So Arianna admits the SUV ads were inspired with the guy whining "Can I just use drugs a little bit without funding terrorists?"
Once he have the second ad, this blows the doors open for Letterman, Leno, or SNL to come up with if you do ____ you are helping terrorists -- is seems to have good comic potential now that these adds are so far over the top.
Some time back before my wife and I were married, we ate supper at our church sponsored by the Knights of Columbus. The food was brats and hot dogs.
This friend of a friend from church was telling us what a great guy he was helping the hungry, poor, and homeless in distant lands, and his most recent project was organizing relief for Bosnia. While he was saying all this, my (then girlfriend, now wife) pointed at her plate and indicated she couldn't finish the other half of her hot dog. I already had 2 brats, but I was still a little bit hungry and I scarfed up that half a hot dog.
Anyway, this grossed by friend out, which I thought was funny in light of all what he was saying. I mean part of helping the hungry is like not throwing out food?
On the other hand, eating off someone's plate in public is traditionally a way of signalling that one is in a somewhat intimate relationship. My friend was both a geek-like person and a perhaps somewhat sexually-repressed Catholic-like person, and perhaps this was too much, but maybe what you eat off your girlfriend's plate are fries and not a half-eaten hot dog. But parents routinely eat half-eaten food left behind by children so I don't know what the big deal was about the hot dog, but I thought Mr. Helping the Hungry was making too much fuss.
I suppose you know about Project Apollo and how Canada put a man on the Moon? When they cancelled the Arrow, all the engineers moved to California where they worked on the Apollo CM, and now you know the REST OF THE STORY.
By the way, the thing looks pretty much the same in appearance and performance specs as a U.S. Navy/North American A5 Vigilante, except the Vigi had this central tunnel-bomb bay-fuel storage bay while the Arrow has the engines closer together.
I am just waiting to see Pierce Brosnan crouched down in the back seat, a bunch of guys shooting at him with machine guns as he careens through a hotel garage, and a German-accented female voice nagging him that he won't get the rental deposit back if he keeps this up.
GM is a well spring of all kinds of goofy ideas. Their big boner in the 1970's was that Wankel (rotary) engines would take over, and that rotary engines were so easy to make, their Hydramatic transmission division was going to build them. That classic rust-bomb the Chevy Vega has zero interior room because it had a high driveline tunnel to accomodate a rotary engine, and then they produced it with the famous 30,000 mile durability "look Ma, no cast-iron sleeves" long-stroke aluminum tractor engine. I guess their 90's boner was putting seatbelts into the doort.
Sit in an Impala, Taurus, Camry and what do you see? They have these big honking "A-pillars" on each side of the windshield connecting the frame to the roof. The roof is structurally connected to the frame, which gives those cars such good Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crash test ratings -- the high stiffness also helps with handling (did the reviewer say that the Hy-Wire didn't handle worth anything, that it plowed straight ahead at any speed over 35 MPH?).
GM brags that the Hy-Wire has this dinky 1-foot crush zone on the front of the "skateboard." Go to the IIHS web site and look at their crunched cars -- for the cars rated "Good", the whole freakin front end of the car is a crush zone, and the whole passenger compartment from frame through A-pillars to roof is a safety cage that resists entry of stuff from the crush zone. This skateboard car with "skinnable" superstructure is an engineering joke because yes, people crash into things and you want them to be able to "take the hit."
Besides the safety concern, I would guess that it doesn't handle very well, borne out by the review. There is a reason why cars are build the way they are.
You mean at some point in the future I will have to give up my 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 FPGA-2 processor computer? Where will I ever find anything else that fast?
Before there was C# there was J++, done by the same esteemed language architect from Denmark. After using C#, you should take a step back and install J++ and take a look at it, and you will get a powerful sense of deja vu.
My experience is with illegal Java -- I found that J++, C#, and VB.NET all run at the same speed, and they range to within 10 percent to maybe a factor of 2 off from VC++ when doing signal processing -- mostly multiply-accumulates and no trig.
I believe the problem of optimizing byte-code for numeric work has essentially been solved, and for a byte-code system to turn in poor benchmarks means you have a bad library or a bad JVM or something. There may be reasons to stay with C++ -- templates, pure open-source implementations -- but numeric speed is not one of them unless you are quibbling over the last 10 percent.
Now GUI's and other libraries are another matter. Don't you think something like SWT, tuned for individual platforms, will knock the socks off Swing, generalized for all platforms?
Dane County Airport (MSN) still has the concrete shelters that once housed pairs of F-106's -- they were supposed to greet Russian bombers over Canada with a nuclear-tipped Genie rocket. Northbrook, Illinois was home to the nuclear-armed Nike Hercules. When the National Guard toted nukes -- oooh, that was a scary thought. I don't think those nukes were that small either -- I believe they were in the 10 kiloton range.
An Audi was always out of my price range, but I test-drove a VW Quantum a while back, and my first impression was, gee, these pedals are all offset.
I think it is one of those Dvorak Keyboard things -- the Audi/VW pedal layout was probably for getting faster response on the brakes, all very scientific UI engineering and all, but for us dumb clucks trained on conventional pedals, it turned out to be an easy way to make a new opening in the garage.
Yes, the drivers were at fault, but I think it was a UI issue compared to experience with other cars of where your feet think the gas and brake are. And once you make the wrong connection, you are in a kind of PIO (pilot-induced oscillation or feedback) -- you press to stop, no stop, so you press even more. You can call the victims dumb women drivers, but it is really, really hard not to make a new door in the garage once you connect with the wrong pedal -- your reflexes get the better of you.
Oh, and I am pretty sure that it was a UI issue rather than some mystery bug in the engine controller. I didn't buy that Quantum because I thought that pedal layout would give me a back ache.
While the UK is not adopting the Euro, they will be converting their currency to something called the Canadian Euro. The coins will look about the same, toll clerks on the Alpine pass tunnels will try and palm them off on you for change only they won't work in most vending machines.
As a kid I like that TV show Emergency a lot: the show with those fire department paramedics who went around with well-stocked tackle boxes and who radioed EKG's back to Rampart Hospital.
SCTV, of course, had their own show called Emergency Caterer, where the emergencies were gatherings that ran out of food and the guests collapsed from hunger. The Emergency Caterers showed up with their tackle boxes stocked with snacks, which they stuffed into unconscious party goer's mouths with what looked like oil-can funnels. Coming from an immigrant household where food hospitality was a big deal, trust me, that skit was funny.
Of course 9-11 is an excuse for airlines not to offer more than 90 calories worth of food to anyone paying less than 2 grand for their ticket, so we need Emergency Caterer more than the medical telemetry setup.
Your mention of the Linux and Solaris SWT bindings as separate bindings raises interesting questions about Java and the degree of Java Political Correctness.
AWT/Swing doesn't have or need bindings because 1) they are 100% Java or 2) to the extent that they are not 100% Java and need to JNI down to something, that something is distributed with the Java VM that appears on each machine, so you don't need to distribute any platform specific AWT/Swing bindings with your app.
SWT needs separate bindings for each target platform -- it becomes like wxWindows or Qt in that regard. If you want to distribute an SWT app, you need to distribute those bindings, or tell your users how to install the right binding on their machine. But then you are into a bindings model rather than a true "write once, run everywhere" model.
My remark about J++ may not be completely off the mark. To the extent that C# is in reality J++, and that WFC was transformed to System.Windows.Forms, and to the extent the Mono is going down the bindings road to port System.Windows.Forms (to answer your question, 2002 - 1997 = 5 years to get Linux and Solaris versions of WFC), and to the extent that Miguel gets lambasted for doing what he is doing, why should Eclipse/SWT get a free pass for doing a similar thing with Java?
What the book says about anesthesiologists
on
Complications
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· Score: 2
What I got out of the book is that there has been a total revolution in anesthesiology in the past 10 years, largely the work of an engineer. If only the same thing could be done for the surgeons.
Surgeons do dumb things, and all the surgeons get together in conferences about the dumb things and critique each other in a kind of Quality Circle, and nothing changes -- the advice is "Don't do dumb things." Nothing changes.
This engineer dude looks at how anesthesiologists kill patients. Well, they get the tube down the "wrong throat" -- not much we can do about that, but if we can monitor blood O2 level (see if fingernails are turning blue with a photocell), we can warn of this condition. We can also put a limit on the O2 dial that it gives at least some O2 at minimum; we can standardize the dials to min O2 and max O2 is the same on all machines (so much for all this whining in the Linux world about the need to "customize" every last UI).
Turns out anesthesia is killing only a 10th the patients it did 10 years ago. All from looking at where the fsckups are taking place and standardizing the "user interface" to anesthesia machines. All of the critiquing and peer evals the surgeons are doing is pissing in the wind by comparison.
I guess not many people have looked at J++, but if you have a chance, you will come away with a strong, strong sense of deja vu with regard to Visual Studio.NET.
1) SWT seems like a cool idea, but with its close coupling to Windows (Windows is the farthest along -- the other bindings seem to be "under construction"), how is this different than (gasp, choke, gag) J++?
2) Can someone point me at how to get started in Eclipse? The menu and dialogs seem completely non-standard -- where do I begin with this thing?
My dad's workshop burnt to the ground in 1999 -- I mean a real charred mess. I pulled a 400 MB (yup, a really ancient) IDE Western Digital drive out of the Gateway computer housing, connected it to power and a drive cable, and was able to back everything up to CD-ROM. The drive smells really bad, so I keep it in a sealed plastic bag and don't try to run it, but I was able to get the data off it.
Do you suppose this worked because it was an old, low-density drive?
Being that this is Slashdot, you are going to call me a moron, so I will admit up front, I am a moron. Being the facts, I can't get Eclipse to do much of anything.
I can download JBuilder and be up and building and running their example programs in no time. I downloaded Eclipse, and if I had a spare day or two, I suppose how I could build and run any of their examples. But since I don't have a spare two days to f__k with the thing, as far as I am concerned, it doesn't do anything.
How are you suppose to download and run their examples? After building an example, how do you run it? The IDE Run command brings up a dialog with about 10 fields that I don't know how to fill in. I have never seen such a fussy IDE and I have used 'em all -- Delphi, C++ Builder, Visual everything in plain and.NET.
Their Web site does have instructions on how to use their IDE to run the example programs -- you get these long checklists interspersed with screen shots which don't correspond to the version you have. If the IDE needs 2-page long cheat sheets on how to run an example program, why don't we just use Make files and dispense with the IDE altogether?
I am sure that people are able to be fantastically productive in it, but I think this is one of these IBM-isms where they march to the beat of their own UI drummer and don't care about Files Open opening a file.
Why did the United States together with NATO attack Milosovic? Can't say there is much oil just outside Novi Sad.
The alternatives to war are 1) maintain sanctions that have killed thousands and thousands of children since 1991, 2) remove sanctions and give free reign to a regime to threaten millions with nuclear or germ-war death, including you in Europe, a regime that has a proven track record of willingness to use chemical weapons, 3) hope that "Cowboy Bush's" threats of war will get Iraq to cooperate with UNMOVIC and avoid war.
You all in Europe need Middle Eastern oil more than the U.S. does -- your policy, however, is appeasement.
P. J. O'Rourke talks about working of a newspaper names "Harry" in his hippy days. The name had similar origins, and it probably seemed so profound when enough Cannabis Sativa was smoked.
Calling any kind of non-food product "Apple" for no obvious reason is such a hippy thing, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, and so you are trying to tell me that two groups of hippy business people came up with "Apple" independently? That a hippy like Jobs (he is all business suits nowadays, but try and tell me that Jobs was such a geek he had no connection to the popular culture) never heard of Apple Records.
You may be right, but your tale may be a cover story told by Jobs.
Wasn't Apple Records the original "Apple." The Beatles became important enough to have their own record label (apart from their own stuff, that "Those were the days, my friend" song was the only thing they came out with). I suppose the name "Apple" was this kind of Beatles, perhaps John Lennon thing: never explained but meant to suggest getting back to nature or to first principles as in the apple in the Garden of Eden.
Harry Shearer and Eric Idles "Ruttles" had a record label named "Banana" as documented in "All You Need is Cash." Gosh I wish they should show that satire-special again -- it was such a hoot and one is sure to pick up more of the jokes a second time around.
I am hard pressed that if there wasn't an Apple record label with all of the feel-good associated with the Beatles that Jobs and Woz would have called their computer something else. Why do you suppose Apple Computer got a free ride? Yes, a computer company and a record label (at least at the time) were completely different businesses, but Jobs would be coy to suggest that his Apple had no connection to the Beatles Apple and that he wasn't trying to make a connection in people's minds.
It is 6 one, half dozen the other on source vs binary: automatic source clutters up the source (yeah, yeah, toggle outlining) while Delphi's binary is this mystery meat hidden underneath the sauce.
There is one big advantage to Delphi's binary approach. The interpretation of that binary resource is in the actual widget class itself, so if you knew which methods to override, you can customize how that binary resource is written at design time and read back in when the thing runs. Overriding Delphi's GetChildren and GetChildOwner and you can go to town making widgets containing lists of Designer-accessible widgets.
You can do the same thing in C#/.NET to render configurable collection widgets into code, but it you have to create your own collection classes by overriding gobs of methods and it doesn't do quite what you want, and to customize further you have to get into the code-generation API (ew, gross!).
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Once he have the second ad, this blows the doors open for Letterman, Leno, or SNL to come up with if you do ____ you are helping terrorists -- is seems to have good comic potential now that these adds are so far over the top.
You get 9 GPH and 145 MPH and 55 percent power out of a Warrior? Is this a pick any two? Could you teach me your leaning procedure?
This friend of a friend from church was telling us what a great guy he was helping the hungry, poor, and homeless in distant lands, and his most recent project was organizing relief for Bosnia. While he was saying all this, my (then girlfriend, now wife) pointed at her plate and indicated she couldn't finish the other half of her hot dog. I already had 2 brats, but I was still a little bit hungry and I scarfed up that half a hot dog.
Anyway, this grossed by friend out, which I thought was funny in light of all what he was saying. I mean part of helping the hungry is like not throwing out food?
On the other hand, eating off someone's plate in public is traditionally a way of signalling that one is in a somewhat intimate relationship. My friend was both a geek-like person and a perhaps somewhat sexually-repressed Catholic-like person, and perhaps this was too much, but maybe what you eat off your girlfriend's plate are fries and not a half-eaten hot dog. But parents routinely eat half-eaten food left behind by children so I don't know what the big deal was about the hot dog, but I thought Mr. Helping the Hungry was making too much fuss.
By the way, the thing looks pretty much the same in appearance and performance specs as a U.S. Navy/North American A5 Vigilante, except the Vigi had this central tunnel-bomb bay-fuel storage bay while the Arrow has the engines closer together.
I am just waiting to see Pierce Brosnan crouched down in the back seat, a bunch of guys shooting at him with machine guns as he careens through a hotel garage, and a German-accented female voice nagging him that he won't get the rental deposit back if he keeps this up.
Sit in an Impala, Taurus, Camry and what do you see? They have these big honking "A-pillars" on each side of the windshield connecting the frame to the roof. The roof is structurally connected to the frame, which gives those cars such good Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crash test ratings -- the high stiffness also helps with handling (did the reviewer say that the Hy-Wire didn't handle worth anything, that it plowed straight ahead at any speed over 35 MPH?).
GM brags that the Hy-Wire has this dinky 1-foot crush zone on the front of the "skateboard." Go to the IIHS web site and look at their crunched cars -- for the cars rated "Good", the whole freakin front end of the car is a crush zone, and the whole passenger compartment from frame through A-pillars to roof is a safety cage that resists entry of stuff from the crush zone. This skateboard car with "skinnable" superstructure is an engineering joke because yes, people crash into things and you want them to be able to "take the hit."
Besides the safety concern, I would guess that it doesn't handle very well, borne out by the review. There is a reason why cars are build the way they are.
C# is a lot, lot like Microsoft J++: think of J++ as C# version 0.9.
You mean at some point in the future I will have to give up my 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 FPGA-2 processor computer? Where will I ever find anything else that fast?
Before there was C# there was J++, done by the same esteemed language architect from Denmark. After using C#, you should take a step back and install J++ and take a look at it, and you will get a powerful sense of deja vu.
I believe the problem of optimizing byte-code for numeric work has essentially been solved, and for a byte-code system to turn in poor benchmarks means you have a bad library or a bad JVM or something. There may be reasons to stay with C++ -- templates, pure open-source implementations -- but numeric speed is not one of them unless you are quibbling over the last 10 percent.
Now GUI's and other libraries are another matter. Don't you think something like SWT, tuned for individual platforms, will knock the socks off Swing, generalized for all platforms?
In Soviet Russia, old joke fed up with you! (My apologies, I could not resist.)
Dane County Airport (MSN) still has the concrete shelters that once housed pairs of F-106's -- they were supposed to greet Russian bombers over Canada with a nuclear-tipped Genie rocket. Northbrook, Illinois was home to the nuclear-armed Nike Hercules. When the National Guard toted nukes -- oooh, that was a scary thought. I don't think those nukes were that small either -- I believe they were in the 10 kiloton range.
I think it is one of those Dvorak Keyboard things -- the Audi/VW pedal layout was probably for getting faster response on the brakes, all very scientific UI engineering and all, but for us dumb clucks trained on conventional pedals, it turned out to be an easy way to make a new opening in the garage.
Yes, the drivers were at fault, but I think it was a UI issue compared to experience with other cars of where your feet think the gas and brake are. And once you make the wrong connection, you are in a kind of PIO (pilot-induced oscillation or feedback) -- you press to stop, no stop, so you press even more. You can call the victims dumb women drivers, but it is really, really hard not to make a new door in the garage once you connect with the wrong pedal -- your reflexes get the better of you.
Oh, and I am pretty sure that it was a UI issue rather than some mystery bug in the engine controller. I didn't buy that Quantum because I thought that pedal layout would give me a back ache.
While the UK is not adopting the Euro, they will be converting their currency to something called the Canadian Euro. The coins will look about the same, toll clerks on the Alpine pass tunnels will try and palm them off on you for change only they won't work in most vending machines.
SCTV, of course, had their own show called Emergency Caterer, where the emergencies were gatherings that ran out of food and the guests collapsed from hunger. The Emergency Caterers showed up with their tackle boxes stocked with snacks, which they stuffed into unconscious party goer's mouths with what looked like oil-can funnels. Coming from an immigrant household where food hospitality was a big deal, trust me, that skit was funny.
Of course 9-11 is an excuse for airlines not to offer more than 90 calories worth of food to anyone paying less than 2 grand for their ticket, so we need Emergency Caterer more than the medical telemetry setup.
AWT/Swing doesn't have or need bindings because 1) they are 100% Java or 2) to the extent that they are not 100% Java and need to JNI down to something, that something is distributed with the Java VM that appears on each machine, so you don't need to distribute any platform specific AWT/Swing bindings with your app.
SWT needs separate bindings for each target platform -- it becomes like wxWindows or Qt in that regard. If you want to distribute an SWT app, you need to distribute those bindings, or tell your users how to install the right binding on their machine. But then you are into a bindings model rather than a true "write once, run everywhere" model.
My remark about J++ may not be completely off the mark. To the extent that C# is in reality J++, and that WFC was transformed to System.Windows.Forms, and to the extent the Mono is going down the bindings road to port System.Windows.Forms (to answer your question, 2002 - 1997 = 5 years to get Linux and Solaris versions of WFC), and to the extent that Miguel gets lambasted for doing what he is doing, why should Eclipse/SWT get a free pass for doing a similar thing with Java?
Surgeons do dumb things, and all the surgeons get together in conferences about the dumb things and critique each other in a kind of Quality Circle, and nothing changes -- the advice is "Don't do dumb things." Nothing changes.
This engineer dude looks at how anesthesiologists kill patients. Well, they get the tube down the "wrong throat" -- not much we can do about that, but if we can monitor blood O2 level (see if fingernails are turning blue with a photocell), we can warn of this condition. We can also put a limit on the O2 dial that it gives at least some O2 at minimum; we can standardize the dials to min O2 and max O2 is the same on all machines (so much for all this whining in the Linux world about the need to "customize" every last UI).
Turns out anesthesia is killing only a 10th the patients it did 10 years ago. All from looking at where the fsckups are taking place and standardizing the "user interface" to anesthesia machines. All of the critiquing and peer evals the surgeons are doing is pissing in the wind by comparison.
I guess not many people have looked at J++, but if you have a chance, you will come away with a strong, strong sense of deja vu with regard to Visual Studio .NET.
1) SWT seems like a cool idea, but with its close coupling to Windows (Windows is the farthest along -- the other bindings seem to be "under construction"), how is this different than (gasp, choke, gag) J++? 2) Can someone point me at how to get started in Eclipse? The menu and dialogs seem completely non-standard -- where do I begin with this thing?
Do you suppose this worked because it was an old, low-density drive?
I can download JBuilder and be up and building and running their example programs in no time. I downloaded Eclipse, and if I had a spare day or two, I suppose how I could build and run any of their examples. But since I don't have a spare two days to f__k with the thing, as far as I am concerned, it doesn't do anything.
How are you suppose to download and run their examples? After building an example, how do you run it? The IDE Run command brings up a dialog with about 10 fields that I don't know how to fill in. I have never seen such a fussy IDE and I have used 'em all -- Delphi, C++ Builder, Visual everything in plain and .NET.
Their Web site does have instructions on how to use their IDE to run the example programs -- you get these long checklists interspersed with screen shots which don't correspond to the version you have. If the IDE needs 2-page long cheat sheets on how to run an example program, why don't we just use Make files and dispense with the IDE altogether?
I am sure that people are able to be fantastically productive in it, but I think this is one of these IBM-isms where they march to the beat of their own UI drummer and don't care about Files Open opening a file.
The alternatives to war are 1) maintain sanctions that have killed thousands and thousands of children since 1991, 2) remove sanctions and give free reign to a regime to threaten millions with nuclear or germ-war death, including you in Europe, a regime that has a proven track record of willingness to use chemical weapons, 3) hope that "Cowboy Bush's" threats of war will get Iraq to cooperate with UNMOVIC and avoid war.
You all in Europe need Middle Eastern oil more than the U.S. does -- your policy, however, is appeasement.
You may be right, but your tale may be a cover story told by Jobs.
Harry Shearer and Eric Idles "Ruttles" had a record label named "Banana" as documented in "All You Need is Cash." Gosh I wish they should show that satire-special again -- it was such a hoot and one is sure to pick up more of the jokes a second time around.
I am hard pressed that if there wasn't an Apple record label with all of the feel-good associated with the Beatles that Jobs and Woz would have called their computer something else. Why do you suppose Apple Computer got a free ride? Yes, a computer company and a record label (at least at the time) were completely different businesses, but Jobs would be coy to suggest that his Apple had no connection to the Beatles Apple and that he wasn't trying to make a connection in people's minds.
There is one big advantage to Delphi's binary approach. The interpretation of that binary resource is in the actual widget class itself, so if you knew which methods to override, you can customize how that binary resource is written at design time and read back in when the thing runs. Overriding Delphi's GetChildren and GetChildOwner and you can go to town making widgets containing lists of Designer-accessible widgets.
You can do the same thing in C#/.NET to render configurable collection widgets into code, but it you have to create your own collection classes by overriding gobs of methods and it doesn't do quite what you want, and to customize further you have to get into the code-generation API (ew, gross!).
C# is OK but Delphi rules.