You question was rhetorical, but yeah, of course we can blame them. Representation != echoing. The Representatives and Senators need to represent their constituents. That includes both their needs and their wants, both the present and the future. So, if you believe a member of congress has a position that is irresponsible and will cause damage to the country and their constituents, yes, blame them for it. (Admittedly obvious -- we rarely call someone irresponsible w/o blaming them).
Of course, I imagine those Tea-Party Republicans don't think they're irresponsible and do think their current stances will allow them to accomplish more of their goals and improve the country. If you agree, cheer them on. If you disagree, blame 'em.
t why Mozilla hasn't considered a Firefox OS?"
on
Where Is Firefox OS?
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· Score: 1
Why not combine the browser and the OS? Because people who do programming have been refining a model of how things should be done since the 60s that says the opposite. Call it "levels of abstraction", "modular programming", "interface driven", "black box programming", "information hiding", "object oriented", etc etc. They all call out for not jumbling everything together -- that's "spaghetti logic".
Cmdr, please stop taking the trolls out for a walk in the park. Admittedly, the trolls do enjoy it, and there seems to be a lot of public interaction, but really,it's a bit of a nuisance. Please, the next time they ask, just say no....
jddorian writes "I am head of a clinical division at an academic hospital (not Radiology, but similarly tech oriented).
I don't watch "Scrubs", but Wikipedia says that J.D. Dorian is a "residency director" on the show's teaching hospital.
*Ahem*, what happened to The Animated Series? It's almost entirely awful and is more or less non-canon, but it's still a Star Trek series.
Awful and non-canon? Admittedly, I was a kid at the time, but I recall that the stories were pretty good. I don't recall the visual quality though. Wikipedia mentions an Emmy, critical acclaim, a couple of stories by David Gerrold, the use of a lot of the original writers, and the use of the original "series bible". I'd guess about as awful and non-canon as ST:TOS (discrepancies in the original can't be canon).
Yes, total cost is probably too high. But... The cost to get there and mine and perhaps return to orbit -- yes, astronomical. Cost of delivery from orbit to earth of durable goods -- neither terribly difficult nor expensive if I remember O'Neil's arguments correctly. It's going *up* the gravity well that's the bigger pain.
AndreV writes "Biomimetic adhesives aren't new, but a PhD graduate in British Columbia has developed a new method of creating microscopic, mushroom-like plastic structures in order to produce a dry adhesive that mimics the stickiness of gecko feet—and is prepping his glue-free innovation for outer space. A research group at his university, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, is engineering a spider-like, sticky-footed climbing robot destined to explore Mars, and it is also developing reusable attaching systems for astronauts to use where magnetic and suction systems generally fail. In the future, he says, single-use versions could be used in any number of medical applications as well as for replacements for everyday sticky needs, such as Post-It notes and Scotch tape."
Mark [of the RFID Journal] challenges Paget to point to a single instance where RFID was successfully used for nefarious purposes.
I think I've managed to leave town twice in my life while accidentally leaving a door unlocked. Nothing bad happened. So, I should conclude that I could leave doors unlocked all the time and I'd never see an unlocked door used for nefarious purposes?
I hope not all the logic at the RFID Journal is that bad...
An AC thinks it's a good idea to make a company immune to patent lawsuits as long as said company "actually makes stuff". As if there are no valid patent lawsuits? As if valid patent lawsuits aren't against someone using an idea to make something? We do this, we might as well get rid of patent lawsuits. At which point you might as well get rid of patents. Well, yeah, that is indeed one way of killing trolls. But this gets +4 Insightful? How about -5 lame?
Google's search engine started doing OCR on any scanned documents they found in late 2008. The results were horrible in some cases, but it didn't matter. The searchable OCR results made it possible to find things more easily and you could obviously refer to the original source if the OCR was too garbled.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
on
Flight of the Desktops
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· Score: 1
The article may turn out to be correct for home users but it makes no sense at all in the corporate world.
At the Fortune 50 company where I work, they took away our desktops and replaced them with laptops and docking stations. Any of the admins or other people with "on call" responsibilities had laptops anyway. Seems like they didn't want us to have both laptops and desktops. Also, another part of the thinking was supposedly that it made sense for disaster recovery scenarios.
I remember when I saw the first IBM PC. I'd seen UNIX on a variety of systems and various flavors of CPM on somewhat aging hardware. Frankly, I was surprised DOS wasn't much more advanced than CPM.
[...] MS that made a significant contribution to making the general PC market possible by licensing DOS.
MS sold their OS both to IBM and IBM's clone-making competitors. I'm not so sure I'd count that as a significant contribution to the PC market. In fact, I'd like to think that if MS hadn't sold an OS to the clone makers, DR DOS and other products would have provided more interesting competition.
A similar conundrum exists -- where are their tools? Any sufficiently advanced civilization should be able to create self replicating probes. Even without FTL, they should be able to spread to all the stars in the Milky Way in under a half million years.
Of course, even if someone did spread probes, would those probes broadcast in a way we'd hear? If not, even if they aren't "stealthed", how hard would it be for us to build something to detect them? And wouldn't stealthed "hunter" probes overwhelm any "broadcasting" probes?
The contest results for "bumper stickers from the future" was in the first issue I read.
Quasars shift red, Hot stars burn blue, space is warped, and so are you!
Senator Proxmire is so dense he absorbs neutrinos!
There were a couple dozen more. Omni reported that they got too many entries for "black holes suck" to include it. And that they'd received a hilarious pun on the seventh planet which wasn't printable but did get a place of honor on the office bulletin board...
Securing the network layer is like securing the highways. A secure highway doesn't stop a robber from driving to your house and stealing from you. The problem isn't the robber's *car*.
As long as criminals and spammers can hijack computers and run botnets there will be spam and phishing sites. As long as users' desktops are vulnerable, they'll be compromised to make phishing sites look good.
Of course, the network layer *does* need to be secure in various ways. Preventing various types of masquerade, preventing attacks on the network itself, etc. But solutions at the end-points seem to be a tougher problem at the moment.
Almost all of our opinions about comments end up relating to the understandability.
For example:
Comments like "this is ugly" are OK. Such comments often highlight areas that might break as the code around them changes. Also... let's not begrudge the programmer who felt he or she could have done better but decided that it wasn't justified.
Small snippets of code are not usually where comments are most needed. If I really need to totally grok what your (or my old) ten line section of code does, I can work through it if necessary. Comments are much more valuable when they promote understanding of larger pieces of code -- entire modules, functions, class methods, entire classes, etc.
Things get more interesting when you look at an environment of multiple different applications running on multiple servers and interacting. You want to see things like documentation about the expected interfaces and good error/sanity checking and reporting. But that's really a different documentation topic than program comments...
There's always some noise and quite a bit of discussion on this topic for one very simple reason.
There's more than one way to do commenting well.
Heck, for a sample size of *one*, I can say that my commenting varies significantly depending on things like language, size of project, and how hard or obscure the problem domain is.
In the end, commenting has only one goal -- to promote understanding. Usually that means what/how/why the code does what it does.
There are a few defunct projects on sourceforge and, I think, one live effort. I'm writing an emulator, but I haven't released any code yet.
CPUs are trivial. Systems can be hard.
Writing an emulator probably wasn't feasible before the sources were released two years ago. A few people started prior to that, but I can't imagine how.
Multics ran on somewhat complex hardware. In addition to the CPU, there were several other complex components including the system controllers, I/O multiplexors, and front end processors. Some of these were programmable or semi-programmable devices and much of the documentation is missing.
Now that we have compiler listings, assembly listings, a few documents, and a boot tape, the task seems feasible. Digging through the machine code on the boot tape and in the assembly listings partially makes up for the lack of decent documentation on some of the components.
My emulator is far from complete -- and it's almost 18K lines of code. It does read the boot tape and run about 2 million instructions, but crashes before finishing the boot process. The emulator doesn't yet know about disks or support instruction restart etc. There's a lot of work left to do.
I plan on cleaning up a few things and releasing it real soon now.
Slashdot Mirror
You question was rhetorical, but yeah, of course we can blame them. Representation != echoing. The Representatives and Senators need to represent their constituents. That includes both their needs and their wants, both the present and the future. So, if you believe a member of congress has a position that is irresponsible and will cause damage to the country and their constituents, yes, blame them for it. (Admittedly obvious -- we rarely call someone irresponsible w/o blaming them).
Of course, I imagine those Tea-Party Republicans don't think they're irresponsible and do think their current stances will allow them to accomplish more of their goals and improve the country. If you agree, cheer them on. If you disagree, blame 'em.
Why not combine the browser and the OS? Because people who do programming have been refining a model of how things should be done since the 60s that says the opposite. Call it "levels of abstraction", "modular programming", "interface driven", "black box programming", "information hiding", "object oriented", etc etc. They all call out for not jumbling everything together -- that's "spaghetti logic".
....Linux isn't really a "programmer's tool", so doesn't blong on the list in the first place. ...
Maybe not, but I find I'm much more productive under Linux than I was under CP/M or MSDOS...
Cmdr, please stop taking the trolls out for a walk in the park. Admittedly, the trolls do enjoy it, and there seems to be a lot of public interaction, but really,it's a bit of a nuisance. Please, the next time they ask, just say no....
jddorian writes "I am head of a clinical division at an academic hospital (not Radiology, but similarly tech oriented).
I don't watch "Scrubs", but Wikipedia says that J.D. Dorian is a "residency director" on the show's teaching hospital.
*Ahem*, what happened to The Animated Series? It's almost entirely awful and is more or less non-canon, but it's still a Star Trek series.
Awful and non-canon? Admittedly, I was a kid at the time, but I recall that the stories were pretty good. I don't recall the visual quality though. Wikipedia mentions an Emmy, critical acclaim, a couple of stories by David Gerrold, the use of a lot of the original writers, and the use of the original "series bible". I'd guess about as awful and non-canon as ST:TOS (discrepancies in the original can't be canon).
Sunday, however, is a "death slot"
Yeah, those "60 Minutes" guys don't have a chance. Probably will never have a second season....
Of course. And I'm sure the real rush is to make the Christmas shopping season. But, I still predict some complaints....
WOW is just a game ... But this choice of a release date is sure to generate controversy....
Yes, total cost is probably too high. But... The cost to get there and mine and perhaps return to orbit -- yes, astronomical. Cost of delivery from orbit to earth of durable goods -- neither terribly difficult nor expensive if I remember O'Neil's arguments correctly. It's going *up* the gravity well that's the bigger pain.
The TFA doesn't mention prior efforts. Here's one -- From an April 2009 slashdot:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/09/1927217:
AndreV writes "Biomimetic adhesives aren't new, but a PhD graduate in British Columbia has developed a new method of creating microscopic, mushroom-like plastic structures in order to produce a dry adhesive that mimics the stickiness of gecko feet—and is prepping his glue-free innovation for outer space. A research group at his university, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, is engineering a spider-like, sticky-footed climbing robot destined to explore Mars, and it is also developing reusable attaching systems for astronauts to use where magnetic and suction systems generally fail. In the future, he says, single-use versions could be used in any number of medical applications as well as for replacements for everyday sticky needs, such as Post-It notes and Scotch tape."
Mark [of the RFID Journal] challenges Paget to point to a single instance where RFID was successfully used for nefarious purposes.
I think I've managed to leave town twice in my life while accidentally leaving a door unlocked. Nothing bad happened. So, I should conclude that I could leave doors unlocked all the time and I'd never see an unlocked door used for nefarious purposes?
I hope not all the logic at the RFID Journal is that bad...
An AC thinks it's a good idea to make a company immune to patent lawsuits as long as said company "actually makes stuff". As if there are no valid patent lawsuits? As if valid patent lawsuits aren't against someone using an idea to make something? We do this, we might as well get rid of patent lawsuits. At which point you might as well get rid of patents. Well, yeah, that is indeed one way of killing trolls. But this gets +4 Insightful? How about -5 lame?
Google's search engine started doing OCR on any scanned documents they found in late 2008. The results were horrible in some cases, but it didn't matter. The searchable OCR results made it possible to find things more easily and you could obviously refer to the original source if the OCR was too garbled.
The article may turn out to be correct for home users but it makes no sense at all in the corporate world.
At the Fortune 50 company where I work, they took away our desktops and replaced them with laptops and docking stations. Any of the admins or other people with "on call" responsibilities had laptops anyway. Seems like they didn't want us to have both laptops and desktops. Also, another part of the thinking was supposedly that it made sense for disaster recovery scenarios.
I remember when I saw the first IBM PC. I'd seen UNIX on a variety of systems and various flavors of CPM on somewhat aging hardware. Frankly, I was surprised DOS wasn't much more advanced than CPM.
[...] MS that made a significant contribution to making the general PC market possible by licensing DOS.
MS sold their OS both to IBM and IBM's clone-making competitors. I'm not so sure I'd count that as a significant contribution to the PC market. In fact, I'd like to think that if MS hadn't sold an OS to the clone makers, DR DOS and other products would have provided more interesting competition.
What's the chance that volunteers will "discover" that the man in the moon is actually Colbert?
> ... strangest repair techniques ever: 'Users were advised to pick the computer up a few inches off the ground and then drop it
Well, that drop technique was what many of us used to use to nail the stiction problem...
Whatdda mean, "not every problem requires a hammer"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Hard_disk_drives
A similar conundrum exists -- where are their tools? Any sufficiently advanced civilization should be able to create self replicating probes. Even without FTL, they should be able to spread to all the stars in the Milky Way in under a half million years.
Of course, even if someone did spread probes, would those probes broadcast in a way we'd hear? If not, even if they aren't "stealthed", how hard would it be for us to build something to detect them? And wouldn't stealthed "hunter" probes overwhelm any "broadcasting" probes?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
Who's to say? Mathematics. Anybody with technology to steal our oceans would have cheaper ways of acquiring salt water.
Without FTL, a similar cost/benefit analysis fails for almost any other resource exploitation we can imagine.
Now, if they're insane or view hunting live aliens as a sport worth the costs (and worth the travel time costs)...
The contest results for "bumper stickers from the future" was in the first issue I read.
Quasars shift red,
Hot stars burn blue,
space is warped,
and so are you!
Senator Proxmire is so dense he absorbs neutrinos!
There were a couple dozen more. Omni reported that they got too many entries for "black holes suck" to include it. And that they'd received a hilarious pun on the seventh planet which wasn't printable but did get a place of honor on the office bulletin board...
Securing the network layer is like securing the highways. A secure highway doesn't stop a robber from driving to your house and stealing from you. The problem isn't the robber's *car*.
As long as criminals and spammers can hijack computers and run botnets there will be spam and phishing sites. As long as users' desktops are vulnerable, they'll be compromised to make phishing sites look good.
Of course, the network layer *does* need to be secure in various ways. Preventing various types of masquerade, preventing attacks on the network itself, etc. But solutions at the end-points seem to be a tougher problem at the moment.
Almost all of our opinions about comments end up relating to the understandability.
For example:
Comments like "this is ugly" are OK. Such comments often highlight areas that might break as the code around them changes. Also ... let's not begrudge the programmer who felt he or she could have done better but decided that it wasn't justified.
Small snippets of code are not usually where comments are most needed. If I really need to totally grok what your (or my old) ten line section of code does, I can work through it if necessary. Comments are much more valuable when they promote understanding of larger pieces of code -- entire modules, functions, class methods, entire classes, etc.
Things get more interesting when you look at an environment of multiple different applications running on multiple servers and interacting. You want to see things like documentation about the expected interfaces and good error/sanity checking and reporting. But that's really a different documentation topic than program comments...
There's always some noise and quite a bit of discussion on this topic for one very simple reason.
There's more than one way to do commenting well.
Heck, for a sample size of *one*, I can say that my commenting varies significantly depending on things like language, size of project, and how hard or obscure the problem domain is.
In the end, commenting has only one goal -- to promote understanding. Usually that means what/how/why the code does what it does.
You'd really want *anyone* to be able to get under your skin?
There are a few defunct projects on sourceforge and, I think, one live effort. I'm writing an emulator, but I haven't released any code yet.
CPUs are trivial. Systems can be hard.
Writing an emulator probably wasn't feasible before the sources were released two years ago. A few people started prior to that, but I can't imagine how.
Multics ran on somewhat complex hardware. In addition to the CPU, there were several other complex components including the system controllers, I/O multiplexors, and front end processors. Some of these were programmable or semi-programmable devices and much of the documentation is missing.
Now that we have compiler listings, assembly listings, a few documents, and a boot tape, the task seems feasible. Digging through the machine code on the boot tape and in the assembly listings partially makes up for the lack of decent documentation on some of the components.
My emulator is far from complete -- and it's almost 18K lines of code. It does read the boot tape and run about 2 million instructions, but crashes before finishing the boot process. The emulator doesn't yet know about disks or support instruction restart etc. There's a lot of work left to do.
I plan on cleaning up a few things and releasing it real soon now.