"took the worst of [Cryptonomicon] and magnified it to create Quicksilver"
Subtle but important difference: I'd say it's more that he took some of the best of Cryptonomicon, and magnified it to such an obscene degree in Quicksilver that, like too much of any good thing, it became almost unbearable. (Okay, not the very best elements of Cryptonomicon, but it was good stuff.)
I was pretty disappointed by Quicksilver, though I wouldn't say I quite "hated" it, and the rest of the Baroque Cycle is still on my list. I'm interested enough to want to see where he goes with it, and I'm sure it'll be "bearable" at worst. Put it this way: a couple years ago, a friend tricked me into reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and, while I still haven't quite forgiven him, I figure if I could survive that, I can handle anything.
Its relation to reality is another thing entirely. I've seen beautiful models that produce beautiful, stable, consistent but utterly meaningless results.
"There is nothing so horrifying as witnessing the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts." --unknown
And yet, I still find it amusing that the two previous replies that I referred to each chose to quote a different one of the possible answers, without mentioning that there were any others. So the "ye shall be told both 'yea' and 'nay'" thing applies, even though in this case they were both right.
Oh well, I think I'll just stick wth my original system of pronouncing it like "Hi-guns" on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, and "Hoi-guns" on all other days.
Isn't it great how you can ask a question on Slashdot and get two answers, both purporting to cite the same reference source, and yet completely contradicting each other?
It reminds me of somebody's sig that I noticed a while back: "Go not unto Slashdot for advice, for ye shall be told both 'yea' and 'nay'."
(and no, I'm not interested enough in this case to click either link, let alone do any deeper research, to find out which one is correct.)
They are. They have to be. They've got some scary wildlife down there in Oz -- haven't you heard about the heavily-armed kangaroos? (page has no bookmark link -- page down to "Damn Wildlife").
My answer to Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA? was going to be, "No, not really (not yet, anyway), but I wouldn't mind a laptop with an array of maybe a dozen of these cards instead of a hard drive."
Let's all pause for a collective *drool* over the thought of a laptop with no HD. Mmmmm... silent. Mmmmm... longer battery life. Mmmmm... less heat.
Also, imagine these in a RAID (though I guess neither the "I" nor the "D" is applicable, and maybe not necessarily the "R"). I gather these things are "almost as fast as a hard drive" on throughput, but actually much faster on latency (like you said, no seek time).
And the way I figure, putting storage devices in an array can help a lot with throughput but only slightly with latency. RAID gives you a slight probabilistic improvement in latency because the distance to the block you want is random in each drive and you get to send each request to the drive that happens to be closer, but that only goes so far before you hit the general principle that "9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months, but they can't make 1 baby in 1 month".
But since these things are already low-latency, and throughput is the only problem, you could make an unbelievably fast RAID 0+1 with, say, 50-way striping over 2-way mirroring (or any of the fancier schemes like RAID 3 or 5). Let's have another *drool*, shall we?
The people who do say "I will not buy stuff that funds the RIAA" even though they're not downloading anything will not be recognized. It will just be assumed that they're downloading the music anyway. (Convenient for the RIAA, isn't it?)
I don't think even they are quite powerful enough (yet) to simply declare it illegal for anyone in the world other than themselves to possess any money at all.
Or to sue some kid on the grounds that "You're in the target demographic for such-and-such albums, yet we have no record of your having bought copies of all of them. Therefore you must have stolen them."
I think they still need to show that the illegal downloading actually occurred.
I have a generic-GSM version Treo 600 (able to work with either Cingular or AT&T), live near San Francisco, am currently using Cingular, and have been wondering about switching to AT&T.
I don't know what AT&T's QoS is like, but I do know it could be really awful and still be lots better than Cingular. Or are you saying AT&T is (significantly?) worse than Cingular? That's difficult to imagine. Are you sure? Does anyone else agree or disagree?
I know it won't matter once they merge, but that's a ways off and it'd be nice to have decent service in the meantime. Or at least, if what I have now really is the best available, it'd be nice to know that.
(3) your friends may choose to watch your movies *without you*
Five points to anyone who can come up with the original cite on this -- I seem to recall reading that one of the earliest proposed consumer video-cassette formats in the late '70s / early '80s had cassettes with a locking mechanism that would only let you play the tape once, and then you'd have to take it back to the store and pay to have it unlocked and rewound.
But when movie studio executives were approached about distributing their movies in this format, they immediately said "Uh-uh, no way, not a chance, over our dead bodies." The manufacturers tried to reassure them that the locking device would be secure, but they cut them off: "Oh, sure -- we don't doubt that it'll work just the way you say. But how will we know how many people are in the room when the movie is played? What if the family plays it while they have friends over? Or at their kid's birthday party? Someone might see the movie without paying for it!!!".
This has to be the first time I've seen jargon actually fit concisely and neatly into a legal text!
I don't think it's the first time -- I even seem to recall one where the Jargon File was referenced from within a legal brief. (Link? Anyone?)
But we've got to at least mention the incredible irony of IBM being the one to accuse someone else of using FUD tactics (even though (or perhaps, especially since) they're right). I mean... IBM?! It's a strange, strange world...
Do web developers test a pages on a T1 connection?
No, I think they generally use their local filesystems. Sorry. *shrug*
Then again, the actual html document is only ~26KB, and if you're using a "real" browser, it should be able to do the layout and display the text before loading the other objects.
It should even be able to do incremental layout, displaying the text before it's even finished loading the html. Though in this case, the text you want to see is 14KB (!) down, so you're definitely waiting for that.
Okay, not to sound "Pro-Semitic" or anything (though I don't see why I shouldn't), but I find it even harder to imagine "ANY other country" with a history of exercising such incredible restraint and forbearance in its responses to such a volume of terrorist attacks as Israel being considered to have "such a horrible Human Rights record".
(Oh, and to the other responders: if I'm reading his last paragraph correctly, it sounds like his misspelling of "Israel" was a deliberate insult, not an unintended spelling error. Doesn't explain his inability to spell "Semitic", though.)
Slashdot Mirror
"took the worst of [Cryptonomicon] and magnified it to create Quicksilver"
Subtle but important difference: I'd say it's more that he took some of the best of Cryptonomicon, and magnified it to such an obscene degree in Quicksilver that, like too much of any good thing, it became almost unbearable. (Okay, not the very best elements of Cryptonomicon, but it was good stuff.)
I was pretty disappointed by Quicksilver, though I wouldn't say I quite "hated" it, and the rest of the Baroque Cycle is still on my list. I'm interested enough to want to see where he goes with it, and I'm sure it'll be "bearable" at worst. Put it this way: a couple years ago, a friend tricked me into reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and, while I still haven't quite forgiven him, I figure if I could survive that, I can handle anything.
KHAAAN!!!
Its relation to reality is another thing entirely. I've seen beautiful models that produce beautiful, stable, consistent but utterly meaningless results.
"There is nothing so horrifying as witnessing the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts."
--unknown
Huh. Guess that shows me.
And yet, I still find it amusing that the two previous replies that I referred to each chose to quote a different one of the possible answers, without mentioning that there were any others. So the "ye shall be told both 'yea' and 'nay'" thing applies, even though in this case they were both right.
Oh well, I think I'll just stick wth my original system of pronouncing it like "Hi-guns" on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, and "Hoi-guns" on all other days.
Isn't it great how you can ask a question on Slashdot and get two answers, both purporting to cite the same reference source, and yet completely contradicting each other?
It reminds me of somebody's sig that I noticed a while back: "Go not unto Slashdot for advice, for ye shall be told both 'yea' and 'nay'."
(and no, I'm not interested enough in this case to click either link, let alone do any deeper research, to find out which one is correct.)
send them a picture of somewhere on Earth that deserves to be spared from the Vogons
"Go ahead, if it makes you feel better."
"Will it do any good?"
"No."
They are. They have to be. They've got some scary wildlife down there in Oz -- haven't you heard about the heavily-armed kangaroos? (page has no bookmark link -- page down to "Damn Wildlife").
My answer to Does anyone need 2GB of memory for their PDA? was going to be, "No, not really (not yet, anyway), but I wouldn't mind a laptop with an array of maybe a dozen of these cards instead of a hard drive."
Let's all pause for a collective *drool* over the thought of a laptop with no HD. Mmmmm... silent. Mmmmm... longer battery life. Mmmmm... less heat.
Also, imagine these in a RAID (though I guess neither the "I" nor the "D" is applicable, and maybe not necessarily the "R"). I gather these things are "almost as fast as a hard drive" on throughput, but actually much faster on latency (like you said, no seek time).
And the way I figure, putting storage devices in an array can help a lot with throughput but only slightly with latency. RAID gives you a slight probabilistic improvement in latency because the distance to the block you want is random in each drive and you get to send each request to the drive that happens to be closer, but that only goes so far before you hit the general principle that "9 women can make 9 babies in 9 months, but they can't make 1 baby in 1 month".
But since these things are already low-latency, and throughput is the only problem, you could make an unbelievably fast RAID 0+1 with, say, 50-way striping over 2-way mirroring (or any of the fancier schemes like RAID 3 or 5). Let's have another *drool*, shall we?
The people who do say "I will not buy stuff that funds the RIAA" even though they're not downloading anything will not be recognized. It will just be assumed that they're downloading the music anyway. (Convenient for the RIAA, isn't it?)
I don't think even they are quite powerful enough (yet) to simply declare it illegal for anyone in the world other than themselves to possess any money at all.
Or to sue some kid on the grounds that "You're in the target demographic for such-and-such albums, yet we have no record of your having bought copies of all of them. Therefore you must have stolen them."
I think they still need to show that the illegal downloading actually occurred.
AT&T's GSM network in CA is totally crap.
I have a generic-GSM version Treo 600 (able to work with either Cingular or AT&T), live near San Francisco, am currently using Cingular, and have been wondering about switching to AT&T.
I don't know what AT&T's QoS is like, but I do know it could be really awful and still be lots better than Cingular. Or are you saying AT&T is (significantly?) worse than Cingular? That's difficult to imagine. Are you sure? Does anyone else agree or disagree?
I know it won't matter once they merge, but that's a ways off and it'd be nice to have decent service in the meantime. Or at least, if what I have now really is the best available, it'd be nice to know that.
(3) your friends may choose to watch your movies *without you*
Five points to anyone who can come up with the original cite on this -- I seem to recall reading that one of the earliest proposed consumer video-cassette formats in the late '70s / early '80s had cassettes with a locking mechanism that would only let you play the tape once, and then you'd have to take it back to the store and pay to have it unlocked and rewound.
But when movie studio executives were approached about distributing their movies in this format, they immediately said "Uh-uh, no way, not a chance, over our dead bodies." The manufacturers tried to reassure them that the locking device would be secure, but they cut them off: "Oh, sure -- we don't doubt that it'll work just the way you say. But how will we know how many people are in the room when the movie is played? What if the family plays it while they have friends over? Or at their kid's birthday party? Someone might see the movie without paying for it!!! ".
When asked how, exactly, such a situation would be against consumers' interests, Attaway declined to comment.
This has to be the first time I've seen jargon actually fit concisely and neatly into a legal text!
I don't think it's the first time -- I even seem to recall one where the Jargon File was referenced from within a legal brief. (Link? Anyone?)
But we've got to at least mention the incredible irony of IBM being the one to accuse someone else of using FUD tactics (even though (or perhaps, especially since) they're right). I mean... IBM?! It's a strange, strange world...
Actually, the theorem (with proof) goes thusly:
(1): All programs have at least one bug.
(2): All programs can be simplified by at least one instruction.
Therefore: Any program can be reduced to a single instruction that doesn't work.
Do web developers test a pages on a T1 connection?
No, I think they generally use their local filesystems. Sorry. *shrug*
Then again, the actual html document is only ~26KB, and if you're using a "real" browser, it should be able to do the layout and display the text before loading the other objects.
It should even be able to do incremental layout, displaying the text before it's even finished loading the html. Though in this case, the text you want to see is 14KB (!) down, so you're definitely waiting for that.
Think, if Microsoft didn't exist, what would be holding Open Source back?
IBM?
Sun?
Apple?
I dunno -- $ENV{'EVIL_EMPIRE'}
Frankly, I can't get very far past "Think, if Microsoft didn't exist..." But that part gives me a warn, tingly feeling. Say it again -- slower.
That's almost as good as 42% of all statistics being made up on the spot.
I thought it was 87%
He treats spam as a store that comes to you in your inbox, and sells some stuff online
Translation: He's not satisfied with the size of his penis.
I usually take my clothing off before the fun and games start. (or during . depending)
During. Definitely during.
Okay, not to sound "Pro-Semitic" or anything (though I don't see why I shouldn't), but I find it even harder to imagine "ANY other country" with a history of exercising such incredible restraint and forbearance in its responses to such a volume of terrorist attacks as Israel being considered to have "such a horrible Human Rights record".
(Oh, and to the other responders: if I'm reading his last paragraph correctly, it sounds like his misspelling of "Israel" was a deliberate insult, not an unintended spelling error. Doesn't explain his inability to spell "Semitic", though.)
Nice. But couldn't you find a way to pack in a newline at the end to keep clear of the next prompt?
Do you still use a ten-year-old PC? (Wait - this is Slashdot. Don't answer that.)
Nice catch, dude. You almost sounded like an idiot.
many fad-of-the-moment Java/XML/OOP idiots don't realise how important ACID and transactionality are
No, to make "Lite" beer, you need a bucket of real beer, a thirsty horse, and an empty bucket.
I wanted to ask "why"
Never ask a geek "why". Just nod slowly as you back away.