Egyptian pyramids went for stacked sand-walled mastabas to full-blown monsters in less than a century. This was attributed to creativity of Imhotep. (also credited with inventing columns in architecture).
If this guy really did all that is attributed to him, then he was even more impressive than Einstein and Co. Just reading his wikipedia bio sends shivers down my spine. It's like learning that the old guy of 10000BC (the movie) is for real.
The thought that humans 60 000 years ago may be smarter than us today amused me
Well, I have some doubts. At the start of agriculture you'd starve on the 1st winter if you were stupid. Or as a hunter you'd get torn to pieces pretty fast if you were stupid. Now if you are stupid you can still find a good lawyer to help you get rich by spilling hot coffee on yourself. Idiocracy indeed.
First impressions... Why did XP default to the "Playskool" look?
I was always impressed by how ugly the default XP background image is: a field with nothing interesting on it, not even in focus, from an obvious cheap lens. You can't even claim it's neutral since there's some clutter on it. A bunch of clouds, not even good looking. I have 10000 better images on my site. Is it the first pic taken by Bill's kid with a throw-away camera and put there to please ? I've never heard the history of that image, but I'm pretty sure the photographer is hiding under a rock after becoming a mute monk out of shame.
Why didn't you (or anybody having to wait for the bus for more than a minute) take a baseball bat / pickax / bullet / squirt gun filled with glue onto the loudspeaker ? I definitely would to had if I was in that situation, fortunately I live in a country that respects its citizens a bit more.
Many of us drive the same car both on road and on track. Are you saying we should be required to have two separate cars?
In most countries that is the case. Normal cars are not allowed on race tracks because they lack various safety equipment. And race cars are not allowed on roads for the exact same reasons !!!
An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling
Disastrous idea. I've had to accelerate hard a few times to avoid a collision, and you do that by flooring it, no time to think further. Unfortunately once I couldn't do that because there was a car right in front of me and we were both stopped. The resulting fireball resulting in 8 cars looking like this... Way to end a honeymoon.
Just to add a tiny bit of info about tethering. I was for 2 months without internet connection after moving recently. I have an HTC Hero (Android) with tethering, but my phone provider doesn't allow for tethering... Well, fuck them, except that the web didn't work. All the other protocols did (ping, ssh, ftp, etc...). The providers were detecting the http requests coming from the PC and replacing them with blank pages, pages requested from the phone itself were fine. A simple workaround on Firefox was to install User Agent Switcher Firefox add-on and set an empty user agent.
Also I couldn't get USB tethering to work on Ubuntu ( it appeared as an ndis device but I couldn't get it to work), so that's one very good reason to use wifi tethering.
If your company is doing poorly, you have the option of selling it to someone else who can hopefully make changes that would keep the doors open.
Yes: to a private citizen (or several).
Second, how could you prevent that?
That seems very simple to me since a company is a legal entity which is in no way comparable to a stack of pancakes. Just make it so the resale goes by certain laws.
What you describe is impossible, and you wouldn't want to do it anyway.
But all practicality prupose, why are you making a Modbus thermal probe?
We are not. We made everything else (and that's a LOT of distributed dedicated hardware, FPGAs, digital and analog I/Os, etc), but one paper pusher decided it would be cost efficient to purchase a modbus thermal probe to add to the design. Except there's nowhere that this thing can fit in the software architecture. At best it'll be an ugly kludge.
Nicely said. There's a lot to say for or against capitalism. One thing I never understood is why, in most cases, companies are given the same right as a person. Without going as far as the current stupidity by the supreme court of free speech = money, hence companies can freely bribe politicians; I'd like to ask why companies are allowed to buy other companies... Yes, you read that right, it's so commonly done as to be considered normal but I don't think it is. If a rich guy wants to buy shares in several companies, good for him, but why do we allows chains of virtual ownership that gets diluted at each step ?
Personally I cannot stand languages that lock you in. Meaning that if you cannot link your program to a C system library or a Fortran math library, I won't be using it. Like Java. So how does Go work with other languages ?
I never understood the need to block things like porn for the military. You get a bunch of guys together for months on end in a highly stressful condition. Porn would be one excellent way for them to release some steam, but no, they're not allowed to do that. So what are they supposed to do ? Go out, shoot some guys and rape their GFs ?!? I mean is this all it's really about, some kind of control via stress and basic sexual drives like in most wars of the past ? If it was just for me I'd airdrop a billion netbooks full of porn with free satellite access over the middle east.
Linux errors are usually more useful, descriptive and since the order of the buttons change from window to window, you have to be more careful.;-)
Yup, I've several times toyed with the idea of using random labels and placements for the [Yes] [No] [Maybe] [Dismiss] [Fail] [Retry] [Abort] buttons on my user interfaces, just to make sure they don't clic on the lower-right button without reading anything.
Are you serious? The only examples anyone on Slashdot can find seem to be routers and switches? The reasons RS232 isn't going away is because an awful lot of industrial automation equipment (large and small-scale) still uses it.
Yup. I'll give some examples of serial hardware I had to interface with in the last few months which may be a tad unfamiliar to most slashdotters: power supplies, high voltage power supplies, pressure gauges, ultra-vacuum pressure gauges, thermal probes, microcontrollers, GPSs, radiometers, bolometers, 3G cards...
I'd guess you're running Modbus, or something similar.
Argh! Who the fucking fuck invented this fucking protocol ?!? All the drawbacks of serial with all the drawbacks of binary closed protocols. I'm in the middle of implementing a simple driver for a modbus thermal probe... in the time it takes me to write 5 drivers for other protocols. To read a simple temperature, the manual is something like 75 pages. WTFF ?!?
Well, then I did log in to your (or a similar) box with a random password and left a string of insults a couple weeks ago... But I don't understand the choice of dynsdns. If you want to run a ssh honeypot, you could just link to ssh://user:passwd@home.dynsdns.com:22/ and the bots would come running. By the way is there some service that will tell you the most likely typos for a given word ?
One thing I've never seen discussed is how typosquaters can get your ssh passwords. I almost fell for one. Like many slashdotters I have some personal servers on adsl lines (moving IPs) and thus use the services of a dynamic DNS. I wanted to connect to user@myhomepc.dnsalias.com, one of the most common dynalic DNS, but mistyped the domain name (don't remember how exactly). I was nonetheless prompted for a password, which I stopped halfway, remembering that I had setup a public key and thus did not have to type one. It's easy to recompile ssh to log all passwords attempted. Hook it on a catchall for all subdomains and you can start gathering accesses...
How many clients have you ever met that actually ~know~ what they want?
Happened to me once. The specs were basically: 'we want the same thing as this 15-year old device, but with modern hardware (to replace 2 racks of analog electronics) and software'. After a few months of design, we did the install (both electronics and software) in an afternoon, the client was happy, basically haven't heard since.
Get an IM notification and want to reply to it? Tap the button to leave Pandora and go into the IM app and the music stops.
Really? That's bloody idiotic! On my Android phone, I can listen to music while Google maps uses the GPS to track me to my destination, and I can switch back and forth to webpages of info in the meanwhile. I doesn't seem like much.
Oh, and while it wouldn't address the root problem, I wish there was a global stroke or gesture that would bounce you back to the previous app you were in.
I'll mention it to other android users because I found it by chance, but holding the [home] button does the equivalent of the Windows Alt-Tab task switcher.
Once thing I've noticed about apple products, is that there's always one ore more important detail that is wrong and that makes the product a no-no for me. At the same time some people gloat over those details as if they were the best thing since sliced butter (or whatever). Examples:
The no-button mouse. I hated that thing from the first second: I couldn't rest my big hand on it without clicking. On the other hand an admin giving a tour of the lab to some people asked me how much I loved the new great mouse from Apple (that was quite a while ago). I won't even mention single button mice.
iPhones/iPads without SD card slots. iPhones that don't appear as a mass storage device when connected to a PC (I still don't believe this one, it seems so 1995).
Laptops without changeable batteries. Destops where it's almost impossible to change the hard drive. Etc, etc...
As for the so-called manipulation of data. I can give one relevant example. I worked for 15 years in climatology. One of the first software I wrote was reception of data packets from automatic weather stations. There were so many errors in the packet transmissions that according to the built-in CRC (cyclic redundancy check) we would have had to toss 9 out of 10 packets. With one packet every 10 minutes, that was unacceptable, so I would extract the data (pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction) from the packet and then just remove the 'wrong' data points, both automatically, but also manually. So you have -10.1C, -10.2C, 5.2C, -10.4C, guess which point needs to be removed? When half the data points on a given measurement are bad, it can be a little trickier. I'm sure some denialists would love this example as an evidence of data tampering. Well, fuck them.
I wonder how long until we decide that separation of science and state is also a good idea.
So you would base political decisions on what ? Stupidity ? Ignorance ? Random numbers ? There are already way too many important decision based on 'gut feeling'...
Slashdot Mirror
Egyptian pyramids went for stacked sand-walled mastabas to full-blown monsters in less than a century. This was attributed to creativity of Imhotep. (also credited with inventing columns in architecture).
If this guy really did all that is attributed to him, then he was even more impressive than Einstein and Co. Just reading his wikipedia bio sends shivers down my spine. It's like learning that the old guy of 10000BC (the movie) is for real.
The thought that humans 60 000 years ago may be smarter than us today amused me
Well, I have some doubts. At the start of agriculture you'd starve on the 1st winter if you were stupid. Or as a hunter you'd get torn to pieces pretty fast if you were stupid. Now if you are stupid you can still find a good lawyer to help you get rich by spilling hot coffee on yourself. Idiocracy indeed.
There are several proto-writings, such as the Vinca script which are fascinating, but also hotly debated.
First impressions... Why did XP default to the "Playskool" look?
I was always impressed by how ugly the default XP background image is: a field with nothing interesting on it, not even in focus, from an obvious cheap lens. You can't even claim it's neutral since there's some clutter on it. A bunch of clouds, not even good looking. I have 10000 better images on my site. Is it the first pic taken by Bill's kid with a throw-away camera and put there to please ? I've never heard the history of that image, but I'm pretty sure the photographer is hiding under a rock after becoming a mute monk out of shame.
Why didn't you (or anybody having to wait for the bus for more than a minute) take a baseball bat / pickax / bullet / squirt gun filled with glue onto the loudspeaker ? I definitely would to had if I was in that situation, fortunately I live in a country that respects its citizens a bit more.
If I have 5000$ in the bank, I certainly hope that my 'value' is at least 10000$, whatever than means, not being a resalable slave...
Many of us drive the same car both on road and on track. Are you saying we should be required to have two separate cars?
In most countries that is the case. Normal cars are not allowed on race tracks because they lack various safety equipment. And race cars are not allowed on roads for the exact same reasons !!!
An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling
Disastrous idea. I've had to accelerate hard a few times to avoid a collision, and you do that by flooring it, no time to think further. Unfortunately once I couldn't do that because there was a car right in front of me and we were both stopped. The resulting fireball resulting in 8 cars looking like this... Way to end a honeymoon.
Also I couldn't get USB tethering to work on Ubuntu ( it appeared as an ndis device but I couldn't get it to work), so that's one very good reason to use wifi tethering.
If your company is doing poorly, you have the option of selling it to someone else who can hopefully make changes that would keep the doors open.
Yes: to a private citizen (or several).
Second, how could you prevent that?
That seems very simple to me since a company is a legal entity which is in no way comparable to a stack of pancakes. Just make it so the resale goes by certain laws.
What you describe is impossible, and you wouldn't want to do it anyway.
Maybe, but it's not clear why...
I'd airdrop hookers.
And that'd still be more cost efficient than Blackwater mercenaries...
But all practicality prupose, why are you making a Modbus thermal probe?
We are not. We made everything else (and that's a LOT of distributed dedicated hardware, FPGAs, digital and analog I/Os, etc), but one paper pusher decided it would be cost efficient to purchase a modbus thermal probe to add to the design. Except there's nowhere that this thing can fit in the software architecture. At best it'll be an ugly kludge.
Nicely said. There's a lot to say for or against capitalism. One thing I never understood is why, in most cases, companies are given the same right as a person. Without going as far as the current stupidity by the supreme court of free speech = money, hence companies can freely bribe politicians; I'd like to ask why companies are allowed to buy other companies... Yes, you read that right, it's so commonly done as to be considered normal but I don't think it is. If a rich guy wants to buy shares in several companies, good for him, but why do we allows chains of virtual ownership that gets diluted at each step ?
Personally I cannot stand languages that lock you in. Meaning that if you cannot link your program to a C system library or a Fortran math library, I won't be using it. Like Java. So how does Go work with other languages ?
I never understood the need to block things like porn for the military. You get a bunch of guys together for months on end in a highly stressful condition. Porn would be one excellent way for them to release some steam, but no, they're not allowed to do that. So what are they supposed to do ? Go out, shoot some guys and rape their GFs ?!? I mean is this all it's really about, some kind of control via stress and basic sexual drives like in most wars of the past ? If it was just for me I'd airdrop a billion netbooks full of porn with free satellite access over the middle east.
Linux errors are usually more useful, descriptive and since the order of the buttons change from window to window, you have to be more careful. ;-)
Yup, I've several times toyed with the idea of using random labels and placements for the [Yes] [No] [Maybe] [Dismiss] [Fail] [Retry] [Abort] buttons on my user interfaces, just to make sure they don't clic on the lower-right button without reading anything.
Are you serious? The only examples anyone on Slashdot can find seem to be routers and switches? The reasons RS232 isn't going away is because an awful lot of industrial automation equipment (large and small-scale) still uses it.
Yup. I'll give some examples of serial hardware I had to interface with in the last few months which may be a tad unfamiliar to most slashdotters: power supplies, high voltage power supplies, pressure gauges, ultra-vacuum pressure gauges, thermal probes, microcontrollers, GPSs, radiometers, bolometers, 3G cards...
I'd guess you're running Modbus, or something similar.
Argh! Who the fucking fuck invented this fucking protocol ?!? All the drawbacks of serial with all the drawbacks of binary closed protocols. I'm in the middle of implementing a simple driver for a modbus thermal probe... in the time it takes me to write 5 drivers for other protocols. To read a simple temperature, the manual is something like 75 pages. WTFF ?!?
Well, then I did log in to your (or a similar) box with a random password and left a string of insults a couple weeks ago... But I don't understand the choice of dynsdns. If you want to run a ssh honeypot, you could just link to ssh://user:passwd@home.dynsdns.com:22/ and the bots would come running. By the way is there some service that will tell you the most likely typos for a given word ?
One thing I've never seen discussed is how typosquaters can get your ssh passwords. I almost fell for one. Like many slashdotters I have some personal servers on adsl lines (moving IPs) and thus use the services of a dynamic DNS. I wanted to connect to user@myhomepc.dnsalias.com, one of the most common dynalic DNS, but mistyped the domain name (don't remember how exactly). I was nonetheless prompted for a password, which I stopped halfway, remembering that I had setup a public key and thus did not have to type one. It's easy to recompile ssh to log all passwords attempted. Hook it on a catchall for all subdomains and you can start gathering accesses...
How many clients have you ever met that actually ~know~ what they want?
Happened to me once. The specs were basically: 'we want the same thing as this 15-year old device, but with modern hardware (to replace 2 racks of analog electronics) and software'. After a few months of design, we did the install (both electronics and software) in an afternoon, the client was happy, basically haven't heard since.
Get an IM notification and want to reply to it? Tap the button to leave Pandora and go into the IM app and the music stops.
Really? That's bloody idiotic! On my Android phone, I can listen to music while Google maps uses the GPS to track me to my destination, and I can switch back and forth to webpages of info in the meanwhile. I doesn't seem like much.
Oh, and while it wouldn't address the root problem, I wish there was a global stroke or gesture that would bounce you back to the previous app you were in.
I'll mention it to other android users because I found it by chance, but holding the [home] button does the equivalent of the Windows Alt-Tab task switcher.
The no-button mouse. I hated that thing from the first second: I couldn't rest my big hand on it without clicking. On the other hand an admin giving a tour of the lab to some people asked me how much I loved the new great mouse from Apple (that was quite a while ago). I won't even mention single button mice.
iPhones/iPads without SD card slots. iPhones that don't appear as a mass storage device when connected to a PC (I still don't believe this one, it seems so 1995).
Laptops without changeable batteries. Destops where it's almost impossible to change the hard drive. Etc, etc...
As for the so-called manipulation of data. I can give one relevant example. I worked for 15 years in climatology. One of the first software I wrote was reception of data packets from automatic weather stations. There were so many errors in the packet transmissions that according to the built-in CRC (cyclic redundancy check) we would have had to toss 9 out of 10 packets. With one packet every 10 minutes, that was unacceptable, so I would extract the data (pressure, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction) from the packet and then just remove the 'wrong' data points, both automatically, but also manually. So you have -10.1C, -10.2C, 5.2C, -10.4C, guess which point needs to be removed? When half the data points on a given measurement are bad, it can be a little trickier. I'm sure some denialists would love this example as an evidence of data tampering. Well, fuck them.
I wonder how long until we decide that separation of science and state is also a good idea.
So you would base political decisions on what ? Stupidity ? Ignorance ? Random numbers ? There are already way too many important decision based on 'gut feeling'...