The design people at work tell me that the only thing that matters are the page proofs. A backlit display isn't going to look like ink on paper no matter how fancy your display is.
Of course, that's only if you're doing graphics work for paper. If not, ignore me. The monitor probably matters there.
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." —George Bernard Shaw
wrt, Chekov-- Chekov was not in TOS episode "Space Seed", and yet, here he is at the beginning of The Wrath of Khan "remembering" the Enterprise's encounter with Khan. So the continuity has already been fucked-up there. It has simply been assumed that Chekov was on the Enterprise but not a major player at the time. I am OK with this.
I am less OK with the new-old Enterprise. WHY? Seriously, all you're doing is begging the real fans to hate your movie. But I am excited about Zachary Quinto and Simon Pegg.
OK, I am putting the 12 year old me back into hibernation now so I can function as a normal human. If people only knew how much Trek shit I have...
Every field of study... that is, every single field of study... was once a branch of philosophy, or a branch off a branch of philosophy, et cetera.
Actually-- this is untrue. There are plenty of fields whose genesis was in practice, and the refinement of that practice became the study, including many scientific fields. Metallurgy, engineering, chemistry, to name a few. To use [abused] philosophical terminology: certain things cannot be known a priori, therefore knowledge of them must be gained through experience. Modern scientific thought borrows Hegel's dialectic ("thesis, antithesis, synthesis") from philosophy, but it is not solely derived from that branch by any stretch of the imagination.
Disclaimer: I have a Philosophy degree and am currently working on my CS degree.
You want liberal bias? Watch or listen to PBS/NPR?
I hear this leveled against NPR quite a bit, and since I'm a regular listener, I think about it often. I simply do not perceive any bias. Of course, with unintentional bias, that is exactly the point. Conservative pundits often try to make the case that this bias is intentional, but I do not believe it—I have had the privilege of working with NPR staff in the past (I had connections to an NPR affiliate through my college radio station), and I have to say, that if anything, NPR's fault is simply that they believe certain things to be true about Americans in general: that Americans believe the future will be better than the past (i.e., that change will be a positive force), that all people are entitled to equal opportunity, that people have a right to live their lives as they please so long as they don't harm anyone, and that compassion toward those in need is a good measuring stick for society. These beliefs are not at the forefront of people's minds-- they are literally the lens that shapes their perception of the world.
Now, until I left college and traveled the US, I too, thought that these things were universal beliefs-- that all Americans shared them. I have since learned that these beliefs are identified as being 'liberal'. This was shocking to me when I first heard it-- they were simply axiomatic to me. So when I heard someone say the word 'liberal' with that sneering tone, I thought "what's wrong with you?" So now, I accept this bias-- if you can call it as such-- and if someone has a problem with me because it, well, fuck you very much. Fine, I guess I'm a 'liberal'. I don't have to justify myself to people who justify their own bigotry by saying that 'God' told them to do it. Gimme a break.
I think we should replace Sarah Palin with Tina Fey and have do-over. If you like Palin, score, Fey does Palin better than Palin does. If you don't like Palin, hey, at least she's funny.
A board? Unless your goal is for nothing to actually happen, then a board is a terrible idea, let alone a board with seven people. In my experience 3 is the maximum number of people you can have before returns start diminishing sharply.
These people serve a valuable role in society, but it is not within the corridors of power.
I was thinking about this exact subject this morning with regard to Ralph Nader. Smart guy, definitely has the interests of the people at heart, and he's worked in previous administrations under the Secretary of Labor. Unfortunately, he is literally his own undoing. His mere presence would polarize people to the point where nothing could get done, despite the fact that he'd probably have some pretty good ideas.
This was the first Crichton book I read, when I was in middle school, and it stuck with me for a long time. In fact, his writing formed part of the aura around science/technology for me that made me want to pursue an education and career in technology. I never saw his stories as warnings about science, I saw them as warnings about the failings of people who choose to ignore what science says for various reasons. Political, personal, etc. Andromeda Strain is a great example of this.
I have mixed feelings about his work. His earlier stuff was great, some of his latter stuff was terrible (Prey in particular). I've heard good things about Airframe but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Anyway, you can't deny his impact on the popular perception of science-- most for the better IMHO. Thanks for the books, Michael. RIP.
I discovered this, too. My parents bought me a book called "Great Games for the TI-99/4A". I still have it floating around somewhere. Unfortunately, you figured out exactly what _not_ to do by having to program in every permutation of death. But there were other games-- there was an Asteroids clone, if I remember correctly. Of course, I had to write these things multiple times-- the external 5 1/4" floppy drive seemed to only excel at losing data.
It's funny—I found that it was the other way around. I spent 6 months hiking, with essentially no contact with television of any kind during that time, and when I came home, some friends invited me to see a movie. I think it was one of the Matrix movies. Anyway, I was absolutely glued to the screen. My friends left the theatre complaining about how the movie sucked, but for me—I was completely immersed.
Grocery stores are the worst. Our local grocery has installed these around every corner, usually featuring some strange man extolling the virtues of white-flesh peaches. It's basically impossible to carry out a conversation with someone in those stores-- as if the horrific music weren't enough. I'd stop buying food if that were an option.
Wow. A good indicator of whether someone doesn't have a CS education (or cheated their way through their CS education) is if they think that modern CPU speeds are at all a factor in whether to remove the need for fast disk subsystems. For applications where speed is the most important thing, programmers will attempt not to use the disk as much as possible. But when an application does use disk (and this is unavoidable in some circumstances-- e.g., file servers), your fast CPU does not change the fact that your CPU is many, many orders of magnitude slower than your physical disk.
Let's take a typical 2GHz CPU. This machine's clock ticks 2E9 times per second. If this machine has all of its ducks in a row, it can add a handful of numbers in a single clock tick. This is extremely fast, and here's HOW fast: For the sake of argument, let's say that you can perform, on average, 1 operation every 10 ticks on this machine, and so, 1 operation takes 5E-9 seconds.
Now, your typical access time on a fast hard disk—the time needed simply to locate the data, since this is the slowest part— is about 4 ms, or 4E-3 seconds. This is 6 orders of magnitude difference from a hard disk.
Put it this way: if we were to scale the above process so that 1 operation happened in one second, your computer would have to wait a little more than 9 days for the disk just to access the data, let alone read it. S-l-o-w.
There's hardly any program you used 20 or 30 years ago that you couldn't use today.
That's a little naive. During that time frame, we may have had a primitive x86 architecture, but it was far from being a standard. In the eighties, the computers I used were the TI-99/4A, a Commodore 64, and an aging LSI-11.
I didn't get to use what I'd consider to be "modern" machines—a Mac SE and a Packard Bell 286 (a 12MHz machine with a "Turbo" button that allowed it to crash faster) until the late eighties. While there are indeed emulators for a few of the computers I mention above, finding and running the software on these machines is difficult.
My father recently recovered some data (his dissertation) from 5 1/4" floppy that he had originally saved to 8" disk— fortunately, he thought ahead and moved it to a "modern" format, but— seriously, try to get that 8" floppy drive working with your emulator. It is definitely worth the effort to standardize document formats and storage technologies.
That's absolutely right. You can see it particularly when some asshole thinks he's bigger and badder and somehow righteous because he drives a pickup truck. My girlfriend drives a small economy car and is always being tailgated by these people. I have a truck, but mostly keep it in the driveway (I ride my bike almost everywhere), and this same phenomena does not happen when I'm driving my own vehicle. But when I'm on my bike-- I get people sneering, cutting me off unexpectedly (well, not unexpectedly anymore), and generally looking down at me because my choice of transportation is me-powered. WTF? In general people are about as rational in their choice of transportation as they are about everything else. I work with people who claim that they "couldn't live" without their vehicles. Fine, I say, if you really are that mentally inflexible, good luck with that natural selection thing.
I'm not even saying that petrol should go the way of the dinosaur (in this case, literally).
Go the way of the dinosaur... wait, does that mean I should put my petrol into the ground and wait for it to turn into... petrol? Or a dinosaur? Should we be burning dinosaurs now?
Did you replace a fileserver, or did you replace your entire AD? In my opinion, Samba still has a lot of work left to do on the latter part, but it excels at the fileserver role.
It just depreciates slower than inflation and value can be kept up/increased with renovations.
I think you're mostly right, except that there's another variable, which is historical significance. As I live in Massachusetts, there are a large number of homes here with some historical significance, and that adds a fair amount of value to the total property value. My parents live in one such house.
Slashdot Mirror
The design people at work tell me that the only thing that matters are the page proofs. A backlit display isn't going to look like ink on paper no matter how fancy your display is.
Of course, that's only if you're doing graphics work for paper. If not, ignore me. The monitor probably matters there.
"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people." —George Bernard Shaw
That's not got much spam in it.
1337 billion dollars? Next you'll be telling me that they've manufactured 80085 billion LEGOs.
wrt, Chekov-- Chekov was not in TOS episode "Space Seed", and yet, here he is at the beginning of The Wrath of Khan "remembering" the Enterprise's encounter with Khan. So the continuity has already been fucked-up there. It has simply been assumed that Chekov was on the Enterprise but not a major player at the time. I am OK with this.
I am less OK with the new-old Enterprise. WHY? Seriously, all you're doing is begging the real fans to hate your movie. But I am excited about Zachary Quinto and Simon Pegg.
OK, I am putting the 12 year old me back into hibernation now so I can function as a normal human. If people only knew how much Trek shit I have...
Every field of study... that is, every single field of study... was once a branch of philosophy, or a branch off a branch of philosophy, et cetera.
Actually-- this is untrue. There are plenty of fields whose genesis was in practice, and the refinement of that practice became the study, including many scientific fields. Metallurgy, engineering, chemistry, to name a few. To use [abused] philosophical terminology: certain things cannot be known a priori, therefore knowledge of them must be gained through experience. Modern scientific thought borrows Hegel's dialectic ("thesis, antithesis, synthesis") from philosophy, but it is not solely derived from that branch by any stretch of the imagination.
Disclaimer: I have a Philosophy degree and am currently working on my CS degree.
You want liberal bias? Watch or listen to PBS/NPR?
I hear this leveled against NPR quite a bit, and since I'm a regular listener, I think about it often. I simply do not perceive any bias. Of course, with unintentional bias, that is exactly the point. Conservative pundits often try to make the case that this bias is intentional, but I do not believe it—I have had the privilege of working with NPR staff in the past (I had connections to an NPR affiliate through my college radio station), and I have to say, that if anything, NPR's fault is simply that they believe certain things to be true about Americans in general: that Americans believe the future will be better than the past (i.e., that change will be a positive force), that all people are entitled to equal opportunity, that people have a right to live their lives as they please so long as they don't harm anyone, and that compassion toward those in need is a good measuring stick for society. These beliefs are not at the forefront of people's minds-- they are literally the lens that shapes their perception of the world.
Now, until I left college and traveled the US, I too, thought that these things were universal beliefs-- that all Americans shared them. I have since learned that these beliefs are identified as being 'liberal'. This was shocking to me when I first heard it-- they were simply axiomatic to me. So when I heard someone say the word 'liberal' with that sneering tone, I thought "what's wrong with you?" So now, I accept this bias-- if you can call it as such-- and if someone has a problem with me because it, well, fuck you very much. Fine, I guess I'm a 'liberal'. I don't have to justify myself to people who justify their own bigotry by saying that 'God' told them to do it. Gimme a break.
I think we should replace Sarah Palin with Tina Fey and have do-over. If you like Palin, score, Fey does Palin better than Palin does. If you don't like Palin, hey, at least she's funny.
A laser and and LED are two completely different things, except that they both occasionally excel at rendering retinal tissue useless.
I'm probably going to wait until I can get one with a pocket projector protector.
A board? Unless your goal is for nothing to actually happen, then a board is a terrible idea, let alone a board with seven people. In my experience 3 is the maximum number of people you can have before returns start diminishing sharply.
These people serve a valuable role in society, but it is not within the corridors of power.
I was thinking about this exact subject this morning with regard to Ralph Nader. Smart guy, definitely has the interests of the people at heart, and he's worked in previous administrations under the Secretary of Labor. Unfortunately, he is literally his own undoing. His mere presence would polarize people to the point where nothing could get done, despite the fact that he'd probably have some pretty good ideas.
This was the first Crichton book I read, when I was in middle school, and it stuck with me for a long time. In fact, his writing formed part of the aura around science/technology for me that made me want to pursue an education and career in technology. I never saw his stories as warnings about science, I saw them as warnings about the failings of people who choose to ignore what science says for various reasons. Political, personal, etc. Andromeda Strain is a great example of this.
I have mixed feelings about his work. His earlier stuff was great, some of his latter stuff was terrible (Prey in particular). I've heard good things about Airframe but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. Anyway, you can't deny his impact on the popular perception of science-- most for the better IMHO. Thanks for the books, Michael. RIP.
I discovered this, too. My parents bought me a book called "Great Games for the TI-99/4A". I still have it floating around somewhere. Unfortunately, you figured out exactly what _not_ to do by having to program in every permutation of death. But there were other games-- there was an Asteroids clone, if I remember correctly. Of course, I had to write these things multiple times-- the external 5 1/4" floppy drive seemed to only excel at losing data.
http://www.msadams.com/adventures.htm
It's funny—I found that it was the other way around. I spent 6 months hiking, with essentially no contact with television of any kind during that time, and when I came home, some friends invited me to see a movie. I think it was one of the Matrix movies. Anyway, I was absolutely glued to the screen. My friends left the theatre complaining about how the movie sucked, but for me—I was completely immersed.
Grocery stores are the worst. Our local grocery has installed these around every corner, usually featuring some strange man extolling the virtues of white-flesh peaches. It's basically impossible to carry out a conversation with someone in those stores-- as if the horrific music weren't enough. I'd stop buying food if that were an option.
Wow. A good indicator of whether someone doesn't have a CS education (or cheated their way through their CS education) is if they think that modern CPU speeds are at all a factor in whether to remove the need for fast disk subsystems. For applications where speed is the most important thing, programmers will attempt not to use the disk as much as possible. But when an application does use disk (and this is unavoidable in some circumstances-- e.g., file servers), your fast CPU does not change the fact that your CPU is many, many orders of magnitude slower than your physical disk.
Let's take a typical 2GHz CPU. This machine's clock ticks 2E9 times per second. If this machine has all of its ducks in a row, it can add a handful of numbers in a single clock tick. This is extremely fast, and here's HOW fast: For the sake of argument, let's say that you can perform, on average, 1 operation every 10 ticks on this machine, and so, 1 operation takes 5E-9 seconds.
Now, your typical access time on a fast hard disk—the time needed simply to locate the data, since this is the slowest part— is about 4 ms, or 4E-3 seconds. This is 6 orders of magnitude difference from a hard disk.
Put it this way: if we were to scale the above process so that 1 operation happened in one second, your computer would have to wait a little more than 9 days for the disk just to access the data, let alone read it. S-l-o-w.
There's hardly any program you used 20 or 30 years ago that you couldn't use today.
That's a little naive. During that time frame, we may have had a primitive x86 architecture, but it was far from being a standard. In the eighties, the computers I used were the TI-99/4A, a Commodore 64, and an aging LSI-11.
I didn't get to use what I'd consider to be "modern" machines—a Mac SE and a Packard Bell 286 (a 12MHz machine with a "Turbo" button that allowed it to crash faster) until the late eighties. While there are indeed emulators for a few of the computers I mention above, finding and running the software on these machines is difficult.
My father recently recovered some data (his dissertation) from 5 1/4" floppy that he had originally saved to 8" disk— fortunately, he thought ahead and moved it to a "modern" format, but— seriously, try to get that 8" floppy drive working with your emulator. It is definitely worth the effort to standardize document formats and storage technologies.
That's absolutely right. You can see it particularly when some asshole thinks he's bigger and badder and somehow righteous because he drives a pickup truck. My girlfriend drives a small economy car and is always being tailgated by these people. I have a truck, but mostly keep it in the driveway (I ride my bike almost everywhere), and this same phenomena does not happen when I'm driving my own vehicle. But when I'm on my bike-- I get people sneering, cutting me off unexpectedly (well, not unexpectedly anymore), and generally looking down at me because my choice of transportation is me-powered. WTF? In general people are about as rational in their choice of transportation as they are about everything else. I work with people who claim that they "couldn't live" without their vehicles. Fine, I say, if you really are that mentally inflexible, good luck with that natural selection thing.
I'm not even saying that petrol should go the way of the dinosaur (in this case, literally).
Go the way of the dinosaur... wait, does that mean I should put my petrol into the ground and wait for it to turn into... petrol? Or a dinosaur? Should we be burning dinosaurs now?
Probably about as well as a Mustang.
Did you replace a fileserver, or did you replace your entire AD? In my opinion, Samba still has a lot of work left to do on the latter part, but it excels at the fileserver role.
It just depreciates slower than inflation and value can be kept up/increased with renovations.
I think you're mostly right, except that there's another variable, which is historical significance. As I live in Massachusetts, there are a large number of homes here with some historical significance, and that adds a fair amount of value to the total property value. My parents live in one such house.
But NASA and the Navy are just a bunch of chumps, right?