "reducing the marketing of violence to children" is, however, a laudable one. These companies put recommended ages on and then deliberatly market toys at children below that age group. My nine year old stepdaughter, like all of her classmates, has been into the Pokemon craze. The way I watch it, I don't see that there's much difference between the basic premise and dogfighting - setting pets on each other to see who wins. Admittedly, my nine year old stepdaughter does have Aspergers syndrome and therefore has a lot of trouble distinguishing what's serious and what's not.
I don't believe that banning or censoring things is the answer. I do believe that awareness and parental responsibility will help. My two year old son will soon be old enough to be influenced by what he sees and hears (he picked up the word "bugger" quickly enough). I wouldn't like him to grow up thinking that it's normal to shoot/stab/punch people.
I don't want censorship (yeah - I surf for porn now and again) what I want is responsibility. I don't want people to blame the TV or the Internet for their kids seeing graphic anal fisting (much less Taco snotting), I want them to take responsibility and educate their kids. You can't take responsibility without knowledge.
The people who run this site may be going about things the wrong way, but someone needs to highlight that there is a problem.
PS Yes, our TV news does show what actually happens when people are shot/bombed/gassed and it aint pretty. And we still don't want guns - coincidence?
Where I work, the decision was taken, many years ago, to go 95 instead of NT. Most users still have 95. The reasoning was: a) we had a shedload of dodgy DOS apps which wouldn't run on NT, b) upgrading 1,200 machines would cost big bucks.As a result, we run about 1 support person for every 70 staff.
I remember going to a pre-release technical thing at the end of 94 and the reaction they got when they explained what 95 actually was (can't remember clearly 'cos I had a very heavy night the night before) was incredible. We had to sign an NDA so we weren't allowed to tell people that it was basically Win 3.11 with a few bits rewritten as 32bit and a mutex (yes, just one) around the bits that couldn't cope with the pre-emptive multi-tasking (most of it). How they managed to get away with selling it as a "32 bit multi-tasking operating system" is beyond me. It's not 32bit, it's not (properly) multi tasking and I'm not sure it's worthy of the name "operating system. They admitted at the time that half of it was still 16bit - hence the constant "out of system resources" when the 64K user/gdi heaps ran out. The number of times I've heard users ask "why is it out of memory when I have 256Mb RAM?". The only answer I could give is "because your operating system is a bastardised heap of 16bit crap". My work machine runs 2K and people can't believe it when I say I reboot about twice a month (and yes, I develop in C++ on it). 2K might not be very good, but it beats the crap out of 9x.
I shall not mourn its passing - not that 98 is much different. They should never have been developed.
If someone's got a link to an official looking article on the subject, please post so I can send to the management along with a comment "now can we get rid of this fucking shit".
However easy it is, it still sounds like a geek thing. Most people who would even consider doing a thing like that would already have a perfectly functional PC.
Saying that, using standard technology may get them into trouble in other ways. IANAEE (electronics engineer) but I bet that over millions of units, the custom hardware which most consoles use costs less. As the production ramps up, jamming loads onto a few custom made chips starts to pay.
If they think they can win the console wars the same way they one the browser wars (and let's face it, IE costs something to produce and distribute) then they would've had to come in a lot lower than $300. I'm assuming that their plan is to ultimately have the "all MS" household but they forget that:
browsers are cheap to make in bulk
people don't spend $100s on games for their browser Unless they get the games that people want to play, they will come unstuck.
This insightful analysis has been brought to you by a Sega Saturn owner.
Interesting example of a "corrupt organisation". Seems to fit though (Archer, Hamilton etc.)
It seems like it's OK if it's your real name (like Wiliam Hague the naturist). If that were true, you could change your name to anything, then letgitmately register the domain. Not sure how it would hold up though. There was one guy in the UK who, (after being charged £10 by Yorkshire Bank for sending him a letter telling him he was £2.50 overdrawn) changed his name by deed poll (dunno what it's called in the US) to Mr. YorkshireBankPlcAreFascistBastards, then demanded that they issue him with a new chequebook (that's checkbook to you) etc. Wonder if he ever thought of registering the domain.
PS Sorry for those of you who can't pick up pound signs. PPS The bank did issue him with new stuff, then closed his account.
... it comes out OK for the "little" guy. My fave was the one during the last UK general election when www.williamhague.com got disputed (I advise you not to look at the actual content). IIRC William Hague (the naturist) won because he had been running the site for ages before William Hague (the politician) got elected leader of the Conservative party. There's nothing they could do about it.
Mind you, I'm not sure the result would've been much different if the naturist guy had stood instead. All OK now as they've got a completely different slaphead nonentity in charge now.
Re:Why waste all the time .. an informative answer
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
I've always had a problem with handicap ramps. Whilst we depended upon stairs, we were pretty much safe from dalek invasion. Putting wheelchair ramps in all over the place leaves us wide open.
Fortunately I have a solution. If you bolt/weld a steel hemisphere about 3-4" radius in the middle of every wheelchair ramp, legitimate wheelchair users can pass easily whilst daleks will be completely thwarted.
Looks like it'll get Segway riders as well.
Should I post this as AC or not? Moderation will tell.
Sure - code is the "what", but "what" is not useful without "why". I suspect the lameness filter will prevent me from posting examples. I work on application software which can have some pretty bizzare user requirements and these do end up permeating through the entire system. To a newbie coder, some stuff can look like "no sensible user would want that" but they don't know the system and they don't know that "sensible user" is an oxymoron. It needs commenting.
I agree comments should be kept to the useful - otherwise they can obscure the code. I don't think that there are any hard and fast rules though - apart from (good) peer review. If there were hard and fast rules for programming, then it wouldn't take any skill, would it? It ends up, as Joseph Heller said "like an experiment in mass lobotomy using rules instead of scalpels". The important thing is not "does it conform to the rules" but "can anyone else understand it".
In my own personal rules of programming, rule 3 is: "The best, fastest, most optimised piece of code in the world is worth precisely f*ck all if no-one else can understand it". For the record, rules 1 and 2 are "It takes longer to do it quickly" and "nobody cares how fast it is if it doesn't work". I wont list the others.
Early on in my programming career, I was looking at such a piece of code - something which was simple when first written (in C) 5 years previously, but had so many mods, the function was pushing 1000 lines (ugh). Some guy had put in this change, commented it as "for performance improvement", then commented it out with an extra comment explaining that it was taken out because it didn't work. At the time I thought "why is this guy making himself look like a dick?". Later I got it - he'd left it like that just to stop some other poor bastard making the same mistake (it was a calculation thing which we were always pushed to improve performance).
If you do something wierd or clever, for f*ck's sake put a comment in (do as I say, nbot as I do).
Except that by saying that "Honest people don't want online music", they seem to be saying that pretty much everyone I know is dishonest (yes, I know that anecdotal evidence is not real evidence, but..) as they do want online music. They don't want online music which can only be played on their PC, and they don't want a wide selection, consisting of Britney and NSYNC (however you write it).
Revenues are falling in the record industry and costs are higher. They have to put sooo much money into getting a record to chart now, that
it's not economical to promote anything which wont sell loads
they have to sell as much of that crap as possible
I, for one, would be buying more music (on CD) if Napster was still there (and I could get to it from work - damned firewalls) 'cos I could listen first. I've got more chance of shagging the pope than hearing anything to my taste on the radio these days. If I can't check it out first, then I'm not going to risk the money.
BTW I came across this site last week. I can just pay, print out the music, and then I can be sure that it'll play on any compatible piano... well it could if I could play it properly.
The line about "cancel your service and you lose the ability to listen to any of the songs" well, to do that, they must have to connect to the internet in order to work this one out. To enforce this, they must have their own player/codec/format/thingy which needs this to work. No net connection, no play (am I the only one having this trouble on MS Media Player?).
How many people will actually pay for this shit? If you've only got one phone line and someone's using it, you can't listen. If you want to drag the laptop out in the garden for a barbeque and connect your amp & speakers, you need to run the phone cable out as well. Want to listen on the train? Well, you'll need a compatable cell phone and a lot of patience.
As someone said earlier, the normal CD business has a better business model.
I can see a few dumb people signing up for a few months, but after they realise that to listen to their purchases (legally - of course it's easy to rip anything one way or another), they need to huddle round the PC in the corner.
Re:Why waste all the time .. an informative answer
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 2
That should be good. Just lean forward to go forward. When the power runs out, just fall on your face.
If you're talking about the message "At least one service or device driver failed during startup. Check event log for details." then that's OK. All the NT systems I've ever seen (OK, the ones I've set up) do this - that's how you know it's working properly.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, might as well get modded down a bit.
I didn't think they launched rockets exactly vertically. To get the orbital speed right, they go off at an angle - possibly after goign straight up for the most dense part of the atmosphere. I suppose for geostationary sattelites they don't need quite the rotation (and they need to go further up). Easier to explain with a picture, but no can do here.
This is why they like to launch from near the equator and always orbit in the same direction as the earth - you get a substantial boost (900 miles an hour according to Monty Python).
That's Pop Idol (I think - don't really watch these things myself). I think that there is an element of the Great British Public which knows that it will annoy the people behind the show so they are voting in droves. They know that the record company doesn't want anything new or original which might be difficult to sell. To paraphrase Pirsig:
The whole system cautions against originality. Doing the same thing will get you an 'A', originality will get you anything between an A and an F.
There's a lot of artists over the years who have lasted and haven't been that attractive: Buddy Holly (OK - he didn't last but the work did), Mick Jagger, Iggy Pop, Shane MacGowan, The Pixies. The record company behind stuff like Popstars clearly do not want anyone with talent or anyone who will last. The reason that the artists behind this protest are mostly the older ones is because they can survive without their record label. A1, Hear'Say, Backdoor Boys etc. cannot.
With stuff like TV's Popstars, the record labels aren't even bothering to hide the fact that "bands" these days are made-up. Do you think that these mime & dance combos can afford to complain to their record labels? No way. They'll dump you and then just phone up the model agency and ask for 5 more people who look OK and can sort-of dance. No singing ability required. If you can read music (much less, write it), then you're probably too clever and might make trouble later. Much as I can't stand the guy, but at least Elton can actually play an instrument.
I bet the labels can't wait until the CG stuff can be done cheaply enough to replace humans altogether.
Sad times indeed.
The Microsoft devil you know
Key word - "know". I'm sure it would be possible to produce open source versions of stuff like Office which had the same UI etc. so users could pick them up and use them quickly. Possible, yes but you'd be drowned in lawsuits before you could say frost pist.
This is interesting. Imagine if, in the early days of motoring, someone had copyrighted having the gas pedal on the right, the brake in the middle, the clutch on the left, the steering wheel etc. Basically, the user-interface for a car. All the UIs for all the different makes would have to be different. How would that work? Eventually, the car with the most popular UI would become a default monopoly. Either that, or they'd be a lot of wrecks when people changed brands.
People are comfortable with what they know. It's not legally possible to produce something which they can operate in the same way to get the same result - even if, under the hood, it's completely different.
I have a suspicion that the quirky UI is partly a consequence of the cross-platform nature of the product. It looks like it's coded in C/C++ using a cross-platform library of some sort. Since you can replace the entire UI with something custom-written in Java (and I've known people who've done this) then if people find it that offensive then they can do something about it.
The core product is pretty good though. We have a few hundred in-house developed databases which do everything from discussion to complex workflow. We don't have many problems. Once you've got it set up, being able to pick a bunch of people and a room for a meeting, then hitting "find free time" (although, god knows, this is beyond most project managers) is cool. Oh, and our web stuff runs on it as well.
In response to the AC reply, you can fix the daylight saving. I'll admit we did have a problem with the fact that the states and the UK didn't change at the same time, but that's sorted now.
OK, the UI for 4.x was pretty awful. 5 is a lot better - although there are some odd things in there. If it confuses you because you're only used to Outlook, well, too bad.
We use Notes throughout for a lot more than just mail/calendar and we don't get many problems at all. As well as support for all that stuff mentioned above, there's also stuff like S/MIME - with the ability to use the NAB as an LDAP server for picking up public keys etc.
Good administrators can keep it running flawlessly (ours don't do that badly either). We've never had an e-mail virus problem - if you install/configure MAPI to use Notes, then yes, that could be a problem, but why on earth would anyone want to do that?
Certainly large parts of the Silmarillion owed a lot to Christian mythology. The fall of Melkor certainly parallels the Satan thing - and yes, the Wizards to have cetain characteristics of angels.
There are elements of the Norse stuff in there though - the quest of the human hero (sorry, been that long I've forgotten the names) to recover a silmaril so that he can marry the elven princess etc. is a very epic sort of a thing. Mind you, there are parallels to be drawn between many religions. Odin's trial hanging from the tree Yggdrasil for nine days in order to give mankind the secret of the runes could be compared with the crucifiction.
The Silmarillion (nor Marillion - they're bloody rubbish) is well worth a read (although it takes some concentration). Don't judge Tolkien just by LOTR any more than you would judge him just by The Hobbit.
There are a few people commenting on here how autism might actually be an advantage. Well, they clearly haven't come into contact with a seriously autistic child. It's not funny.
The last thing that
Last point: my authority to comment on this comes from:
Working with actuaries. Most of them make the average IT person look like the life and soul of the party. We have real trouble communicating requirements with them.
Having a stepdaughter with Aspergers. It is a frustrating problem for the child, but therapy can help.
Saying all that, often I'd rather be coding device drivers than talking to people.
This morning I submitted this fact about Richard Whitely and gave my real e-mail. That was stupid.
Beware as this is a "latest" thing so will change.
Yeah - sorry. Anti US bias showing. Shouldn't really judge you country by the thing which make the papers over here. (Yeah, but some bastard in Tahoe stole my snowboard).
I've had a think since posting and I still worry about cartoon/film violence. I don't know if you guys over there heard about the Jamie Bulger case (too many links, too many biased). Basically, a couple of 9/10 year old kids tortured and killed a toddler - not much older than my own son. I can't help wondering about what they were thinking of. How did they not realise the consequences of what they were doing?
Maybe if kids only see TV violence, they don't get what it really means. I don't know. The whole business is too disturbing for me to write rationally.
Sadly, The Onion don't seem to have archived their story about people adopting children having to pass stringent tests whilst people having children can do as they like (corrections/links/transcripts appreciated).
There's some twisted children out there and parents who try and blame the media or the Internet (is the Internet a medium?) are just trying to dodge responsibility. If your children are cunts, it's because you made them that way.
(And a european parent at that)
I have no problem with the games and their content or whatever. I also hate extreme Christian tosspots like this guy. The aim of "reducing the marketing of violence to children" is, however, a laudable one. These companies put recommended ages on and then deliberatly market toys at children below that age group. My nine year old stepdaughter, like all of her classmates, has been into the Pokemon craze. The way I watch it, I don't see that there's much difference between the basic premise and dogfighting - setting pets on each other to see who wins. Admittedly, my nine year old stepdaughter does have Aspergers syndrome and therefore has a lot of trouble distinguishing what's serious and what's not.
I don't believe that banning or censoring things is the answer. I do believe that awareness and parental responsibility will help. My two year old son will soon be old enough to be influenced by what he sees and hears (he picked up the word "bugger" quickly enough). I wouldn't like him to grow up thinking that it's normal to shoot/stab/punch people.
I don't want censorship (yeah - I surf for porn now and again) what I want is responsibility. I don't want people to blame the TV or the Internet for their kids seeing graphic anal fisting (much less Taco snotting), I want them to take responsibility and educate their kids. You can't take responsibility without knowledge.
The people who run this site may be going about things the wrong way, but someone needs to highlight that there is a problem.
PS Yes, our TV news does show what actually happens when people are shot/bombed/gassed and it aint pretty. And we still don't want guns - coincidence?
We can work it out logically. IIRC it went like this:
T1 - Arnie is trying to kill John Conner
T2 - Arnie is trying to save John Connor
The only logical conclusion is that in T3, Arnie is completely indifferent to the fate of John Connor.
Where I work, the decision was taken, many years ago, to go 95 instead of NT. Most users still have 95. The reasoning was: a) we had a shedload of dodgy DOS apps which wouldn't run on NT, b) upgrading 1,200 machines would cost big bucks.As a result, we run about 1 support person for every 70 staff.
I remember going to a pre-release technical thing at the end of 94 and the reaction they got when they explained what 95 actually was (can't remember clearly 'cos I had a very heavy night the night before) was incredible. We had to sign an NDA so we weren't allowed to tell people that it was basically Win 3.11 with a few bits rewritten as 32bit and a mutex (yes, just one) around the bits that couldn't cope with the pre-emptive multi-tasking (most of it). How they managed to get away with selling it as a "32 bit multi-tasking operating system" is beyond me. It's not 32bit, it's not (properly) multi tasking and I'm not sure it's worthy of the name "operating system. They admitted at the time that half of it was still 16bit - hence the constant "out of system resources" when the 64K user/gdi heaps ran out. The number of times I've heard users ask "why is it out of memory when I have 256Mb RAM?". The only answer I could give is "because your operating system is a bastardised heap of 16bit crap". My work machine runs 2K and people can't believe it when I say I reboot about twice a month (and yes, I develop in C++ on it). 2K might not be very good, but it beats the crap out of 9x.
I shall not mourn its passing - not that 98 is much different. They should never have been developed.
If someone's got a link to an official looking article on the subject, please post so I can send to the management along with a comment "now can we get rid of this fucking shit".
Ding dong the shit is dead!
However easy it is, it still sounds like a geek thing. Most people who would even consider doing a thing like that would already have a perfectly functional PC.
Saying that, using standard technology may get them into trouble in other ways. IANAEE (electronics engineer) but I bet that over millions of units, the custom hardware which most consoles use costs less. As the production ramps up, jamming loads onto a few custom made chips starts to pay.
If they think they can win the console wars the same way they one the browser wars (and let's face it, IE costs something to produce and distribute) then they would've had to come in a lot lower than $300. I'm assuming that their plan is to ultimately have the "all MS" household but they forget that:
browsers are cheap to make in bulk
people don't spend $100s on games for their browser
Unless they get the games that people want to play, they will come unstuck.
This insightful analysis has been brought to you by a Sega Saturn owner.
Interesting example of a "corrupt organisation". Seems to fit though (Archer, Hamilton etc.)
It seems like it's OK if it's your real name (like Wiliam Hague the naturist). If that were true, you could change your name to anything, then letgitmately register the domain. Not sure how it would hold up though. There was one guy in the UK who, (after being charged £10 by Yorkshire Bank for sending him a letter telling him he was £2.50 overdrawn) changed his name by deed poll (dunno what it's called in the US) to Mr. YorkshireBankPlcAreFascistBastards, then demanded that they issue him with a new chequebook (that's checkbook to you) etc. Wonder if he ever thought of registering the domain.
PS Sorry for those of you who can't pick up pound signs.
PPS The bank did issue him with new stuff, then closed his account.
... it comes out OK for the "little" guy. My fave was the one during the last UK general election when www.williamhague.com got disputed (I advise you not to look at the actual content). IIRC William Hague (the naturist) won because he had been running the site for ages before William Hague (the politician) got elected leader of the Conservative party. There's nothing they could do about it.
Mind you, I'm not sure the result would've been much different if the naturist guy had stood instead. All OK now as they've got a completely different slaphead nonentity in charge now.
I've always had a problem with handicap ramps. Whilst we depended upon stairs, we were pretty much safe from dalek invasion. Putting wheelchair ramps in all over the place leaves us wide open.
Fortunately I have a solution. If you bolt/weld a steel hemisphere about 3-4" radius in the middle of every wheelchair ramp, legitimate wheelchair users can pass easily whilst daleks will be completely thwarted.
Looks like it'll get Segway riders as well.
Should I post this as AC or not? Moderation will tell.
Sure - code is the "what", but "what" is not useful without "why". I suspect the lameness filter will prevent me from posting examples. I work on application software which can have some pretty bizzare user requirements and these do end up permeating through the entire system. To a newbie coder, some stuff can look like "no sensible user would want that" but they don't know the system and they don't know that "sensible user" is an oxymoron. It needs commenting.
I agree comments should be kept to the useful - otherwise they can obscure the code. I don't think that there are any hard and fast rules though - apart from (good) peer review. If there were hard and fast rules for programming, then it wouldn't take any skill, would it? It ends up, as Joseph Heller said "like an experiment in mass lobotomy using rules instead of scalpels". The important thing is not "does it conform to the rules" but "can anyone else understand it".
In my own personal rules of programming, rule 3 is: "The best, fastest, most optimised piece of code in the world is worth precisely f*ck all if no-one else can understand it". For the record, rules 1 and 2 are "It takes longer to do it quickly" and "nobody cares how fast it is if it doesn't work". I wont list the others.
People should try putting some damn comments in.
Early on in my programming career, I was looking at such a piece of code - something which was simple when first written (in C) 5 years previously, but had so many mods, the function was pushing 1000 lines (ugh). Some guy had put in this change, commented it as "for performance improvement", then commented it out with an extra comment explaining that it was taken out because it didn't work. At the time I thought "why is this guy making himself look like a dick?". Later I got it - he'd left it like that just to stop some other poor bastard making the same mistake (it was a calculation thing which we were always pushed to improve performance).
If you do something wierd or clever, for f*ck's sake put a comment in (do as I say, nbot as I do).
Revenues are falling in the record industry and costs are higher. They have to put sooo much money into getting a record to chart now, that
it's not economical to promote anything which wont sell loads
they have to sell as much of that crap as possible
... well it could if I could play it properly.
I, for one, would be buying more music (on CD) if Napster was still there (and I could get to it from work - damned firewalls) 'cos I could listen first. I've got more chance of shagging the pope than hearing anything to my taste on the radio these days. If I can't check it out first, then I'm not going to risk the money.
BTW I came across this site last week. I can just pay, print out the music, and then I can be sure that it'll play on any compatible piano
The line about "cancel your service and you lose the ability to listen to any of the songs" well, to do that, they must have to connect to the internet in order to work this one out. To enforce this, they must have their own player/codec/format/thingy which needs this to work. No net connection, no play (am I the only one having this trouble on MS Media Player?).
How many people will actually pay for this shit? If you've only got one phone line and someone's using it, you can't listen. If you want to drag the laptop out in the garden for a barbeque and connect your amp & speakers, you need to run the phone cable out as well. Want to listen on the train? Well, you'll need a compatable cell phone and a lot of patience.
As someone said earlier, the normal CD business has a better business model.
I can see a few dumb people signing up for a few months, but after they realise that to listen to their purchases (legally - of course it's easy to rip anything one way or another), they need to huddle round the PC in the corner.
That should be good. Just lean forward to go forward. When the power runs out, just fall on your face.
Is anyone else looking forward to seeing that?
If you're talking about the message "At least one service or device driver failed during startup. Check event log for details." then that's OK. All the NT systems I've ever seen (OK, the ones I've set up) do this - that's how you know it's working properly.