Try watching hockey sometime. After a while of listening to the players, coaches, and commentators I -- an American -- have gotten a fairly good idea of who's from where but only in a really broad sense.
Newfies and Quebeqois stand out pretty severely. I can almost tell the difference between someone from say, Toronto and Saskatchewan but sometimes get it wrong.
Considering how broad the country is, there doesn't seem to be a really strong difference in regional accents though. Nothing like the US.
I'd argue that Hockey might exceed both of those as a sport requiring a lot of smarts to be played well. In a smoothly flowing game (as opposed to a grinding, gnashing type of game) it's all the position play and team coordination of football but at high speed with no breaks at all in the action.
Sure there's brutes that get by on nothing but strength or skill, but they never really go anywhere in the NHL. Strength alone gets you nothing but penalties. Many of the feared NHL goons are really smart guys. Skill alone isn't of much use if you can't play in a coordinated offense.
And the hot-swapping of players while play is in motion adds a whole other dimension to the game that isn't done anywhere else in sports (except maybe in auto racing, and that's not really a "sport").
Somebody still doesn't get it. Does Microsoft not realize they actually can distribute OSS software with commercial software as long as they're separate programs? Or are they just giving that excuse to the reporter because, for PR reasons, they don't want to be caught dead shipping the stuff?
I can think of quite a few reasons why -- if I were Microsoft -- I wouldn't distribute GNU stuff with the OS:
1. Ask any 10 geeks about the GNU license -- even those that have read it -- and you'll get at least 3 different answers as to what that license binds you to do (or not do) in some issues. Something this murky would just confuse developers further. (Microsoft's main focus for many products is developers not users.)
2. Where the SFU stuff ends (regardless of which parts are GNU-covered) and the OS begins can confuse people and cause litigation. i.e. SFU API 1 calls API 2 calls API 3 (GNU layer!) calls API 4 calls some OS thing. Even if these "APIs" are separate "programs". Why even introduce the confusion? Show a working OS, show an Add-On package which adds more functionality, and they're demonstrably different. This is the reverse of the IE-bonded-to-Windows contraversy that they're still mired in.
3. The GNU licenses are still mostly untested in court in front of a judge. Would you place the family jewels next to a creepy-crawly misunderstood Consumer of Intellectual Property whose limits aren't firmly established?
4. Microsoft is just crawling out of the Java/Sun nightmare. To a casual observer, this smells the same. Distribution of a toolkit to allow non-MS stuff to run under MS operating systems... Ouch!
5. Don't get developers used to having the SFU handy for all of their needs as part of the OS, then they'll rely on it. Better to keep it separate in case it fails, needs to be spun off, or becomes a support and legal nightmare. Everyone developing gets used to the idea that this is just an add-on.
I'm an occasional reader of "alternative-history" type novels (i.e. 1632 by Eric Flint, Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove) and a recurring theme in those types of books is that when the travelers go back -- no matter what they take with them -- there's no way to skip past levels of technological development.
In Guns of the South, the 19th century types are amazed at computers and a discussion of how to fix them comes around. As one of the 20th century characters puts it, (from memory) "we don't have the tools, to build the tools, to fix the computer."
In 1632 it's pointed out that breech-loading guns are at least a couple of steps away from reality even with modern know-how. For the meantime, they can improve cannons dramatically (rifling, smoother bores, etc..) but no Great Leap of technology is possible.
Actually, in both reactor scenes, lots of Iron (plating from walls, structural girders) is shown being drawn in to the fireball. Solution? Let it be. Nothing poisons a fusion reaction better than Iron.
Oh good lord, I can't believe I'm commenting on this thread. alt.nerd.obsessive indeed. Anyway...
Use some common sense, man. Even comic book common sense. Potentially dangerous reaction causes unforseen side effect (slight magnetic pull). As the reaction gets larger, the room starts to come apart, and eventually the building starts to crumble. So you just want to let it continue? "Don't worry, it'll stop on it's own!" cries the nerd in the back row.
One definition of insanity is trying the same things over and over, and expecting different results.
Of course Spidey (and the now somewhat more sane Doc Ock) are going to try something different to stop the reaction. Letting it go sure doesn't seem to help. Were they supposed to wait until the Chrysler building gets sucked in to try something else?
The First Search Engine War was fought years ago, and has been long over. But a blank check was given and all kinds of approaches and interfaces emerged. The winner was Google, though other technologies are still groveling for the spotlight. They won with a good interface, good results, without too much junk.
A Second Search Engine War might help to refine things even further. Microsoft seems to be starting from Google's UI model (everyone loves a winner) and working from there. That's great. There's not really a whole lot of ways for the users to lose here. Things might get even better!
I actually mis-posted. I meant hand-held power tools: circular saws, reciprocating saws (sawzall), etc...
After the incident I got myself a band saw for taking care of those odd little pieces that need to be ripped, crosscut, or just trimmed. For small close-in work it's a much better solution than a table saw and almost as versitile.
Getting useful tools in the hands of a lot of people is a real challenge for both Windows (not so bad) and Unix (incredible pain sometimes), depending on you development tool of choice. Oftentimes installing a whole development environment is not wanted or needed, and due to compatability differences won't work.
Something that indicates that, for a particular application, you'll need to distribute libraries X, Y, and Z or in some way bundles them all together for distribution.
So far, on Windows,.Net programs seem easy to distribute. Make sure the target platform has the.NET runtime and ship any assemblies you created yourself. The only *real* headaches so far come when distributing to Win98 systems that installed the.NET Runtime separately -- this doesn't always work right....
March 2003 I took a good chunk out of my left index finger on the table saw. Ouch.
And I'm normally a very, very careful person on the saw. But between a little kickback, hands in the wrong place, an odd shaped piece I wound up with an avulsion laceration (ripped the skin off the fleshy part of my fingertip about 1/8" wide and bone deep). Quick trip to the ER. Nothing really to stitch up, the doctor left it open but dressed and packed for a couple of weeks. The skin grew back, and I've got a rather odd fingerprint there now.
I'd trade what happened to my finger for the damage done to the hot dog any day.
This needs to be expanded to routers and hand tools. Kickback from circular saws is very frightening.
In high school, I remember taking a paddle controller apart and mounting a 3' metal rod through it and affixing it to a 5' stand. On the end of the rod was a clamp for changing the amount of weight on it. I made...a pendulum.
After carefully debugging the software and hardware at home, I brought the whole apparatus into school and hooked it up to the school's Atari 400.
On screen, with a couple of keypresses you could get a realtime graph of the pendulum's oscillations against a set of scales (time and distance). Changing the length of the pendulum (with a wing nut), position of the weight, size of the weight, etc.. allowed the other students to really visualize what was going on.
It was still there and working, long after I graduated.
Life'll develop an organism (eventually) that can eat nanobots. There are places on the planet (lava vents, caves, artic ice, etc..) where the nanobots won't thrive but life exists. Given enough time -- and nanobots are a limited niche -- life will figure out a way to eat it.
Life has developed chemosynthesis around black smokers in the ocean, I'm sure it'll figure out nanobots.
As digital cameras get in the hands of more and more snap happy photographers there will be more and more average images cluttering the PC's of the world.
And that's not a bad thing. Most of the people who take the pics want to see the people in the images, and doesn't give a damn about the composition or other aesthetic quality. As long as there's a person they love in the scene, all else is meaningless.
And just remember, even if the quality of everyone's photos goes up most of us will still be within a couple of standard deviations of "average".:)
It's an organized "yard sale" by a community or group. I highly recommend Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog for a good perspective on jumble sales.
Feel free to try and resolve that issue with one of us having something like this.
Piece of cake. Fast forward 3 or 4 years. Your little one is no longer in daycare, and rides the bus with the rest of the first graders
*ring* *ring* "Sir? This is your son/daughter's school/day care. Your son/daughter is bazooka barfing/has a fever/is ill and needs to be picked up right away."
With kids you're pretty much on call all the time. When least convenient they'll get sick, their designated ride home will fail, or some kind of nonsense. And if the other parent has a multi-seat car? Inevitably they'll be out of reach at the moment, the car will be in for repairs, they'll be hours and hours away.
Slashdot Mirror
Try watching hockey sometime. After a while of listening to the players, coaches, and commentators I -- an American -- have gotten a fairly good idea of who's from where but only in a really broad sense.
Newfies and Quebeqois stand out pretty severely. I can almost tell the difference between someone from say, Toronto and Saskatchewan but sometimes get it wrong.
Considering how broad the country is, there doesn't seem to be a really strong difference in regional accents though. Nothing like the US.
Not outsource US IT to Canada? They outsourced hockey to the US decades ago....
I'd argue that Hockey might exceed both of those as a sport requiring a lot of smarts to be played well. In a smoothly flowing game (as opposed to a grinding, gnashing type of game) it's all the position play and team coordination of football but at high speed with no breaks at all in the action.
Sure there's brutes that get by on nothing but strength or skill, but they never really go anywhere in the NHL. Strength alone gets you nothing but penalties. Many of the feared NHL goons are really smart guys. Skill alone isn't of much use if you can't play in a coordinated offense.
And the hot-swapping of players while play is in motion adds a whole other dimension to the game that isn't done anywhere else in sports (except maybe in auto racing, and that's not really a "sport").
1. Ask any 10 geeks about the GNU license -- even those that have read it -- and you'll get at least 3 different answers as to what that license binds you to do (or not do) in some issues. Something this murky would just confuse developers further. (Microsoft's main focus for many products is developers not users.)
2. Where the SFU stuff ends (regardless of which parts are GNU-covered) and the OS begins can confuse people and cause litigation. i.e. SFU API 1 calls API 2 calls API 3 (GNU layer!) calls API 4 calls some OS thing. Even if these "APIs" are separate "programs". Why even introduce the confusion? Show a working OS, show an Add-On package which adds more functionality, and they're demonstrably different. This is the reverse of the IE-bonded-to-Windows contraversy that they're still mired in.
3. The GNU licenses are still mostly untested in court in front of a judge. Would you place the family jewels next to a creepy-crawly misunderstood Consumer of Intellectual Property whose limits aren't firmly established?
4. Microsoft is just crawling out of the Java/Sun nightmare. To a casual observer, this smells the same. Distribution of a toolkit to allow non-MS stuff to run under MS operating systems... Ouch!
5. Don't get developers used to having the SFU handy for all of their needs as part of the OS, then they'll rely on it. Better to keep it separate in case it fails, needs to be spun off, or becomes a support and legal nightmare. Everyone developing gets used to the idea that this is just an add-on.
I'm an occasional reader of "alternative-history" type novels (i.e. 1632 by Eric Flint, Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove) and a recurring theme in those types of books is that when the travelers go back -- no matter what they take with them -- there's no way to skip past levels of technological development.
In Guns of the South, the 19th century types are amazed at computers and a discussion of how to fix them comes around. As one of the 20th century characters puts it, (from memory) "we don't have the tools, to build the tools, to fix the computer."
In 1632 it's pointed out that breech-loading guns are at least a couple of steps away from reality even with modern know-how. For the meantime, they can improve cannons dramatically (rifling, smoother bores, etc..) but no Great Leap of technology is possible.
Maybe not McDonalds, how about gas stations instead? All over here in Detroit there are same-brand stations across the street from each other.
Use some common sense, man. Even comic book common sense. Potentially dangerous reaction causes unforseen side effect (slight magnetic pull). As the reaction gets larger, the room starts to come apart, and eventually the building starts to crumble. So you just want to let it continue? "Don't worry, it'll stop on it's own!" cries the nerd in the back row.
One definition of insanity is trying the same things over and over, and expecting different results.
Of course Spidey (and the now somewhat more sane Doc Ock) are going to try something different to stop the reaction. Letting it go sure doesn't seem to help. Were they supposed to wait until the Chrysler building gets sucked in to try something else?
The First Search Engine War was fought years ago, and has been long over. But a blank check was given and all kinds of approaches and interfaces emerged. The winner was Google, though other technologies are still groveling for the spotlight. They won with a good interface, good results, without too much junk.
A Second Search Engine War might help to refine things even further. Microsoft seems to be starting from Google's UI model (everyone loves a winner) and working from there. That's great. There's not really a whole lot of ways for the users to lose here. Things might get even better!
I actually mis-posted. I meant hand-held power tools: circular saws, reciprocating saws (sawzall), etc...
After the incident I got myself a band saw for taking care of those odd little pieces that need to be ripped, crosscut, or just trimmed. For small close-in work it's a much better solution than a table saw and almost as versitile.
Amen to this.
.Net programs seem easy to distribute. Make sure the target platform has the .NET runtime and ship any assemblies you created yourself. The only *real* headaches so far come when distributing to Win98 systems that installed the .NET Runtime separately -- this doesn't always work right....
Getting useful tools in the hands of a lot of people is a real challenge for both Windows (not so bad) and Unix (incredible pain sometimes), depending on you development tool of choice. Oftentimes installing a whole development environment is not wanted or needed, and due to compatability differences won't work.
Something that indicates that, for a particular application, you'll need to distribute libraries X, Y, and Z or in some way bundles them all together for distribution.
So far, on Windows,
Reading through the rest of the site, apparently there's a cartridge system that needs to be replaced after the brake fires.
(Look under Features->Cartridge)
I guess your saw would be useless if the brake were triggered until you replaced the cartridge.
But that's better than having your arm be useless...
March 2003 I took a good chunk out of my left index finger on the table saw. Ouch.
And I'm normally a very, very careful person on the saw. But between a little kickback, hands in the wrong place, an odd shaped piece I wound up with an avulsion laceration (ripped the skin off the fleshy part of my fingertip about 1/8" wide and bone deep). Quick trip to the ER. Nothing really to stitch up, the doctor left it open but dressed and packed for a couple of weeks. The skin grew back, and I've got a rather odd fingerprint there now.
I'd trade what happened to my finger for the damage done to the hot dog any day.
This needs to be expanded to routers and hand tools. Kickback from circular saws is very frightening.
In high school, I remember taking a paddle controller apart and mounting a 3' metal rod through it and affixing it to a 5' stand. On the end of the rod was a clamp for changing the amount of weight on it. I made...a pendulum.
After carefully debugging the software and hardware at home, I brought the whole apparatus into school and hooked it up to the school's Atari 400.
On screen, with a couple of keypresses you could get a realtime graph of the pendulum's oscillations against a set of scales (time and distance). Changing the length of the pendulum (with a wing nut), position of the weight, size of the weight, etc.. allowed the other students to really visualize what was going on.
It was still there and working, long after I graduated.
Or, an analogy that hits home to Slashdot readers...
This seems akin to having sexual experts who have studied sexual practices, but are still virgins.
And I thought it was all just publishing. Silly me.
"Candygram!", so says the guy in the rubber shark suit.
Those "earthquakes" are actually just the collective sobbing and shaking of the Los Angeles Lakers fans.
Rust will get them, if not something else will.
Life'll develop an organism (eventually) that can eat nanobots. There are places on the planet (lava vents, caves, artic ice, etc..) where the nanobots won't thrive but life exists. Given enough time -- and nanobots are a limited niche -- life will figure out a way to eat it.
Life has developed chemosynthesis around black smokers in the ocean, I'm sure it'll figure out nanobots.
In summary, boobs make *everything* better.
ObQuote:
Jasper: Are they talking about the bordello?
Abe: No! The burlesque house. So keep your mouth shut.
With kids you're pretty much on call all the time. When least convenient they'll get sick, their designated ride home will fail, or some kind of nonsense. And if the other parent has a multi-seat car? Inevitably they'll be out of reach at the moment, the car will be in for repairs, they'll be hours and hours away.
1-seaters are doomed for families.