Um, suppose there was a war and this thing dodged some SAMs and return to base with some shrapnel holes from a near miss? Would they write the whole thing off? There has been more than one time in history when a "platform" has come under fire -- the RB-47 incident, the KAL Flight 7 matter where a civilian jet was attacked under the mistaken belief that it was a Cobra Ball or a Rivet Joint, and so on. Or is the assumption that if one of these things is attacked that it ain't coming home so why bother?
So I just had a funny thought in response to your accurate and insightful post. Scientific research is depends on widespread piracy of the "content industry."
There are any number of scientific projects that require acquiring large amounts of audio and/or video data -- think speech research, anything in experimental psychology, many things medical, and so on. Back in the day, this work required really, really expensive studio-grade equipment or "rolling your own" by writing your own drivers for A/D and video capture cards. But our good friends at Sony made that stuff really cheap.
But why is that stuff cheap. As you say, the non-content industry violating use of the Sony gear is.1% of consumer use, and the number of experimental scientists using that gear in their work is.1 percent of.1 percent of that small number.
But the only reason this equipment is cheap and plentiful to the scientists is because of consumer demand -- if the scientists were the only market, the cost would be 10 to 100 fold more for the same gear, as it was back in the day. And the only reason Sony is that low on the cost curve is because of the demand for their recording products to violate the rights of the Content people.
Hence scientific research takes place by ripping off Mickey Mouse.
Another brick in the wall, but maybe that phrase is also under Copyright.
For a while there I thought that maybe to start asking someone who does or says something lame, "Who is the President of the United States? What State (of the Union) are we living in? What did you have for lunch?" was a malicious yet funny put-down, much as the terms "Florida driver" and "I've fallen, and I can't get up!" have become part of the lexicon. But for now, the Mini-Mental is a dark inside-joke, a kind of battlefield humor for those of us who have gone into medical exam rooms with parents or other family members. I had long heard those questions, but I never heard the term "Mini-Mental" until it was used by an elder-care advocate.
So to those of you who have taken offense already, why do I consider the mini-mental to be "funny"? Aging and the memory loss and loss of cognitive ability with the diseases of aging along with the gradual yet complete destruction of a human being, when that human being is first Grandma, and then Ma and then followed by Poppa is not funny. And to reflect that one has inherited the same genes and it won't be funny at all when it happens to you, pal! But it is funny, because sometimes to see the dark humor in a situation is the only coping mechanism we have, especially when it is some kind of slow-motion train wreck over which we have no control.
So what is so funny about the Mini-Mental? For one thing, that test is administered by the people who are supposed to be helping you, but there is very little help they can offer apart from pulling your driver's license by writing to DMV under the authority of their medical certificate and by inducing you into a kind of prison, from the halfway house of an assistant living facility, to the nursing home or perhaps a Memory Unit with locked doors, or maybe even a state-run mental hospital if the disease process gets to the part of your brain affecting social control before it gets to that part taking your ability to get up and walk. So the Mini-Mental is part of the process of social control where Grandma gets evicted from her apartment because the neighbors don't want to have anything to do with her wandering and knocking on their door.
So now that the test is under copyright, does this mean when my wife gives me the stink-eye for doing something stupid, and I start my litany of self-deprecation to deflect the impending criticism by suggesting I am going senile by saying "Who is the President of the United States? What State are we living in? What did you have for lunch" that I have to write some dude a check for $1.23? That my wife and I cannot have our private joke about the horrors my parents went through and with some high likelihood in 20 years here husband will go through? That I will have to pay someone money for reenacting what happened in my family?
As to the dude's who want to collect that money, I have some questions I want to ask you. Who is the President of the United States? What State are we living in? What did you have for lunch . . .
I read "Dark Sun", where it was explained that the success of the first U.S. H-bomb was the result of making as much shrimp and steak as they cared to eat available to the scientists at the test site. One guy ate a little too much shrimp and couldn't sleep and was restless, and he stayed up and figured out something with the test that would make it fail that had been bothering him and fixed the problem.
Isn't hydrazine poisonous? Or am I thinking of the nitrogen tetroxide or nitric acid oxidizer it is used with in bi-propellant mode? Maybe not as dangerous as a plutonium RTG, but I thought that even the hydrazine fumes are a hazard from returning spacecraft (Apollo, Shuttle) that use this kind of rocket fuel.
Or maybe that is the wrong sci-fi metaphor, you were thinking Hitchhiker's Guide? But if I remember, the Star Trek replicator made a cup of tea no problemo, but in the Hitchhiker's universe, making that nice, hot cup of tea blue-screened the ship's computer and got them into a spot of trouble?
The story was that not only did that 39K COM file image (Y'all remember the.EXE/.COM file distinction and if you went with a.COM file it had to shoehorn into 64K or you had to revert to overlays -- ick! -- or other tricks? Y'all remember DOS memory models? Or am I, like, really old?) contain the whole works -- editor, compiler, run-time library -- the story was that it was Yet Another Pascal Compiler Compiled Using Itself.
My suspicion is/was that the RTL (run-time library) was hand-coded in assembly language and from.COM file sizes of stuff compiled with Turbo Pascal 3.0 that RTL ran maybe about 10-12K. That is, the Turbo Pascal image had the hand-coded RTL in the first 12 K of the image and the rest -- editor and Pascal compiler -- were written and compiled in Turbo Pascal and occupied the rest, which was about the size/scale of a simple editor and a Pascal compiler based on the complexity of source codes for those things that were "around." The cool thing, especially on dual floppy disk PCs, was that the 39K was everything, no overlays, no nothing else. The 12K RTL got plopped into the COM file compiled from your source codes.
The thing about it is that yeah, yeah, you had the limitations of Pascal, the Small memory model, 64K data segment, and Borland didn't even get the 8087 math coprocessor support right (inline instead of high-overhead function calls to a math library) until Turbo 4, which wasn't anywhere as kewl as Turbo 3 from the standpoint of compactness. But you could develop useful apps with this thing on a dual-floppy machine.
The other thing about this is the Pascal language. I had a conversation with a dude who was selling some 3rd party library for the Turbo Pascal ecosystem who expressed the view that hate the begin-end, hate the quirky use of semicolon as a statement "separator" instead of 'terminator", hate the bondage-and-discipline aspects (although the Turbo dialect of Pascal solved the fixed-length string problem and gave you enough overrides to the Pascal type safety to allow it to do anything C can), Pascal is the Ur Single-Pass Compiler language. I guess the Arch language of simple parsing at the expense of stupid looking source would be Lisp, but Pascal was close behind in terms of simple syntax and simple compiler implementations. Back in the day before we had Cray Y-MPs on our desk as we effectively do today, that compilation of large programs in the time of a sneeze instead of a long coffee break was a huge, huge productivity booster that made up for whatever people hated about Pascal.
So ol Nicky Wirth was a smart dude when he invented Pascal, and Anders Hejlsberg (Philippe Kahn was just the front man) was also a smart hacker in coming up with Turbo 3, and you have to give the man his propers in hackerdom. For what it is worth, Hejlsberg crossed over to the Dark Side and is credited as the Chief Architect behind the abortive Microsoft Java ecosystem J-somethingoranother from which came the good Visual Studio versions, C#, and all of that.
I was going to post a string of close parens as representing the termination of a Lisp program, but the comment moderation nanny would not let me do that. So much for trying to tell a geek joke around here.
This might be tangential to the parent rant, which I endorse, but . . .
With respect to shorter working hours as the sweet reward for automation and improved productivity, didn't it used to be that loafing was supposed to be one of the rewards of being on top? The stereotype of the doctor taking a day off mid-week to go golfing, of the CEO with a putting practice setup in an expansive office with no visible signs of any work being done on any desktop? The peons had to put in long, long hours, but as you rose in the chain, you delegated all the work and kind of sat back with your feet up on the desk?
It seems this started with Reagan, not with Mr. Reagan himself who was reputed to practice low-impact work practices and delegate all the work to his minions, but with Successful People. The standard seemed to change to "if the underlings are working 12 hours, the boss would work 16 hours to show he was Braveheart of the Business World."
Instead of loafing being the status symbol, the folks on top seemed to go to great lengths to boast of how hard they worked and how many hours they put in. Again, to use the Braveheart metaphor, instead of staying back at the castle, the head dude was supposed to be at the front of the column of soldiers.
I am not saying there is an easy answer to this, but if "most of what gets produced is complete and total garbage", how to we trust any result generated by said PhD student that appears in a journal paper with their advisor's name on it?
In other words, the code may be ugly, and the code may be brittle, but do academics run validation tests?
"unless it is a water-world (what else is liquid or low density in the habitable zone?) with incredibly immense ocean depths"
Um, the home world of Jar-Jar Binks?
Gestures? How about the one of the arm cocked back about to throw a hard object? Danger Will Robinson! People attempting to shop the store after hours!
Years before Design Patterns there was Glenford Myers, Reliable Software Through Composite Design.
Some of the concepts are dated as the concepts of objects have superceded the types of non-object or pre-object modules in Myers' world. But the power of this book is not algorithms, not on using goto or not using goto statement, not on the merits of any particular programming language. It is that if you are to code anything but the most trivial computer program, you are going to have to figure out how to divide it into managable pieces and then have the pieces work together.
The absolute best UI evah is Windows Classic on WindowsXP. Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux) whatever distro they have in the computer labs that apes WindowsXP is my first choice in OS's now that Windows 7 is out. Or is it Windows 8? I cannot tell anymore what the current version of Windows is, so I will call it Windows #.
Windows # is Pre-Born, it is Abomination -- I can't figure out a darned thing on it and I hate it, especially since it is an OS/X wannabe that has this hangup about distinguishing between an active and an inactive application program. Durn trouble is that the computer labs cannot get the Engineering students to use Linux enough that they are switching some of the Linux machines to Windows #. Ugh.
The GUI API in Java is that good with respect to performance, portability, and features that there are native C/C++ programs that use Java Swing instead of Qt/wxWindows/what have you 3rd party native GUI library.
Yep, you read that right, there are native code apps that use the Java GUI for portability. These apps have names like things like "Matlab", "Maple", and "Mathematica."
Don't believe me? Why do you think Matlab has such a long launch time? It is because the GUI Command Windows is a JFrame that has to class load Swing on startup that makes the launch so pokey. It sometimes divulges its "secret identity" by showing the Java coffee cup icon on the Windows Taskbar when this is going on. Don't think Matlab is anything like a 100% Java app. My guess is the most of it is native code written in some semi-portable C/C++ -- they are just using Java for the GUI.
"Here in Madison, WI, where there are a fair number of cyclists, there are still those people that go out of their way to prevent them from riding. "
Like pedestrians . . . (cue snare drum rim shot).
Have you ever tried to cross Randall at Dayton on foot? With the walk sign on? With some fine upstanding citizen on a 15-speed bombing through the red light? Or at that marked crosswalk across University near where Bob's Copy Shop in University used to be? When that walk sign is on, I guess the red light for the cross traffic doesn't apply to cyclists in the bike lane.
Of course, as a pedestrian, you are never of any danger of being hit, with the force of an NFL free safety making a flying tackle, only taking the hit, on cement, without helmet or pads, because the cyclists know how to weave around any pedestrian who dares to enter a crosswalk.
Seriously and all snark aside, I would have a lot more sympathy for the concerns of cyclists if there was a little more respect for people on foot. Is that so anti-green?
I was offered a "deal" on some kind of residential demand metering.
I mean some deal. The off-peak price went down a little, but the on-peak price went up a lot. It is one thing to purchase some kind of switch or Smart Grid interlink so that the dehumidifer only runs at night and that the water heater only runs at night. But the way this deal was structured, I would have to do almost everything -- cook, wash clothes after 11 PM at night to even break even.
If the deal was essentially "revenue neutral" for a common pattern of residential usage and you got a discount for shifting time-of-use, I would have said bring it on. But to raise my electric cost unless I became a total night owl, fuggedaboudit!
Slashdot Mirror
. . . these are not the tools you are looking for.
Um, suppose there was a war and this thing dodged some SAMs and return to base with some shrapnel holes from a near miss? Would they write the whole thing off? There has been more than one time in history when a "platform" has come under fire -- the RB-47 incident, the KAL Flight 7 matter where a civilian jet was attacked under the mistaken belief that it was a Cobra Ball or a Rivet Joint, and so on. Or is the assumption that if one of these things is attacked that it ain't coming home so why bother?
There are any number of scientific projects that require acquiring large amounts of audio and/or video data -- think speech research, anything in experimental psychology, many things medical, and so on. Back in the day, this work required really, really expensive studio-grade equipment or "rolling your own" by writing your own drivers for A/D and video capture cards. But our good friends at Sony made that stuff really cheap.
But why is that stuff cheap. As you say, the non-content industry violating use of the Sony gear is .1% of consumer use, and the number of experimental scientists using that gear in their work is .1 percent of .1 percent of that small number.
But the only reason this equipment is cheap and plentiful to the scientists is because of consumer demand -- if the scientists were the only market, the cost would be 10 to 100 fold more for the same gear, as it was back in the day. And the only reason Sony is that low on the cost curve is because of the demand for their recording products to violate the rights of the Content people.
Hence scientific research takes place by ripping off Mickey Mouse.
For a while there I thought that maybe to start asking someone who does or says something lame, "Who is the President of the United States? What State (of the Union) are we living in? What did you have for lunch?" was a malicious yet funny put-down, much as the terms "Florida driver" and "I've fallen, and I can't get up!" have become part of the lexicon. But for now, the Mini-Mental is a dark inside-joke, a kind of battlefield humor for those of us who have gone into medical exam rooms with parents or other family members. I had long heard those questions, but I never heard the term "Mini-Mental" until it was used by an elder-care advocate.
So to those of you who have taken offense already, why do I consider the mini-mental to be "funny"? Aging and the memory loss and loss of cognitive ability with the diseases of aging along with the gradual yet complete destruction of a human being, when that human being is first Grandma, and then Ma and then followed by Poppa is not funny. And to reflect that one has inherited the same genes and it won't be funny at all when it happens to you, pal! But it is funny, because sometimes to see the dark humor in a situation is the only coping mechanism we have, especially when it is some kind of slow-motion train wreck over which we have no control.
So what is so funny about the Mini-Mental? For one thing, that test is administered by the people who are supposed to be helping you, but there is very little help they can offer apart from pulling your driver's license by writing to DMV under the authority of their medical certificate and by inducing you into a kind of prison, from the halfway house of an assistant living facility, to the nursing home or perhaps a Memory Unit with locked doors, or maybe even a state-run mental hospital if the disease process gets to the part of your brain affecting social control before it gets to that part taking your ability to get up and walk. So the Mini-Mental is part of the process of social control where Grandma gets evicted from her apartment because the neighbors don't want to have anything to do with her wandering and knocking on their door.
So now that the test is under copyright, does this mean when my wife gives me the stink-eye for doing something stupid, and I start my litany of self-deprecation to deflect the impending criticism by suggesting I am going senile by saying "Who is the President of the United States? What State are we living in? What did you have for lunch" that I have to write some dude a check for $1.23? That my wife and I cannot have our private joke about the horrors my parents went through and with some high likelihood in 20 years here husband will go through? That I will have to pay someone money for reenacting what happened in my family?
As to the dude's who want to collect that money, I have some questions I want to ask you. Who is the President of the United States? What State are we living in? What did you have for lunch . . .
I read "Dark Sun", where it was explained that the success of the first U.S. H-bomb was the result of making as much shrimp and steak as they cared to eat available to the scientists at the test site. One guy ate a little too much shrimp and couldn't sleep and was restless, and he stayed up and figured out something with the test that would make it fail that had been bothering him and fixed the problem.
Isn't hydrazine poisonous? Or am I thinking of the nitrogen tetroxide or nitric acid oxidizer it is used with in bi-propellant mode? Maybe not as dangerous as a plutonium RTG, but I thought that even the hydrazine fumes are a hazard from returning spacecraft (Apollo, Shuttle) that use this kind of rocket fuel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIaORknS1Dk
Or maybe that is the wrong sci-fi metaphor, you were thinking Hitchhiker's Guide? But if I remember, the Star Trek replicator made a cup of tea no problemo, but in the Hitchhiker's universe, making that nice, hot cup of tea blue-screened the ship's computer and got them into a spot of trouble?
How do you know the people in Iran aren't "supposed" to download the software, and in so doing propagate another worm?
Mister (says a cowboy to a vegan across and Old West saloon counter), I said, can I buy you a chicken leg!
My suspicion is/was that the RTL (run-time library) was hand-coded in assembly language and from .COM file sizes of stuff compiled with Turbo Pascal 3.0 that RTL ran maybe about 10-12K. That is, the Turbo Pascal image had the hand-coded RTL in the first 12 K of the image and the rest -- editor and Pascal compiler -- were written and compiled in Turbo Pascal and occupied the rest, which was about the size/scale of a simple editor and a Pascal compiler based on the complexity of source codes for those things that were "around." The cool thing, especially on dual floppy disk PCs, was that the 39K was everything, no overlays, no nothing else. The 12K RTL got plopped into the COM file compiled from your source codes.
The thing about it is that yeah, yeah, you had the limitations of Pascal, the Small memory model, 64K data segment, and Borland didn't even get the 8087 math coprocessor support right (inline instead of high-overhead function calls to a math library) until Turbo 4, which wasn't anywhere as kewl as Turbo 3 from the standpoint of compactness. But you could develop useful apps with this thing on a dual-floppy machine.
The other thing about this is the Pascal language. I had a conversation with a dude who was selling some 3rd party library for the Turbo Pascal ecosystem who expressed the view that hate the begin-end, hate the quirky use of semicolon as a statement "separator" instead of 'terminator", hate the bondage-and-discipline aspects (although the Turbo dialect of Pascal solved the fixed-length string problem and gave you enough overrides to the Pascal type safety to allow it to do anything C can), Pascal is the Ur Single-Pass Compiler language. I guess the Arch language of simple parsing at the expense of stupid looking source would be Lisp, but Pascal was close behind in terms of simple syntax and simple compiler implementations. Back in the day before we had Cray Y-MPs on our desk as we effectively do today, that compilation of large programs in the time of a sneeze instead of a long coffee break was a huge, huge productivity booster that made up for whatever people hated about Pascal.
So ol Nicky Wirth was a smart dude when he invented Pascal, and Anders Hejlsberg (Philippe Kahn was just the front man) was also a smart hacker in coming up with Turbo 3, and you have to give the man his propers in hackerdom. For what it is worth, Hejlsberg crossed over to the Dark Side and is credited as the Chief Architect behind the abortive Microsoft Java ecosystem J-somethingoranother from which came the good Visual Studio versions, C#, and all of that.
I was going to post a string of close parens as representing the termination of a Lisp program, but the comment moderation nanny would not let me do that. So much for trying to tell a geek joke around here.
Um, maybe the reconstructed satellite will want to mind meld with a bald Asian sex goddess?
Didn't he have a spirit vision after eating chili sauce made especially for his cast-iron palate?
developers, developers, developers!
With respect to shorter working hours as the sweet reward for automation and improved productivity, didn't it used to be that loafing was supposed to be one of the rewards of being on top? The stereotype of the doctor taking a day off mid-week to go golfing, of the CEO with a putting practice setup in an expansive office with no visible signs of any work being done on any desktop? The peons had to put in long, long hours, but as you rose in the chain, you delegated all the work and kind of sat back with your feet up on the desk?
It seems this started with Reagan, not with Mr. Reagan himself who was reputed to practice low-impact work practices and delegate all the work to his minions, but with Successful People. The standard seemed to change to "if the underlings are working 12 hours, the boss would work 16 hours to show he was Braveheart of the Business World."
Instead of loafing being the status symbol, the folks on top seemed to go to great lengths to boast of how hard they worked and how many hours they put in. Again, to use the Braveheart metaphor, instead of staying back at the castle, the head dude was supposed to be at the front of the column of soldiers.
What changed?
In other words, the code may be ugly, and the code may be brittle, but do academics run validation tests?
So, which step is "Profit!"
"unless it is a water-world (what else is liquid or low density in the habitable zone?) with incredibly immense ocean depths" Um, the home world of Jar-Jar Binks?
Gestures? How about the one of the arm cocked back about to throw a hard object? Danger Will Robinson! People attempting to shop the store after hours!
Some of the concepts are dated as the concepts of objects have superceded the types of non-object or pre-object modules in Myers' world. But the power of this book is not algorithms, not on using goto or not using goto statement, not on the merits of any particular programming language. It is that if you are to code anything but the most trivial computer program, you are going to have to figure out how to divide it into managable pieces and then have the pieces work together.
Windows # is Pre-Born, it is Abomination -- I can't figure out a darned thing on it and I hate it, especially since it is an OS/X wannabe that has this hangup about distinguishing between an active and an inactive application program. Durn trouble is that the computer labs cannot get the Engineering students to use Linux enough that they are switching some of the Linux machines to Windows #. Ugh.
Yep, you read that right, there are native code apps that use the Java GUI for portability. These apps have names like things like "Matlab", "Maple", and "Mathematica."
Don't believe me? Why do you think Matlab has such a long launch time? It is because the GUI Command Windows is a JFrame that has to class load Swing on startup that makes the launch so pokey. It sometimes divulges its "secret identity" by showing the Java coffee cup icon on the Windows Taskbar when this is going on. Don't think Matlab is anything like a 100% Java app. My guess is the most of it is native code written in some semi-portable C/C++ -- they are just using Java for the GUI.
Like pedestrians . . . (cue snare drum rim shot).
Have you ever tried to cross Randall at Dayton on foot? With the walk sign on? With some fine upstanding citizen on a 15-speed bombing through the red light? Or at that marked crosswalk across University near where Bob's Copy Shop in University used to be? When that walk sign is on, I guess the red light for the cross traffic doesn't apply to cyclists in the bike lane.
Of course, as a pedestrian, you are never of any danger of being hit, with the force of an NFL free safety making a flying tackle, only taking the hit, on cement, without helmet or pads, because the cyclists know how to weave around any pedestrian who dares to enter a crosswalk.
Seriously and all snark aside, I would have a lot more sympathy for the concerns of cyclists if there was a little more respect for people on foot. Is that so anti-green?
I was offered a "deal" on some kind of residential demand metering.
I mean some deal. The off-peak price went down a little, but the on-peak price went up a lot. It is one thing to purchase some kind of switch or Smart Grid interlink so that the dehumidifer only runs at night and that the water heater only runs at night. But the way this deal was structured, I would have to do almost everything -- cook, wash clothes after 11 PM at night to even break even.
If the deal was essentially "revenue neutral" for a common pattern of residential usage and you got a discount for shifting time-of-use, I would have said bring it on. But to raise my electric cost unless I became a total night owl, fuggedaboudit!