The last movie of a "generation" is always bad.
Hey, I thought Star Trek VI was really good. Surely you're not suggesting Generations was a TOS movie...
As one who fears he may be right behind you, I say congrats Rob.
When did I get so fucking old? I remember pretty much every birthday until I turned 21, and now they're all just a blur. When I wake up tomorrow and am 50, I'm going to be really upset.
Okay, I downloaded the RedHat 8 CDs using gtk-gnutella while all the FTP sites were swamped. Checked the digital sigs and I was on my way.
Legit enough for you?
Hmm, I've read all of the Ender series and a couple other of his works. I'm not really so wild about his work, to be honest. Ender's Game was definately the high point of his writing, and now he just seems to be coasting on that...
I almost bought Prey, but the more I hear about it the less I'm interested -- even the glowing reviews are turning me off.
Can someone recommend something to me? I just got done rereading Harry Potter (guilty pleasure), so I'm headed for the bookstore tonight. Here's sort of what I'm interested in: I'd like to read something by Niven, Gaiman, Stephenson (even the Big U), Gibson, Bret Ellis, Eric Nylund or Chuck Palahniuk, but I've already read everything they've written.
I'm looking for something on that range; I'm not ready to read anything too brainy at the moment -- getting ready to embark on another Karen Armstrong book...
Considering what I've been reading the last few weeks about this new Department of Information Awareness, I think I miss TIPS. Bad to worse and all -- TIPS was at least simply a formal structure for Americans to report on one another. DoIA, on the other hand, seems more like a full-out spy organization targetted towards the American people.
I am perpetually shocked at the willingness of Americans to give
away the rights for which their ancestors suffered so much.
Menace the average modern American with anything halfway alarming
-- terrorism, crime or any other of today's various boogeymen --
and in place of their forebearers' bravery, idealism and resolve,
they will show cowardice, surrender and an astounding aptitude for
cognative dissonence. They will gratefully trade their liberties
for even the illusion of security, and will gladly indenture themselves
to anyone who claims to offer them safety. How far we've fallen from
the day when men like Washinton, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt
fought for and to protect the central ideas of American Democracy.
How we've betrayed the bravery of our heritage.
I believe that if America stands for anything, it's the rights which it
is supposed to guarantee its citizens. Strip that away, and what are you
left with? Nothing more than a location on a map and base nationalism.
To give away our hard-won rights is disgusting cowardice, and to strip
them from others is nothing less than treason.
I think you're missing the point in regards to most mainframe software.
In my experience, this stuff hasn't changes significantly in years -- it's tweaked now and then, but it basically works and as such isn't messed with.
What you have to remember is that entities who are still using mainframes are both (a) very large and (b) very well established. The mainframes tend to be involved with really important tasks that are mission critical (and I mean "mission critical" in a very real sense, not in the 1999 out-webserver-is-down way), like flight reservation systems or bank account tracking systems.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a really bad idea to mess with these systems unless you really have to -- anyone with a couple years at a suitably large company could tell you that there's nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by messing with them. The hardware and support costs are laughible if you compare them with what just a few minutes of downtime from buggy new software would cause.
This is an easy one: Mainframes are still around because they house working, stable and extremely mission-critical apps for very large and established corporations.
Nobody in their right mind is going to mess with them until they absolutely can't get strung along anymore, because they know that crashing, say, a HMO's appointment handling system would be what we call a "career limiting" move.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it ain't broke and it's mission critical to the tune of millions of dollars an hour, avoid it like someone carrying the plague, ebola, leprosy, herpes and a bad hangnail.
Okay, maybe I'm just having a slow start to my Tuesday, but why can't I figure out how to get Mozilla 1.2 to go ahead and smooth fonts in KDE on a RedHat 8 system? I can't even find anything useful on Google, which is bizarre.
Thuse when reading this article and it stating that the surgery takes much longer but the hospital stays are shorter might in fact be hiding the fact that the rate of cognitive damage might go up and not be detected until months afterwards.
So you're saying that because there's no evidence of something, it must be true? My freshman year logic instructor would not approve.
That case clearly shows the flaws with this technology... It made the surgeon lazy. He expected the robot to just 'do what it should' with no problems. He didn't check for internal bleeding. The patient died because of it.
You're joking, right?
Look, this thing isn't a "robot" in any real sense -- it's not taking away control from the doctor, it's a sophisticated tool which has the potential to do as much for surgery in the next few decades as the laproscope did in the last few.
If the doctors start skipping steps, it's their fault, not the tool's. Like certain other people in this thread, you're applying Windows logic ("It should have done this for me and covered my ass!") in a UNIX situation -- the tool is meant to be used by someone who understands it and knows what they're doing.
If some newbie rm -rf's his filesystem, it's his fault, not the OS's.
Will a robotic system that is minimally invasive create "tunnel vision" so that doctors are unable to see other potential problems?
Realistically, the number of problems found incidentally in surgery is dwarfed by the number of problems that cutting open someone's chest, sawing their sternum in half, jacking open their ribcage and then stapling the whole thing back together again.
It's like saying that it's better to reboot a healthy system when the webserver crashes because you might fix other problems that you haven't noticed yet -- Windows logic.
Or get the writers to produce stuff that is worth paying for. It's a hard road, but someone has to want to read the stuff they write.
That'd be interesting -- set up contracts so the writers get paid based on how many people read their pages or, better yet, click on ads in their articles.
I could see a whole new writing paradigm evolving, one where you have Suck-style links to products you mention in your article and other tomfoolery to try and get people to go spend money.
Of course, it's way too late for Salon to adopt this approach -- the only time they'll be bringing in money is when they auction off their office equipment.
It's too bad to see Salon go -- they have genuinely interesting features on occassion.
That said, I don't see how they ever really planned on surviving once the dot-com meltdown occurred. Selling the ability to opt-out of annoying ads just didn't cut it, especially given their level of overhead (big-name writers and the like). If Suck couldn't keep its head above water, Salon was always doomed.
Still, it'll suck to have the only real webzine be Slate.
Re:this one I never forget..
on
Science Askew
·
· Score: 2
Granted it's been a while since I was in school, but wouldn't the CatToast actually enter a superposition in which all results are equally likely until observed?
I dunno, I've had trouble with Western Digital drives in the past, too. In fact, I remember one of their drive lines (although I can't remember which) being notorious for failing quickly.
Personally, I think this sort of discussion is useless just because there are people out there who have had trouble with any given manufacturer's drives.
I think a collection of real stats which were somehow reliably collected would be really useful in terms of all this commodity hardware ("Gee, those ShitCo drives fail twice as often as most others" or "Gee, there's no difference in drive reliability, so if I got IBM I'd be paying for a brand name"). I just don't see how you'd go about collecting that data.
VFolders, a method of storing searches in a folder view format, are very nice. I must confess though, I don't use it much. I only have 5 VFolders configured.
I'll admit I have a hard time doing cross-folder searches, although I'll admit that it's probably because I haven't spent enough time learning how.
Which, of course, means that 98% of people won't, either.
What I'd really, *really* like to see is an easy-to-use email search function. If I could google through my email to find something (I often forget what misc. coworker sent me that important doc), and do it easily and intuitively, I'd be a happy man.
Technically, you're not breaking anything when you brute-force it. Rather, you're just coming up with the key by an alternate method. I wouldn't call that breaking the enryption and more than I'd call torturing you until you coughed up the passphrase breaking the encryption.
IMO, "breaking" implies that you've found an error in the algorithm or discovered a Gunter Janek-style shortcut which allows you to read the encoded information.
Impossible seems like a pretty weird word to ever use in this sort of situation. "Very, very difficult" or "requiring technology or techniques in advance of what is presently available" might be more accurate.
Re:Not much different than with a plane...
on
Pipeline Mass Transit?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Same story with the jetliners we're flying in
Except without the falling and the crashing and the screaming.
Re:From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES!-Weeeh!
on
Pipeline Mass Transit?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
If you can get the police to stay out of my way. I bet I could.
Mapquest says it's 2906 miles from SF to New York. That puts your average speed at about 530 MPH. I'm pretty sure the cops wouldn't be able to catch you at that rate, anyhow.
If you decide to try it out, let me know and I'll race ya.
Slashdot Mirror
Which alternate universe are you from, again?
The last movie of a "generation" is always bad. Hey, I thought Star Trek VI was really good. Surely you're not suggesting Generations was a TOS movie...
As one who fears he may be right behind you, I say congrats Rob. When did I get so fucking old? I remember pretty much every birthday until I turned 21, and now they're all just a blur. When I wake up tomorrow and am 50, I'm going to be really upset.
Okay, I downloaded the RedHat 8 CDs using gtk-gnutella while all the FTP sites were swamped. Checked the digital sigs and I was on my way. Legit enough for you?
Hmm, I've read all of the Ender series and a couple other of his works. I'm not really so wild about his work, to be honest. Ender's Game was definately the high point of his writing, and now he just seems to be coasting on that...
Can someone recommend something to me? I just got done rereading Harry Potter (guilty pleasure), so I'm headed for the bookstore tonight. Here's sort of what I'm interested in: I'd like to read something by Niven, Gaiman, Stephenson (even the Big U), Gibson, Bret Ellis, Eric Nylund or Chuck Palahniuk, but I've already read everything they've written. I'm looking for something on that range; I'm not ready to read anything too brainy at the moment -- getting ready to embark on another Karen Armstrong book...
I need my fix.
I am perpetually shocked at the willingness of Americans to give away the rights for which their ancestors suffered so much.
Menace the average modern American with anything halfway alarming -- terrorism, crime or any other of today's various boogeymen -- and in place of their forebearers' bravery, idealism and resolve, they will show cowardice, surrender and an astounding aptitude for cognative dissonence. They will gratefully trade their liberties for even the illusion of security, and will gladly indenture themselves to anyone who claims to offer them safety. How far we've fallen from the day when men like Washinton, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt fought for and to protect the central ideas of American Democracy.
How we've betrayed the bravery of our heritage.
I believe that if America stands for anything, it's the rights which it is supposed to guarantee its citizens. Strip that away, and what are you left with? Nothing more than a location on a map and base nationalism. To give away our hard-won rights is disgusting cowardice, and to strip them from others is nothing less than treason.
In my experience, this stuff hasn't changes significantly in years -- it's tweaked now and then, but it basically works and as such isn't messed with.
What you have to remember is that entities who are still using mainframes are both (a) very large and (b) very well established. The mainframes tend to be involved with really important tasks that are mission critical (and I mean "mission critical" in a very real sense, not in the 1999 out-webserver-is-down way), like flight reservation systems or bank account tracking systems.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a really bad idea to mess with these systems unless you really have to -- anyone with a couple years at a suitably large company could tell you that there's nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by messing with them. The hardware and support costs are laughible if you compare them with what just a few minutes of downtime from buggy new software would cause.
Nobody in their right mind is going to mess with them until they absolutely can't get strung along anymore, because they know that crashing, say, a HMO's appointment handling system would be what we call a "career limiting" move.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it ain't broke and it's mission critical to the tune of millions of dollars an hour, avoid it like someone carrying the plague, ebola, leprosy, herpes and a bad hangnail.
Okay, maybe I'm just having a slow start to my Tuesday, but why can't I figure out how to get Mozilla 1.2 to go ahead and smooth fonts in KDE on a RedHat 8 system? I can't even find anything useful on Google, which is bizarre.
So you're saying that because there's no evidence of something, it must be true? My freshman year logic instructor would not approve.
You're joking, right?
Look, this thing isn't a "robot" in any real sense -- it's not taking away control from the doctor, it's a sophisticated tool which has the potential to do as much for surgery in the next few decades as the laproscope did in the last few.
If the doctors start skipping steps, it's their fault, not the tool's. Like certain other people in this thread, you're applying Windows logic ("It should have done this for me and covered my ass!") in a UNIX situation -- the tool is meant to be used by someone who understands it and knows what they're doing.
If some newbie rm -rf's his filesystem, it's his fault, not the OS's.
Realistically, the number of problems found incidentally in surgery is dwarfed by the number of problems that cutting open someone's chest, sawing their sternum in half, jacking open their ribcage and then stapling the whole thing back together again.
It's like saying that it's better to reboot a healthy system when the webserver crashes because you might fix other problems that you haven't noticed yet -- Windows logic.
No, I understand that, but never making money tends to bode poorly for the future of any business. I'm projecting out into the not-so-distant future.
That'd be interesting -- set up contracts so the writers get paid based on how many people read their pages or, better yet, click on ads in their articles.
I could see a whole new writing paradigm evolving, one where you have Suck-style links to products you mention in your article and other tomfoolery to try and get people to go spend money.
Of course, it's way too late for Salon to adopt this approach -- the only time they'll be bringing in money is when they auction off their office equipment.
It's too bad to see Salon go -- they have genuinely interesting features on occassion. That said, I don't see how they ever really planned on surviving once the dot-com meltdown occurred. Selling the ability to opt-out of annoying ads just didn't cut it, especially given their level of overhead (big-name writers and the like). If Suck couldn't keep its head above water, Salon was always doomed. Still, it'll suck to have the only real webzine be Slate.
Granted it's been a while since I was in school, but wouldn't the CatToast actually enter a superposition in which all results are equally likely until observed?
Personally, I think this sort of discussion is useless just because there are people out there who have had trouble with any given manufacturer's drives.
I think a collection of real stats which were somehow reliably collected would be really useful in terms of all this commodity hardware ("Gee, those ShitCo drives fail twice as often as most others" or "Gee, there's no difference in drive reliability, so if I got IBM I'd be paying for a brand name"). I just don't see how you'd go about collecting that data.
I'll admit I have a hard time doing cross-folder searches, although I'll admit that it's probably because I haven't spent enough time learning how.
Which, of course, means that 98% of people won't, either.
What I'd really, *really* like to see is an easy-to-use email search function. If I could google through my email to find something (I often forget what misc. coworker sent me that important doc), and do it easily and intuitively, I'd be a happy man.
Judging by that cover, I disagree. An angry 6' tall penguin should be able to gut Bill in seconds, not to mention swim at speeds in excess of 80 MPH.
IMO, "breaking" implies that you've found an error in the algorithm or discovered a Gunter Janek-style shortcut which allows you to read the encoded information.
Impossible seems like a pretty weird word to ever use in this sort of situation. "Very, very difficult" or "requiring technology or techniques in advance of what is presently available" might be more accurate.
Except without the falling and the crashing and the screaming.
Mapquest says it's 2906 miles from SF to New York. That puts your average speed at about 530 MPH. I'm pretty sure the cops wouldn't be able to catch you at that rate, anyhow.
If you decide to try it out, let me know and I'll race ya.