My first game on my PS/2 (late bloomer a few years ago) was GTA3. There was a learning curve, and then I had many hours of fun with it. GTA Vice City was larger, harder, had some annoying bugs, and I never did finish it. It just got to be a task to figure out what to do next. My wife bought me GTA San Andreas for Christmas, and I'm still barely into it. I originally thought the hugeness of the game would be great, but it's just boring. Get an assignment, drive for five minutes, blow it, start again. That's not fun. It's a huge waste of time, while hoping some fun happens eventually, when you're not eating, working out, and trying to earn respect points.
It reminds me of when I tried my wife's copy of The Sims once. I friggin' live my life already. I don't have time to help a bunch of digital homunculi work, sleep, pay bills, and indulge their neuroses. Despite the popularity of it, I lasted three days with it and was done forever.
My favorite PS/2 game in the past year was Simpson's Hit & Run. Just silly mindless fun. I'm old (old enough anyway) and I like to play games to unwind a bit, not to get wound up. If I want to engage my mind in something deep and complex, I look for a game of Go or a good book.
Well, I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. I mean, if your company's weighed down by a political war between the Palm and Be folks (who were pretty sure they were much smarter than anyone at Palm), wouldn't you want to bring in masters of immobilizing politics? That's just fighting fire with....actually I'm not sure about that analogy.
Very insider. Thanks for noticing.:-) I had time to sort it out after I got laid off (round 3). My wife made it to round 4. Now I'm happily out of high-tech.
...where to start. Why does Palm have so much trouble?
Self-proclaimed genius works on stylus UI for Psion (IIRC), decides to take it
further, comes up with one of the few interfaces would-be PDA makers hadn't
thought of and it actually takes off -- though slowly at first.
Genius forms a company with a bunch of bitter ex-Apple folks.
PalmPilot starts to take off and Palm immediately make plans for the Nth
generation of the OS, which will work on handhelds, phones, game consoles,
etc. They also make plans to split the company into a hardware and OS division
so there will be no conflicts like Apple had when Palm takes on Microsoft and
kicks their butt. They talk about this for years.
The split is a disaster. They didn't figure out how groups would work together
and left lots of unanswered questions -- and then rushed the split. The
result? Two half-staffed divisions with no plan for how to work together.
Carl Yankowski is hired, who tells all of Palm to stick it 'cause he's here to
tell y'all that Bluetooth is the future. A year is wasted trying to a) figure
out how to cram Bluetooth into a Palm without sucking its batteries dry, b)
trying to figure out the protocols, c) trying to figure out something useful
to do with a Bluetooth-enabled Palm. The result? Carl is fired (Oh I'm sorry.
He resigned. And all that cheering when the door hit his huge butt? Um...that
was cheering.)
The two divisions are re-merged, with plans to split them again at some future
date. Jobs are duplicated, jobs are lost. Nothing is gained.
The relatively inexperienced guy who runs the supply chain operations, after
years of pressure from marketing over parts shortages, finally works out a
contract so that Palm will have more Palm V's in the next couple of years than
you can shake a stick at. I don't know how it got approved, but someone
finally worked out that the Palm V was supposed to be end-of-lifed in six
months and they needed to clear out the channel for the new devices. This
is bad.
In Europe, in March (IIRC), Palm announces the release of the next-gen Palm.
People say "Wow, that sounds good, so I'll put off my purchase of a Palm V
until the new one comes out." Later marketing claims no one told them that the
project was delayed until at least June (it actually turned out to be
September). The channel is stuffed with Palm V's -- with tons more on the way
-- and no one's buying them. The new Palm isn't ready, so no one's buying
them either. Palm's revenue dries up faster than an earthworm on a sunny day.
The billion dollars or so that came from its IPO was partially committed to
all those Palm V's no one wanted. But there was also some kind of fallout from
the land deal for the new World HQ, that was made worse by ever-abusive parent
company, 3Com, raping Palm yet again to pay for its own lost business. Palm
loses something like $800M in six months.
First round of layoffs are announced. People panic. Next two rounds of layoffs
are not announced. But someone reserves every conference room in the Outlook
calendar, so it's kind of a tipoff.
All those friends of friends who were hired when everyone thought they were
going to get rich from the IPO fall into two camps: A) Friends in high places
are still there to protect them, B) first to go. Where Camp A people are
found, so are scapegoats.
Lunatic VP of engineering cheerfully announces that the only way to continue
on towards greatness is by adopting parallel development. To wit, every
engineer is now on 5 projects. Project A on Monday, Project B on Tuesday, etc.
Completion dates are not changed.
Stock options are repeatedly given as incentives. Let's say options at $10 are
granted on Monday. By Wednesday, when they can be distributed, the stock is
down to $9.50. This happens repeatedly.
A calendar company is bought, not used, its people fired. A web portal company
is bought, not used, its people fired. A French software company is bought and
the engineers are actually vit
Now I like a good sci-fi story as much as the next guy and love to watch my wife lose her mind over the loops a writer will go through to make a time-travel story "work". But a few years ago, something occurred to me which I don't think I've ever seen in any story anywhere. Mind you, this is more of a literary sci-fi critique, since time travel probably isn't possible for the many reasons laid out here.
So let's say you have yourself an Acme Time Machine, and it works. So you set it to transport you back in time 24 hours. Has no one ever considered that the earth has moved? Assuming for the moment that time travel is possible, if you do not calculate precisely where the earth is, and the location you want to go to, then you will most likely end up in space, but with a nasty possibility of "arriving" inside the earth (or possibly even the sun or some other body).
A time machine would have to also be an instantaneous space travel machine, capable of transporting you anywhere in the universe. I mean, if you can magically transport yourself the 17,640 mi (28,224 km) the earth will have moved in 24 hours, then whatever principle it uses will probably transport you over much greater distances.
Second - If your boss fights you, threatens you, or tries to intimidate you, you have the option to just leave.
The thing a lot of bosses will try with younger employees is pulling the parent card. "You'll be in big trouble if you don't do what I say." Like what kind of trouble? Can he make the other company fire you? Make you somehow come back in to work for him? I think not. Since you've already got a new job lined up, there's not a damned thing under the sun he can do to you, and it's in his best interests that you never figure this out. He'd love it if he could cut your pay and tell you that you don't have permission to leave -- and have you believe it like you're tempted to at the moment.
You're a big boy now. It may take a while to realize it, but you get to make choices.
And didn't a large number of the replies decry the naive longing on the part of people who don't know any better. Folks, reducing complex logic to pretty pictures is not likely to happen...ever. Unless it's the programming language for Lego Mindstorms robots. But serious Lego'ers use one of the libraries available in several languages to get real...uh...Lego'ing done.
I've always maintained that I discovered I had a knack for computers at some
point. Never was any kind of computer genius, but they've played a part in my
life for a loooong time.
I'm 43, fwiw. When I was like 6 or 7, my mom bought me sort of calculator. It
was based on a principle similar to an abacus. There were columns of numbers
on the face, with a slotted tape in a groove. The tape was half black, and
half white. You stuck a stylus (later replaced with a finishing nail) into the
groove near the digit of the number you wanted to add. If the part of the tape
was black, you pulled down. If white, you pushed up and clicked to increment
the next 10's place up. It's hard to explain, but 30 seconds of playing with
it and you could do addition and subtraction with carrying.
I had an early LED calculator in high school, but bought a TI98C (I think
that was the model number) for college. It didn't have graphing capability,
but was programmable via X,Y coordinates that mapped directly to the layout
of the keys ("go over 3 keys, then down 7"), so you could run primitive
programs on it.
In my sophomore year at UCSB, around 1982, I took an intro to programming
class on a lark. Pascal. Didn't like it much.
In my junior year at UCSB, I was in a Psych intro to experimentation class,
where you recreated some experiment. The point of the class was choosing your
parameters and variables, and how to write up the experiment. I was really
sick the first week of class, so when I went to the professor and found out
that everyone had broken up into groups the first day, he suggested doing the
Prisoner's Choice experiment, using the department computer to simulate
opponent's for each of my subject's (you were required to sign up for a
minimum number of each other's experiments so each group was guaranteed to
have some data). With only the BASIC manual, I wrote the program and only 2
out of 18 people had any idea there wasn't "another computer lab downstairs."
It was only later that I realized I had written a complete, albeit pretty
simple, program to interact with users.
Eventually I got a job doing tech support, and then later programming.
But you asked about introducing kids to computers. For what it's worth, I'd
recommend you teach your kids logic and reasoning, make sure they can do basic
math and as much more as they're comfortable with, have them read, read, read,
and make sure they play sports or have hobbies. Oh yeah! Make sure they have a
social life. It's too easy to spend your days and nights in front of a computer.
I do real estate appraisals now. I use Perl because I have to parse web-based
information that would have to be transcribed manually otherwise. I use Excel
because I have numbers to analyze and billing to manage. I generally don't use
Word. I use Photoshop because I love taking pictures and Photoshop lets me
make them even better. I use Panda Egg to access the Internet Go Server
because it's hard to find people to play Go with in my area. I use lots of
Cygwin utilities because I have to work on Win32, but I love the power of
knowing how my computer works. I dunno. Maybe you just need to get the kids
interested in something, and see if a computer offers them something in
that regard. If not, maybe you shouldn't worry about it. Unless a kid really
wants to be a hacker type, they can always learn programming and Word/Excel/OO
and the OS of their choice later. Anyone can obsessively learn all the details
of using a saw and hammer, but building a house can be as much an art as a
skill. Anyone can obsessively learn to use a computer; but if you have no real
reason for doing so, it's a complete waste.
Look, the school takes in money to give students an education. They go to a lot of trouble to set up computer networks, wireless and otherwise, and to provide access to information and tools to those students. An unforseen situation came up where the wireless service is hosed in those apartments due to everyone's cards getting confused by too many access points.
They're not "regulating" squat, Junior. They're saying their network, in their building, providing tools and services to their students, paid for by their "customers" (your PARENTS) is hosed by a bunch of clever kids who don't think ahead or think much of cooperating so everyone has a good connection. They're trying to unhose something, not oppress you, Sparky.
So, what would you suggest? Really? If you stopped moaning about your rights, how would you fix it? I'm sure the administration would appreciate some solid answers and even some assistance, if appropriate. But if you imagine you're going to surprise and shock the administration into seeing that your right to swap music and play Half-Life is more important than their carrying on the business of running a university, well....keep imagining.
A truism of great stories, and it's not like this is a secret, is when the
stories don't evolve, they get stale. TOS was a great vision of a clean,
orderly future where people had learned from the past and were sharing the
great wisdom with the messy other races of the universe. Such an imperial,
white race's burden went over better in the 60's. By the fourth or so season
of TNG, the future-science-as-pretty-magic syndrome was getting a bit old,
like insisting that emotions aren't so much physiological states as magical
powers that float hither and thither, lodging in mechanoid crew members as
easily as humans. Also, the crew of the Enterprise forever insisting they
respected the foolish ways of aliens, all the while trying to convert
them to our better ways, puts me off more and more as I get older.
It's a short road from morality play to condescension
DS9 made a good attempt at dirtying up the Star Trek vision to make it more
real, and it had it's good points after the first season, but they lost it
when they decided it had to be at the center of a galactic war. And then at
the end, all the war heroes just went back to work. No promotions, no space
parades. "Let's make it really interesting, but not change anything," say the
makers, "like when Riker won awards and honors and proved himself the
captain's equal, but never took his own command." They forget that interesting
equals change and lack of change equals uninteresting.
So, yeah, I'd say the producers should try to live with the riches they make
from the franchise, but go tell a different story. ST is not a religion, for
pity's sake; it's just a TV show we all grew up with.
You're right, of course. But the poster's question was how to prioritize which computers to replace because he couldn't replace them all. The thrust of my comment (in intent, anyway), was simply to replace the most broken/unstable first.
Figure out what you are doing or want to do with the computers. Is that what the survey is for?
Figure out what you would replace them with (including networking, licenses for proprietary software, etc.) and figure out what it will cost and thus how many you can buy.
Figure out which of your current machines are serving you the least in this capacity. If you have a bunch of unstable Win95 or Win98 machines that crash a lot, I'd say those are good candidates. If you have older machines that are stable, consider leaving them alone if it will allow you to replace more of the unstable ones.
Go over the list you make, poke holes in it, and start again. When you're done, show it to others and don't look at it for a week, then come back to it and see what you think of your logic.
There. Any other part of your job you'd like us to do for you? I mean, how hard was that?
Someone beat me to it. I was about to ask why the hell you didn't try it out on yourself or someone who wouldn't get pissed off first.
If this is your first time using some form of technology **dig dig**>, someone should have warned you it doesn't always work like it says on the pretty brochure.
Re:Somebody explain this to me?
on
Amorphous Steel
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· Score: 1
I hadn't made the connection to ceramic knives earlier, but now I do seem to remember rather mixed reviews on ceramic knives. Really sharp and stay that way for a long time, but also really expensive to sharpen, and you have to send them somewhere to get it done. I also hear that, while they're not fragile, they are more brittle than metal and can be broken. I've been curious to try one, but they're also expensive and we don't have any shortage of knives around here.
Re:Somebody explain this to me?
on
Amorphous Steel
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There was an article in Discover magazine just a couple of months ago about this very thing. Not sure if it's online, but you can definitely find it at your local library.
One thing worth noting: While the tensile strength is increased greatly, it is also glass-like in that if you hit it with a baseball bat, it explodes in lots of little shards. It has to do with the lack of a lattice structure keeping it together.
Another thing I thought was interesting: steel knives sort of shed molecules and become deformed at the knife-edge when you use them, requiring you to sharpen them. Glassy steel knives wouldn't do this. You could literally pour yourself a knife in a mold and have a never-dulling knife -- assuming you don't drop it.:-)
I thought the results were slanted a little toward Perl-like scripting languages, but they don't seem to know as much Perl as they think they do. I mean, why do they show Python code as
import sys; print sys.argv[1]
while showing Perl code as
% perl -le 'print '
? One is obviously intended to run from a script, while the other runs from a command line, including an unnecessary extra command-line option.
"shebang-aware"??? Please! On Unix you can shebang yourself a line to call the script easily, and on Win32 you can simply create an association for particular extensions (like.pl) or convert the finished script to a batch file.
Beyond nit-picking, though, a real test of languages should involve a range of tasks, simple to complex, and evaluate languages on criteria that would score differently at different levels. Like, the ability of some languages to drop the need for declaring variables is great for hacking together a one-off quickie, but you wouldn't want to do that for anything you'd reuse or that is longer than a couple dozen lines.
Also, non-Perl fans are always blabbing on about readability, like it's a built-in problem in Perl. So score a program based on readability, and then write a fully readable Perl script. [Note to non-Perl fans: you can make a Perl script as readable as any language, but the shortcuts and special expressions it allows aren't going to be readable to momo's who don't know the language!].
"How will they ever be ready in time for the November elections?"
...they can just send more Republican lawyers ahead of time. <*rimshot*>
Seriously, I can't help but sense a correlation between this story and the one on PDA's. So many people are so sure that if it's electronic, it must be e-better!!! when it's just more complicated.
I once worked for a man who wanted to automate a bunch of processes in his department. It sounded like a good gig, but when I took the job and actually got to know the people, I found there were no processes -- the manager had simply hired under-qualified people who were never able to get organized. He thought automation would let him bypass the entire need to...well...do his job. No matter how many times I tried to explain that you can't "automate" processes that don't even exist, he never got it, the project went nowhere, his department was eventually dismantled, and I got out of high-tech and into real estate.
My point is that I think there are many people who are honestly (if ignorantly) star-struck by new technology, and they end up creating a morass of incompetence, as well as openings for thieves like Diebold to stick their greedy hands into, all with the best of intentions.
Point taken. What I meant was font size, bold, and italic (such as for emphasis or to make titles stand out). I don't want to debate the merits of including the font information, but if the original author included such formatting in the paper original, even just to add emphasis to dialogue he/she had written, I think it's accurate to say that "information" is lost in the plain ASCII version.
Wrt TOC's, maybe I worked on the wrong texts. If I remember correctly, PG text TOC's are simply lists of section or chapter titles (since the concept of a page number is lost). It's more information than simply deleting it would provide, but it no longer serves the purpose of directing you to the location of that section or chapter. In a PG text to HTML converter I wrote once, where I hoped to create a link from the TOC to the item in question, I ran into issues like:
Chapter 1: Something happens
Chapter 2: Something even more amazing
happens which requires a very long title
Chapter 3: Something less dramatic happens
...which required me to manually remove a linebreak so my converter could read it as a title. (Yes you could program around it, but not every text's chapter title begins with "Chapter X:") It's been a few years, but I think it was the Oz series by Frank L. Baum. I got it to work eventually, but it required a lot of manual work, and one or more of the chapter titles mapped to a phrase found in a paragraph, meaning I had to manually create the anchor and didn't ever get the script fully automated. Other anomolies in other works included header or footer information from the original text that was included throughout the PG text. It confused me until I realized what it must be. I also seem to remember different aspects of the texts being handled differently by different editors, so that even a collection of books by the same author and publisher ended up formatted for PG differently.
I agree that RTF is not structured, but I've converted many documents from RTF to HTML. Not excessively formatted documents, I grant you, but I used to be in charge of this thing at work that converted Word documents from various departments into HTML for our intranet. The RTF-to-HTML converter I wrote worked surprisingly well (I used to develop MS-Help files in raw RTF, so I knew a bit about it), and then only required a bit of tweaking to get right -- much less than was required for PG-to-HTML.
I really don't understand why so many people think plain ASCII is so great. As I'm writing this, I realize that even on a printed page, the output is viewed not as plain ASCII, but as a bunch of symbols that are placed in proximity to each other on the space of a page to convey meaning. In changing that, often nothing is lost. But where context and visual information are lost, I believe the failing of simple ASCII becomes apparent.
I am well aware of Michael's intention to move in an XML-based direction for
the database and happen to disagree with some of the choices that have been
made along the way. I didn't call anyone an idiot (as you point out) and I
didn't demand my desires be fulfilled immediately. I must say your threshhold
for defining something as an emotional outburst is much lower than mine.
If a choice was made early on to put texts into any markup format at all, one
that preserved more of the basic information of the original texts than
plain-ASCII, then a converter could easily be written to convert from
one format to another. It's done all the time: databases to text, XML to HTML,
RTF to PDF, POD to LaTex, etc. etc. Why do you think me a nay-sayer?
I converted a bunch of PG texts to HTML once as an experiment. It was
successful, but it required a lot of hand-holding of the Perl script I wrote,
since I had trouble teaching it to recognize what it was looking at -- which
is the point I was making.
With plain text, a paragraph is a visual conceit, where two linebreaks are
considered the delimiter -- unless they aren't! If you convert a book to
some e-reader format that doesn't wrap your paragraph text blocks, then
you might end up with linebreaks in unappealing places that distract
from the text. But with only a computer's interpretation of our visual
conceit, a program is just as likely to wrap a TOC or index, which is equally
unappealing. You could put markers in the text to indicate that this is a TOC,
this is a paragraph, this is poem that keeps its linebreaks...but then you are
already creating a primitive markup language and moving away from plain ASCII
(at least to the extent that we're saying <text markup> tags are not
text in this discussion).
I believe I do know what I'm talking about; but thank you for your input.
I have to disagree. Many texts, though not all by any means, lose information due to loss of fonts, illustrations, TOC, and index, as well as pagination or chapter structure, or even something as silly as lines in a poem where the words use margins in a creative way to sort of swirl down a page.
If texts really had been formatted in WordPerfect or RTF, a converter could easily be written (have been for years, actually) to convert the texts to any other format. The fact that the starting point for PG is now an unstructured, unformatted, plain vanilla ASCII format that does not contain all the original text's information means that it is NOW in exactly the situation you describe. For PG to ever digitally recreate these texts will take up an immense amount of volunteers' time, leaving relatively little time to add new texts to the collection.
I've read about a dozen books from PG. Each time I've had to do some formatting to either get to fit well on paper or to convert it to something I could then convert to read on my Palm. I really appreciate what Michael has done and is doing, and I also understand that in 1971 plain-text might have really been the right choice, but I've felt for quite a while now that each passing year compounds the mistake of this original choice.
Please keep in mind that multiple personalities is extremely rare and discussion of this is not generally relevant to discussing schizophrenia. More common is hearing voices or, in a real bad case, hallucinating people or scenarios (a la, dare I say it, A Beautiful Mind).
For what it's worth, it's still not entirely clear that multiple personalities even exist. The few documented cases of MP remain suspect and incomplete. It's fairly accepted now that even the famous Sybil (treatment by Dr. Cornelia Wilbur dramatized in the book by Flora Schreiber and later made into a movie) did not, in fact, have multiple personalities. Dr. Wilbur basically encouraged and influencd Sybil to claim she had MP's, while Ms. Schreiber's publisher only wanted something sensational -- thus, an entire cultural understanding is born. I don't think Dr. Wilbur meant fraud, but unconsciously influencing a subject/patient based on your own desires is hardly unheard of. Here's a couple of links, if you're interested:
Very true. And let's not forget (that is, if anyone ever stopped to read the original story) that when Plato talked about an "advanced civilization," he was not talking about spaceships and rayguns. He was talking about advanced political systems, advanced philosophical systems, and living at peace as well as at one with nature. The Athenians thought they were getting there, the Spartans didn't care, and everyone else was a barbarian to most Greeks of the time.
What was a mediaval effort to find an undiscovered land (there was still quite a lot of it in those days) has since become a myth about aliens, ancient super-civilizations, inter-dimensional yada yada, and generally silly embellishments on, as the previous poster noted, a story to make a philosophical point.
** Coming in this space next week: The Hundredth Monkey!
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe for you. I still get at least one a month.
It reminds me of when I tried my wife's copy of The Sims once. I friggin' live my life already. I don't have time to help a bunch of digital homunculi work, sleep, pay bills, and indulge their neuroses. Despite the popularity of it, I lasted three days with it and was done forever.
My favorite PS/2 game in the past year was Simpson's Hit & Run. Just silly mindless fun. I'm old (old enough anyway) and I like to play games to unwind a bit, not to get wound up. If I want to engage my mind in something deep and complex, I look for a game of Go or a good book.
FYI, Keyhole was bought by Google and is now rebranded as Google Earth.
Well, I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. I mean, if your company's weighed down by a political war between the Palm and Be folks (who were pretty sure they were much smarter than anyone at Palm), wouldn't you want to bring in masters of immobilizing politics? That's just fighting fire with....actually I'm not sure about that analogy.
Very insider. Thanks for noticing. :-) I had time to sort it out after I got laid off (round 3). My wife made it to round 4. Now I'm happily out of high-tech.
Self-proclaimed genius works on stylus UI for Psion (IIRC), decides to take it further, comes up with one of the few interfaces would-be PDA makers hadn't thought of and it actually takes off -- though slowly at first.
Genius forms a company with a bunch of bitter ex-Apple folks.
PalmPilot starts to take off and Palm immediately make plans for the Nth generation of the OS, which will work on handhelds, phones, game consoles, etc. They also make plans to split the company into a hardware and OS division so there will be no conflicts like Apple had when Palm takes on Microsoft and kicks their butt. They talk about this for years.
The split is a disaster. They didn't figure out how groups would work together and left lots of unanswered questions -- and then rushed the split. The result? Two half-staffed divisions with no plan for how to work together.
Carl Yankowski is hired, who tells all of Palm to stick it 'cause he's here to tell y'all that Bluetooth is the future. A year is wasted trying to a) figure out how to cram Bluetooth into a Palm without sucking its batteries dry, b) trying to figure out the protocols, c) trying to figure out something useful to do with a Bluetooth-enabled Palm. The result? Carl is fired (Oh I'm sorry. He resigned. And all that cheering when the door hit his huge butt? Um...that was cheering.)
The two divisions are re-merged, with plans to split them again at some future date. Jobs are duplicated, jobs are lost. Nothing is gained.
The relatively inexperienced guy who runs the supply chain operations, after years of pressure from marketing over parts shortages, finally works out a contract so that Palm will have more Palm V's in the next couple of years than you can shake a stick at. I don't know how it got approved, but someone finally worked out that the Palm V was supposed to be end-of-lifed in six months and they needed to clear out the channel for the new devices. This is bad.
In Europe, in March (IIRC), Palm announces the release of the next-gen Palm. People say "Wow, that sounds good, so I'll put off my purchase of a Palm V until the new one comes out." Later marketing claims no one told them that the project was delayed until at least June (it actually turned out to be September). The channel is stuffed with Palm V's -- with tons more on the way -- and no one's buying them. The new Palm isn't ready, so no one's buying them either. Palm's revenue dries up faster than an earthworm on a sunny day.
The billion dollars or so that came from its IPO was partially committed to all those Palm V's no one wanted. But there was also some kind of fallout from the land deal for the new World HQ, that was made worse by ever-abusive parent company, 3Com, raping Palm yet again to pay for its own lost business. Palm loses something like $800M in six months.
First round of layoffs are announced. People panic. Next two rounds of layoffs are not announced. But someone reserves every conference room in the Outlook calendar, so it's kind of a tipoff.
All those friends of friends who were hired when everyone thought they were going to get rich from the IPO fall into two camps: A) Friends in high places are still there to protect them, B) first to go. Where Camp A people are found, so are scapegoats.
Lunatic VP of engineering cheerfully announces that the only way to continue on towards greatness is by adopting parallel development. To wit, every engineer is now on 5 projects. Project A on Monday, Project B on Tuesday, etc. Completion dates are not changed.
Stock options are repeatedly given as incentives. Let's say options at $10 are granted on Monday. By Wednesday, when they can be distributed, the stock is down to $9.50. This happens repeatedly.
A calendar company is bought, not used, its people fired. A web portal company is bought, not used, its people fired. A French software company is bought and the engineers are actually vit
So let's say you have yourself an Acme Time Machine, and it works. So you set it to transport you back in time 24 hours. Has no one ever considered that the earth has moved? Assuming for the moment that time travel is possible, if you do not calculate precisely where the earth is, and the location you want to go to, then you will most likely end up in space, but with a nasty possibility of "arriving" inside the earth (or possibly even the sun or some other body).
A time machine would have to also be an instantaneous space travel machine, capable of transporting you anywhere in the universe. I mean, if you can magically transport yourself the 17,640 mi (28,224 km) the earth will have moved in 24 hours, then whatever principle it uses will probably transport you over much greater distances.
Second - If your boss fights you, threatens you, or tries to intimidate you, you have the option to just leave.
The thing a lot of bosses will try with younger employees is pulling the parent card. "You'll be in big trouble if you don't do what I say." Like what kind of trouble? Can he make the other company fire you? Make you somehow come back in to work for him? I think not. Since you've already got a new job lined up, there's not a damned thing under the sun he can do to you, and it's in his best interests that you never figure this out. He'd love it if he could cut your pay and tell you that you don't have permission to leave -- and have you believe it like you're tempted to at the moment.
You're a big boy now. It may take a while to realize it, but you get to make choices.
'nuff said?
I'm 43, fwiw. When I was like 6 or 7, my mom bought me sort of calculator. It was based on a principle similar to an abacus. There were columns of numbers on the face, with a slotted tape in a groove. The tape was half black, and half white. You stuck a stylus (later replaced with a finishing nail) into the groove near the digit of the number you wanted to add. If the part of the tape was black, you pulled down. If white, you pushed up and clicked to increment the next 10's place up. It's hard to explain, but 30 seconds of playing with it and you could do addition and subtraction with carrying.
I had an early LED calculator in high school, but bought a TI98C (I think that was the model number) for college. It didn't have graphing capability, but was programmable via X,Y coordinates that mapped directly to the layout of the keys ("go over 3 keys, then down 7"), so you could run primitive programs on it.
In my sophomore year at UCSB, around 1982, I took an intro to programming class on a lark. Pascal. Didn't like it much.
In my junior year at UCSB, I was in a Psych intro to experimentation class, where you recreated some experiment. The point of the class was choosing your parameters and variables, and how to write up the experiment. I was really sick the first week of class, so when I went to the professor and found out that everyone had broken up into groups the first day, he suggested doing the Prisoner's Choice experiment, using the department computer to simulate opponent's for each of my subject's (you were required to sign up for a minimum number of each other's experiments so each group was guaranteed to have some data). With only the BASIC manual, I wrote the program and only 2 out of 18 people had any idea there wasn't "another computer lab downstairs." It was only later that I realized I had written a complete, albeit pretty simple, program to interact with users.
Eventually I got a job doing tech support, and then later programming. But you asked about introducing kids to computers. For what it's worth, I'd recommend you teach your kids logic and reasoning, make sure they can do basic math and as much more as they're comfortable with, have them read, read, read, and make sure they play sports or have hobbies. Oh yeah! Make sure they have a social life. It's too easy to spend your days and nights in front of a computer.
I do real estate appraisals now. I use Perl because I have to parse web-based information that would have to be transcribed manually otherwise. I use Excel because I have numbers to analyze and billing to manage. I generally don't use Word. I use Photoshop because I love taking pictures and Photoshop lets me make them even better. I use Panda Egg to access the Internet Go Server because it's hard to find people to play Go with in my area. I use lots of Cygwin utilities because I have to work on Win32, but I love the power of knowing how my computer works. I dunno. Maybe you just need to get the kids interested in something, and see if a computer offers them something in that regard. If not, maybe you shouldn't worry about it. Unless a kid really wants to be a hacker type, they can always learn programming and Word/Excel/OO and the OS of their choice later. Anyone can obsessively learn all the details of using a saw and hammer, but building a house can be as much an art as a skill. Anyone can obsessively learn to use a computer; but if you have no real reason for doing so, it's a complete waste.
They're not "regulating" squat, Junior. They're saying their network, in their building, providing tools and services to their students, paid for by their "customers" (your PARENTS) is hosed by a bunch of clever kids who don't think ahead or think much of cooperating so everyone has a good connection. They're trying to unhose something, not oppress you, Sparky.
So, what would you suggest? Really? If you stopped moaning about your rights, how would you fix it? I'm sure the administration would appreciate some solid answers and even some assistance, if appropriate. But if you imagine you're going to surprise and shock the administration into seeing that your right to swap music and play Half-Life is more important than their carrying on the business of running a university, well....keep imagining.
DS9 made a good attempt at dirtying up the Star Trek vision to make it more real, and it had it's good points after the first season, but they lost it when they decided it had to be at the center of a galactic war. And then at the end, all the war heroes just went back to work. No promotions, no space parades. "Let's make it really interesting, but not change anything," say the makers, "like when Riker won awards and honors and proved himself the captain's equal, but never took his own command." They forget that interesting equals change and lack of change equals uninteresting.
So, yeah, I'd say the producers should try to live with the riches they make from the franchise, but go tell a different story. ST is not a religion, for pity's sake; it's just a TV show we all grew up with.
You're right, of course. But the poster's question was how to prioritize which computers to replace because he couldn't replace them all. The thrust of my comment (in intent, anyway), was simply to replace the most broken/unstable first.
- Figure out what you are doing or want to do with the computers. Is that what the survey is for?
- Figure out what you would replace them with (including networking, licenses for proprietary software, etc.) and figure out what it will cost and thus how many you can buy.
- Figure out which of your current machines are serving you the least in this capacity. If you have a bunch of unstable Win95 or Win98 machines that crash a lot, I'd say those are good candidates. If you have older machines that are stable, consider leaving them alone if it will allow you to replace more of the unstable ones.
- Go over the list you make, poke holes in it, and start again. When you're done, show it to others and don't look at it for a week, then come back to it and see what you think of your logic.
There. Any other part of your job you'd like us to do for you? I mean, how hard was that?If this is your first time using some form of technology **dig dig**>, someone should have warned you it doesn't always work like it says on the pretty brochure.
I hadn't made the connection to ceramic knives earlier, but now I do seem to remember rather mixed reviews on ceramic knives. Really sharp and stay that way for a long time, but also really expensive to sharpen, and you have to send them somewhere to get it done. I also hear that, while they're not fragile, they are more brittle than metal and can be broken. I've been curious to try one, but they're also expensive and we don't have any shortage of knives around here.
One thing worth noting: While the tensile strength is increased greatly, it is also glass-like in that if you hit it with a baseball bat, it explodes in lots of little shards. It has to do with the lack of a lattice structure keeping it together.
Another thing I thought was interesting: steel knives sort of shed molecules and become deformed at the knife-edge when you use them, requiring you to sharpen them. Glassy steel knives wouldn't do this. You could literally pour yourself a knife in a mold and have a never-dulling knife -- assuming you don't drop it. :-)
I thought the results were slanted a little toward Perl-like scripting languages, but they don't seem to know as much Perl as they think they do. I mean, why do they show Python code as
while showing Perl code as ? One is obviously intended to run from a script, while the other runs from a command line, including an unnecessary extra command-line option."shebang-aware"??? Please! On Unix you can shebang yourself a line to call the script easily, and on Win32 you can simply create an association for particular extensions (like .pl) or convert the finished script to a batch file.
Beyond nit-picking, though, a real test of languages should involve a range of tasks, simple to complex, and evaluate languages on criteria that would score differently at different levels. Like, the ability of some languages to drop the need for declaring variables is great for hacking together a one-off quickie, but you wouldn't want to do that for anything you'd reuse or that is longer than a couple dozen lines.
Also, non-Perl fans are always blabbing on about readability, like it's a built-in problem in Perl. So score a program based on readability, and then write a fully readable Perl script. [Note to non-Perl fans: you can make a Perl script as readable as any language, but the shortcuts and special expressions it allows aren't going to be readable to momo's who don't know the language!].
Seriously, I can't help but sense a correlation between this story and the one on PDA's. So many people are so sure that if it's electronic, it must be e-better!!! when it's just more complicated.
I once worked for a man who wanted to automate a bunch of processes in his department. It sounded like a good gig, but when I took the job and actually got to know the people, I found there were no processes -- the manager had simply hired under-qualified people who were never able to get organized. He thought automation would let him bypass the entire need to...well...do his job. No matter how many times I tried to explain that you can't "automate" processes that don't even exist, he never got it, the project went nowhere, his department was eventually dismantled, and I got out of high-tech and into real estate.
My point is that I think there are many people who are honestly (if ignorantly) star-struck by new technology, and they end up creating a morass of incompetence, as well as openings for thieves like Diebold to stick their greedy hands into, all with the best of intentions.
Wrt TOC's, maybe I worked on the wrong texts. If I remember correctly, PG text TOC's are simply lists of section or chapter titles (since the concept of a page number is lost). It's more information than simply deleting it would provide, but it no longer serves the purpose of directing you to the location of that section or chapter. In a PG text to HTML converter I wrote once, where I hoped to create a link from the TOC to the item in question, I ran into issues like:
I agree that RTF is not structured, but I've converted many documents from RTF to HTML. Not excessively formatted documents, I grant you, but I used to be in charge of this thing at work that converted Word documents from various departments into HTML for our intranet. The RTF-to-HTML converter I wrote worked surprisingly well (I used to develop MS-Help files in raw RTF, so I knew a bit about it), and then only required a bit of tweaking to get right -- much less than was required for PG-to-HTML.
I really don't understand why so many people think plain ASCII is so great. As I'm writing this, I realize that even on a printed page, the output is viewed not as plain ASCII, but as a bunch of symbols that are placed in proximity to each other on the space of a page to convey meaning. In changing that, often nothing is lost. But where context and visual information are lost, I believe the failing of simple ASCII becomes apparent.
-dd
I am well aware of Michael's intention to move in an XML-based direction for the database and happen to disagree with some of the choices that have been made along the way. I didn't call anyone an idiot (as you point out) and I didn't demand my desires be fulfilled immediately. I must say your threshhold for defining something as an emotional outburst is much lower than mine.
If a choice was made early on to put texts into any markup format at all, one that preserved more of the basic information of the original texts than plain-ASCII, then a converter could easily be written to convert from one format to another. It's done all the time: databases to text, XML to HTML, RTF to PDF, POD to LaTex, etc. etc. Why do you think me a nay-sayer?
I converted a bunch of PG texts to HTML once as an experiment. It was successful, but it required a lot of hand-holding of the Perl script I wrote, since I had trouble teaching it to recognize what it was looking at -- which is the point I was making.
With plain text, a paragraph is a visual conceit, where two linebreaks are considered the delimiter -- unless they aren't! If you convert a book
to some e-reader format that
doesn't wrap your paragraph text blocks,
then you might end up with linebreaks in
unappealing places that
distract from the text.
But with only a computer's interpretation of our visual conceit, a program is just as likely to wrap a TOC or index, which is equally unappealing. You could put markers in the text to indicate that this is a TOC, this is a paragraph, this is poem that keeps its linebreaks...but then you are already creating a primitive markup language and moving away from plain ASCII (at least to the extent that we're saying <text markup> tags are not text in this discussion).
I believe I do know what I'm talking about; but thank you for your input.
-dd
If texts really had been formatted in WordPerfect or RTF, a converter could easily be written (have been for years, actually) to convert the texts to any other format. The fact that the starting point for PG is now an unstructured, unformatted, plain vanilla ASCII format that does not contain all the original text's information means that it is NOW in exactly the situation you describe. For PG to ever digitally recreate these texts will take up an immense amount of volunteers' time, leaving relatively little time to add new texts to the collection.
I've read about a dozen books from PG. Each time I've had to do some formatting to either get to fit well on paper or to convert it to something I could then convert to read on my Palm. I really appreciate what Michael has done and is doing, and I also understand that in 1971 plain-text might have really been the right choice, but I've felt for quite a while now that each passing year compounds the mistake of this original choice.
-dd
For what it's worth, it's still not entirely clear that multiple personalities even exist. The few documented cases of MP remain suspect and incomplete. It's fairly accepted now that even the famous Sybil (treatment by Dr. Cornelia Wilbur dramatized in the book by Flora Schreiber and later made into a movie) did not, in fact, have multiple personalities. Dr. Wilbur basically encouraged and influencd Sybil to claim she had MP's, while Ms. Schreiber's publisher only wanted something sensational -- thus, an entire cultural understanding is born. I don't think Dr. Wilbur meant fraud, but unconsciously influencing a subject/patient based on your own desires is hardly unheard of. Here's a couple of links, if you're interested:
A chapter from Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations And Shattered Lives
An FMS Foundation newsletter from 1997
Search the pages for "Wilbur" and you'll find the interesting bits. You can also search for "wilbur schreiber sybil hoax" or something like that.
What was a mediaval effort to find an undiscovered land (there was still quite a lot of it in those days) has since become a myth about aliens, ancient super-civilizations, inter-dimensional yada yada, and generally silly embellishments on, as the previous poster noted, a story to make a philosophical point.
** Coming in this space next week: The Hundredth Monkey!