There is no such thing as a reliable source of exit polling data in this country, and IMO there shouldn't be. There was a small controversy about this after the last election
Huh? Exit polls told way too much truth. The exit polls said Gore won Florida. According to the voters, Gore won Florida. If the 19,000 fubar butterfly ballots had been counted as the voters intended, you damn near got a landslide.
How about that for a premonition of things to come?
Sure enough, I went to "My eBay" at eBay this morning to look at the auctions I'm in the middle of, and I get a page full of red text -- some(!) of my information is not available.
Sometimes computers make it easy for us to stay poor, sometimes they make it more challenging, but I'm sure that we'll keep finding ways to increase our efficiency one way or the other until we completely run out of money.
Repeatedly over the weekend. I won 4 ebay auctions
and couldn't send the emoola. I hope the stuff comes before my needs change. It sort of acted like it works now.
BTW, PayPal and eBay are part of the same conglomeration -- wonder if eBay is going to have a similar transition?
It was a great (ie better than BASIC) beginner's programming language that ran on CTSS. I think that it originated at Princeton while von Neuman was still there. One version was supplied by a big Fortran program that could support about 50 users. Somebody ought to emulate that bugger on a website.
The guys who did the graphics for Last Starfighter were way ahead of the curve, venture-capitalwise. They managed to round up financing for an $11 million Cray X-MP1 back when that was the first 100 Mips machine, and they placed the first order for one. Los Alamos got the first one delivered, however, because of some silly ideas about producing weapons that are never used being more important than movies. Jeez!
Totally regardless, despite some brilliant successes like 15 minutes of that movie and a bunch of commercials showing running statues with athletes feet, the inside of automobile engines, and minivans driving around on the rings of Saturn, the venture somehow proved unwise capitalwise, and the financiers wound up with a Cray boat anchor. After a few years, it became clear that computer graphics for entertainment should be done on smaller machines.
But the software, hardware, and you-name-it-ware geniuses (staff of Digital Productions, IIRC) who made all that happen were rewarded with lifetime achievement Academy Awards about 10 years ago. I wonder if they'll make any bread on the remake.
These guys built their ant-building and testing system and made their great ants in 3 days! And they didn't see the competition to figure out how to beat it. Three months later some non-winners finally come up with something that can stop them, and that's "already"?
What's a 'session'?
They give me XP at work. Not my idea of a good time.
I reboot XP when I don't understand what's going on, but usually I don't know if XP has failed. It seems to have some problem with degradation of the management of some resource (maybe memory) over very long sessions (a week or more). Then, when the machine gets sluggish and recalcitrant, I reboot. But maybe it's just the network admin spying on my machine or something that I don't even see. Damfino.
In the use of a sock puppet persona on Compuserve about 10+ years ago. He also got thrown off forum after forum. That's the price of being whatever he is.
It became very well-known and used to be on TV all the time because the copyright had been allowed to lapse. Somehow, it's copyright has been unlapsed, and it's locked up again (by Sony IIRC). Could that happen to "This Land is Your Land" too?
Guthrie borrowed the melody from "Little Darling Pal of Mine" for that one. He may have changed it a little, but it's still stealing. "Pretty Boy Floyd" was from a 1920's recording of "Utah Carl", "Jackhammer John" was from "Brown's Ferry Blues", "Grand Coulee Dam" was from "Wabash Cannonball", etc, etc. I'll bet that there's still a copyright on "Little Darling Pal of Mine" or the arrangement (Carter Family) that he cribbed it from.
Sarbanes Oxley makes corporations make sure that the software they use is under control. Microsoft comes up with a plan to let corporations make sure that the software that they use is out of their control. If a company is writing checks or preparing financial statements using Excel (and how many aren't doing that somewhere?), and if anything using Excel is harder to test and verify than a _____ (insert name of any state besides Oregon here) election (because Excel is out on the web and Microsoft can change it whenever they want), everyone is happy.
Congress is happy, because they've mandated that everything is on the up-and-up. Companies are happy because they've passed responsibility for the up-and-up over to Microsoft. And Microsoft is happy because the customers are happy until they have a need to read that license agreement.
And how in the world can anything really critical, like a hospital, emergency service, government, utility infrastructure, or whatever use Office if Office is gonna sprout new behaviors spontaneously as often as Microsoft apps sprout new behaviors?
Will this help diabetics? Does they remove the old retina when they put one of these in? If the meat retina bleeds (as it does in diabetics with retinopathy), and if the blood blocks the view (as it does in diabetics with retinopathy), what good is having a synthetic retina back there? You'd have to have a camera outboard somehwere wired up to the optic nerve, no?
BTW, when your retinas are bleeding, it's because of blood vessel changes caused by the diabetes, and there's a very good chance that the same thing is going on in your kidneys. Retina implant don't help the kidneys, and you can't see for long without kidneys.
Better prospect for diabetics is an implant to monitor blood sugar continuously and administer insulin just like your defunct pancreas is supposed to. The implantable monitors have been approved for human trials by FDA.
How's the performance of wx.Net compared to Windows.Forms? Suppose I want to fill and update a big grid (maybe 10,000 cells); am I going to notice that it happens slower with wx.Net than with Windows.Forms?
System is installed at thousands of customer locations. Several attempts to rewrite have had less than minor success.
Customers pay for maintenance, support, and upgrades, but they are not forced to upgrade and can still get support if they don't upgrade. Thus, small changes are all that most custmers will accept, not anything that requires a huge data conversion or re-training project. Furthermore, because of the limited availability of expertise for such customer support, if a re-written version requiring data conversion or retraining appeared magically next Monday morning, the soonest it could possibly be installed at all of the thousands of customer locations would be around the end of the year, the year being 2015! There is no expeditious way out of the need to maintain the system and test changes to it.
The customers are very happy with the way the system does what it does, but new requirements keep coming along and the maintenance process is somewhat iffy and inefficient, and the difficulties of testing are the number one reason why major improvements are rarely made. A maigic bullet solution to testing and regression testing is just about prerequisite to any big steps toward modernizing the system.
I've had some exposure lately to something where automated testing is so far from imaginable. I wonder if and how anyone could test a system like this automatically:
Inputs Come From: web browser, green screens via curses wrapped by proprietary mumbo, EDI, phone system, email, scanners, tablets to get handwritten input, etc
Outputs go to: web browser, green screens via curses wrapped by proprietary mumbo, EDI, email, phone system, proprietary 3rd-party document storage
Database: Mostly proprietary storage in oddball proprietary data files, some relational DB's
Age of system: Almost 30 years
Number of functions: Enterprise-wide support
of enterprises up to about 1000 users, say 6 departments and six major subsystems
Number of screens: hundreds of major and thousands of minor
System architecture: Pathological. More global connections than Mullah Omar. Fix something here, and something way over there breaks.
It doesn't say who is paying whom for the clicks or where the clicked on links appear or who's the sucker or who's paying the people to click for bucks.
OK. This is the gaff with linux. I installed that bugger six or seven times the last 2 days. WTH is runlevel? How do I set it? Wherezit in the docs???
Linux is as funny as "A Day at the Races". You need a hint book, a code book to decrypt the hint book, a master code book to use the code book, and three jockeys' guides. And then you're still not in the smart money. But I've learned an awful lot from linux. I didn't know that there was anything wrong with me until I tried to use linux.
I've just spent a flippin' holiday trying to get Slackware to boot with a flippin' gui. Keep getting the worthless command line. Any ideas about that?
Note that all those pseudo-gui screens in the slackware (10.0) installer have 2 choices: 'OK' and 'Cancel.' 'Cancel' kills the install and throws you out to the command line. No 'Help' buttons to explain any of this mumbo-jumbo. No 'Back' button if you see that you got where you don't want to be. This is a sub-par intro for anyone coming from an OS that pretends that somebody gives a turd.
Are you getting these packages from the servers of the distribution you are using? You should only download rpms which are specifically built for the linux system you are using. For example, if you are using Mandrake linux 10.0 Official Edition, you should only download packages which are built for Mandrake linux 10.0 Official Edition.
This really kills one of the big advantages of linux -- all the available software, mostly free. I've been trying to get my computer to do midi for several months. It looks like Rosegarden ought to be able to do about the same as Band-in-a-Box does under Windows. But I've had _ZERO_ success. Debian is billed as rock-solid-stable, but it doesn't support new hardware, and installing anything not from debian fails because of dependencies or some such. Remudi and Demudi don't work. CCRMA doesn't work. Mandrake doesn't do very well at sound. Fedora Core 1 may not like my soundcard. Etc, etc.
The problem is that it's a big world. Lots of distros with lots of versions, lots of application software with lots of versions, lots of different user-machine configurations. The chance of a linux beginner finding a helpful soul who can explain how to get correct all the interconnections of a particular combination is just about zero.
OTOH, if you just want to do what the typical typical user does -- word-processing, email, spreadsheets, web-surfing, photo-album stuff, linux looks to be a wonderful improvement over Windows.
Linux certainly isn't as friendly to new users as other operating systems such as MacOS or Windows, but in order to honestly evaluate the distributions, it's important to take into account the communities that surround them. Linux is definitely a different breed of operating system, and should be treated as such.
I've tried to get answers to my beginner's problems setting up linux for sound on comp.os.linux.setup or such, and no help there.
I was working a summer job programming a departmental minicomputer in a large (NYSE) company. As I was tidying up my work on my last day, returning to college the following day, I started a re-org on the hard drive. A few seconds later, it occurred to me that I wanted to do something else, so, I hit the reset switch on the machine's front panel.
Hitting reset in the middle of a re-org is a bad idea. Department lost everything, except that it didn't really lose everything. Everything was still in files, but the files were scrambled. They printed out the contents of each file, figured out what file each fragment belonged to, and typed it all back in.
Fortunately, this hard disk was only a megabyte or so.
If you can put electricity into someone from a distance, you can set the current to stop their heart. They drop dead with a heart attack. No evidence that you did anything to them. Nothing for witnesses to see or hear. No marks, no scars. They're dead and you're gone.
Yes, if you are one of the best poker players on earth and don't mind eight hours per day of hard work in a casino, you can make around $ million/year. But it is very hard work.
You can earn approximately the minimum wage, on average, by playing the cumulative jackpot games in Las Vegas when the jackpots have built up substantially. You can make a ciyoke if hundred thousand per year at sports betting if you are very smart and knowledgeable about sports.
Thorpe, who wrote Beat the Dealer, won a pile of money at roullette in Reno around 1950. He observed the imperfections of the wheels, that some numbers come up more than others, bet accordingly, and did quite well. He got his picture in Time magazine, maybe even on the cover, IDK. The casinos then announced that they were kiboshing the possibility by shuffling wheels around, taking them in and out of service, servicing, waxing, and polishing them frequently to alter their odds, etc.
However, the casinos are really too busy making money to actually do this. They don't move the wheels enough, and there are ways to recognize a friendly wheel in a new spot. There are still some groups covertly making money with the Thorpe technique, although I won't say where. One actually did well enough to be disqualified from roullette at a certain casino.
I knew one of Doyne Farmer's team a few years before the Eudaemonic Pie adventure , when we were in the same class in college. He was part of a team of my classmates that tried the same thing at the Circus Circus casino. There was a balcony overlooking the gambling floor there, and the guys watching the wheel and operating the stopwatches were on the balcony. One pressed his button every time the double zero went past a certain position; the other pressed his button every time the ball went passed the same position. The computer in a van outside did the calculations and sent the results by wireless to the player at the wheel. They never got this to be a big moneymaker, but they got close enough to worry that if they did, they would wind up dead.
Some of the alleged facts in the Bass book struck me as strange or wrong. I believe that he changed things a little to not give away all the details of how the system worked, so that the casinos might not detect further efforts by Farmer's group to win at roullette. IDK if the conclusion of the book, that they quit scared, too, is true.
There's an old story from Monte Carlo about a French schoolteacher (female) who went into the casino one day back in the 1950's. The guy who throws the ball was working his last shift before retiring. The teacher started with around $1,000, made bets on a few single numbers each spin, won 13 times in a half hour, and walked out with around $ million.
After finishing his shift and retiring, the croupier went to a restaurant to celebrate, met the lady, they became romantically involved, married, and retired to the country. No one knows if they knew each other before that day, or if the croupier had honed his skill enough to give the lady a significant advantage if he did know her. No one knows if the numbers she was betting each spin were close to each other on the wheel. It's just one of those 'you never can tell' stories.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Exit polls told way too much truth. The exit polls said Gore won Florida. According to the voters, Gore won Florida. If the 19,000 fubar butterfly ballots had been counted as the voters intended, you damn near got a landslide.
Sure enough, I went to "My eBay" at eBay this morning to look at the auctions I'm in the middle of, and I get a page full of red text -- some(!) of my information is not available.
Sometimes computers make it easy for us to stay poor, sometimes they make it more challenging, but I'm sure that we'll keep finding ways to increase our efficiency one way or the other until we completely run out of money.
BTW, PayPal and eBay are part of the same conglomeration -- wonder if eBay is going to have a similar transition?
It was a great (ie better than BASIC) beginner's programming language that ran on CTSS. I think that it originated at Princeton while von Neuman was still there. One version was supplied by a big Fortran program that could support about 50 users. Somebody ought to emulate that bugger on a website.
Totally regardless, despite some brilliant successes like 15 minutes of that movie and a bunch of commercials showing running statues with athletes feet, the inside of automobile engines, and minivans driving around on the rings of Saturn, the venture somehow proved unwise capitalwise, and the financiers wound up with a Cray boat anchor. After a few years, it became clear that computer graphics for entertainment should be done on smaller machines.
But the software, hardware, and you-name-it-ware geniuses (staff of Digital Productions, IIRC) who made all that happen were rewarded with lifetime achievement Academy Awards about 10 years ago. I wonder if they'll make any bread on the remake.
Dylan language had some strong entries in previous years, and now it's presently absent 100% from the results. What gives there?
These guys built their ant-building and testing system and made their great ants in 3 days! And they didn't see the competition to figure out how to beat it. Three months later some non-winners finally come up with something that can stop them, and that's "already"?
What's a 'session'? They give me XP at work. Not my idea of a good time. I reboot XP when I don't understand what's going on, but usually I don't know if XP has failed. It seems to have some problem with degradation of the management of some resource (maybe memory) over very long sessions (a week or more). Then, when the machine gets sluggish and recalcitrant, I reboot. But maybe it's just the network admin spying on my machine or something that I don't even see. Damfino.
In the use of a sock puppet persona on Compuserve about 10+ years ago. He also got thrown off forum after forum. That's the price of being whatever he is.
It would be a good idea.
It became very well-known and used to be on TV all the time because the copyright had been allowed to lapse. Somehow, it's copyright has been unlapsed, and it's locked up again (by Sony IIRC). Could that happen to "This Land is Your Land" too?
Guthrie borrowed the melody from "Little Darling Pal of Mine" for that one. He may have changed it a little, but it's still stealing. "Pretty Boy Floyd" was from a 1920's recording of "Utah Carl", "Jackhammer John" was from "Brown's Ferry Blues", "Grand Coulee Dam" was from "Wabash Cannonball", etc, etc. I'll bet that there's still a copyright on "Little Darling Pal of Mine" or the arrangement (Carter Family) that he cribbed it from.
Congress is happy, because they've mandated that everything is on the up-and-up. Companies are happy because they've passed responsibility for the up-and-up over to Microsoft. And Microsoft is happy because the customers are happy until they have a need to read that license agreement.
And how in the world can anything really critical, like a hospital, emergency service, government, utility infrastructure, or whatever use Office if Office is gonna sprout new behaviors spontaneously as often as Microsoft apps sprout new behaviors?
BTW, when your retinas are bleeding, it's because of blood vessel changes caused by the diabetes, and there's a very good chance that the same thing is going on in your kidneys. Retina implant don't help the kidneys, and you can't see for long without kidneys.
Better prospect for diabetics is an implant to monitor blood sugar continuously and administer insulin just like your defunct pancreas is supposed to. The implantable monitors have been approved for human trials by FDA.
How's the performance of wx.Net compared to Windows.Forms? Suppose I want to fill and update a big grid (maybe 10,000 cells); am I going to notice that it happens slower with wx.Net than with Windows.Forms?
Customers pay for maintenance, support, and upgrades, but they are not forced to upgrade and can still get support if they don't upgrade. Thus, small changes are all that most custmers will accept, not anything that requires a huge data conversion or re-training project. Furthermore, because of the limited availability of expertise for such customer support, if a re-written version requiring data conversion or retraining appeared magically next Monday morning, the soonest it could possibly be installed at all of the thousands of customer locations would be around the end of the year, the year being 2015! There is no expeditious way out of the need to maintain the system and test changes to it.
The customers are very happy with the way the system does what it does, but new requirements keep coming along and the maintenance process is somewhat iffy and inefficient, and the difficulties of testing are the number one reason why major improvements are rarely made. A maigic bullet solution to testing and regression testing is just about prerequisite to any big steps toward modernizing the system.
What are the best test tools for such a kluge?
What's the silver bullet for such?
It doesn't say who is paying whom for the clicks or where the clicked on links appear or who's the sucker or who's paying the people to click for bucks.
Linux is as funny as "A Day at the Races". You need a hint book, a code book to decrypt the hint book, a master code book to use the code book, and three jockeys' guides. And then you're still not in the smart money. But I've learned an awful lot from linux. I didn't know that there was anything wrong with me until I tried to use linux.
Note that all those pseudo-gui screens in the slackware (10.0) installer have 2 choices: 'OK' and 'Cancel.' 'Cancel' kills the install and throws you out to the command line. No 'Help' buttons to explain any of this mumbo-jumbo. No 'Back' button if you see that you got where you don't want to be. This is a sub-par intro for anyone coming from an OS that pretends that somebody gives a turd.
This really kills one of the big advantages of linux -- all the available software, mostly free. I've been trying to get my computer to do midi for several months. It looks like Rosegarden ought to be able to do about the same as Band-in-a-Box does under Windows. But I've had _ZERO_ success. Debian is billed as rock-solid-stable, but it doesn't support new hardware, and installing anything not from debian fails because of dependencies or some such. Remudi and Demudi don't work. CCRMA doesn't work. Mandrake doesn't do very well at sound. Fedora Core 1 may not like my soundcard. Etc, etc.
The problem is that it's a big world. Lots of distros with lots of versions, lots of application software with lots of versions, lots of different user-machine configurations. The chance of a linux beginner finding a helpful soul who can explain how to get correct all the interconnections of a particular combination is just about zero.
OTOH, if you just want to do what the typical typical user does -- word-processing, email, spreadsheets, web-surfing, photo-album stuff, linux looks to be a wonderful improvement over Windows.
I've tried to get answers to my beginner's problems setting up linux for sound on comp.os.linux.setup or such, and no help there.
Hitting reset in the middle of a re-org is a bad idea. Department lost everything, except that it didn't really lose everything. Everything was still in files, but the files were scrambled. They printed out the contents of each file, figured out what file each fragment belonged to, and typed it all back in.
Fortunately, this hard disk was only a megabyte or so.
If you can put electricity into someone from a distance, you can set the current to stop their heart. They drop dead with a heart attack. No evidence that you did anything to them. Nothing for witnesses to see or hear. No marks, no scars. They're dead and you're gone.
You can earn approximately the minimum wage, on average, by playing the cumulative jackpot games in Las Vegas when the jackpots have built up substantially. You can make a ciyoke if hundred thousand per year at sports betting if you are very smart and knowledgeable about sports.
Thorpe, who wrote Beat the Dealer, won a pile of money at roullette in Reno around 1950. He observed the imperfections of the wheels, that some numbers come up more than others, bet accordingly, and did quite well. He got his picture in Time magazine, maybe even on the cover, IDK. The casinos then announced that they were kiboshing the possibility by shuffling wheels around, taking them in and out of service, servicing, waxing, and polishing them frequently to alter their odds, etc.
However, the casinos are really too busy making money to actually do this. They don't move the wheels enough, and there are ways to recognize a friendly wheel in a new spot. There are still some groups covertly making money with the Thorpe technique, although I won't say where. One actually did well enough to be disqualified from roullette at a certain casino.
I knew one of Doyne Farmer's team a few years before the Eudaemonic Pie adventure , when we were in the same class in college. He was part of a team of my classmates that tried the same thing at the Circus Circus casino. There was a balcony overlooking the gambling floor there, and the guys watching the wheel and operating the stopwatches were on the balcony. One pressed his button every time the double zero went past a certain position; the other pressed his button every time the ball went passed the same position. The computer in a van outside did the calculations and sent the results by wireless to the player at the wheel. They never got this to be a big moneymaker, but they got close enough to worry that if they did, they would wind up dead.
Some of the alleged facts in the Bass book struck me as strange or wrong. I believe that he changed things a little to not give away all the details of how the system worked, so that the casinos might not detect further efforts by Farmer's group to win at roullette. IDK if the conclusion of the book, that they quit scared, too, is true.
After finishing his shift and retiring, the croupier went to a restaurant to celebrate, met the lady, they became romantically involved, married, and retired to the country. No one knows if they knew each other before that day, or if the croupier had honed his skill enough to give the lady a significant advantage if he did know her. No one knows if the numbers she was betting each spin were close to each other on the wheel. It's just one of those 'you never can tell' stories.