I had forgotten about my copy of the Veronica Mars movie until I saw this article.
That triggered a search of old email and sure enough, it was distributed through Flixster/ultraviolet.
Some more digging around and recovering accounts and I got it transferred to Vudu/MoviesAnywhere
This is why I buy movies I care about on disc. Streaming movies can disappear at any moment.
My first job out of grad school in 1981 was with the University of Wisconsin clinical cancer center. We built a DB to track clinical trial data. I was 1/2 the programming staff and we wrote the code in MUMPS running on a special purpose OS that ran on a Data General minicomputer. The base of our code was a DB-like program written by the VA and distributed all over.
The OS was the truly terrible part. The disk was formatted into 1K blocks and these blocks were the closest things to files that it had. The blocks had names and were organized alphabetically. Programs that didn't fit in 1K had to be broken into multiple blocks, executed in a chain alphabetically.
Mumps had some OK features like good string pattern matching and the array like structures were handy. Each array was the equivalent to a DB table and each row a tuple. No query language though.
To effectively use the ridiculous 1K block structure, all reserved words were 1 character and so where all variable names.
A legal statement was
I I W W
So, as others have said, just writable but un-readable. I gave a talk at a MUMPS conference and was one of very few trained programmers there. Most were medical professionals who did some coding.
Some of the people who had worked on this project before me had gone off to form Epic Systems.
I wouldn't want to code in it again, but it was a good job.
I'm no meteorologist but those wind speeds would make this an F4 tornado.
We get tornadoes here in the middle of North America, but they don't last for days.
Good luck to everybody there.
My pacemaker should be replaced in 2-3 years, what should I ask my cardiologist about
the new one to address security concerns?
Are there vendors, models or features I should request?
I was there and the whole day was unpleasant due to the insane crowds drawn by a chance to see Shatner and company.
However, whenever the PA announced the ex-Governor Rod was signing, you could hear thousands of people booing.
I saw people taking pictures, but almost none going up to see him. I doubt he made much money.
I have taught intro programming classes in VB, C, C++, Java, C# and Pascal.
VB is clumsy and it is awkward to say some things. Besides, the.Net version looks too much like C#.
C# and Java are interchangable in this sense. Java wins by portability. But you have to jump a bit into the deep end. I have to explain OO programming almost before discussing variables.
Pascal has too many types.
C and C++ are great languages but it's a bit like teaching intro to wood carving using chainsaws.
I have only looked a little at Python but have a hard time getting by the use of whitespace as syntax.
So I suggest JavaScript (or ECMAScript).
Everybody has the development toolset already on their computer. The console in FireFox is handy for error discovery. Working in a web page is more fun than most IDEs. The basic syntax is the same as C, C++, Java and C# so the skills carry over. Pretty weak on OO programming, though.
Good discussion.
I made one from various building toys
on
Lego Trebuchet
·
· Score: 1
Inspired by Junkyard wars, I built a trebuchet from Legos and Duplos (base and supports) and K'nex (frame and throwing arm, counterweight, etc.) I think there are some bits of Erector set in there too.
There are some pictures here until my ISP yells at me.
It also threw a marble but not nearly so far. Very cool job.
I used to work for a large telecom equipment company. One of my projects was the development of a large scale project tracking system. This is similar in purpose to project management systems except it also kept detailed info on how the project was doing, who was assigned to what and such.
We couldn't use commercial tools due to the scale (1000's of users scattered across the planet) and the fact that we had dozens of variations on the development process to track. The stuff we had built was rather beyond the commercial tools anyway.
But, our 3rd or 4th level management read a book about project management (a novel, really a 250 page advertising brochure) and came to the conclusion that they knew far more about the problem and the solution than did the people who actually did the work.
So they spent millions (several times the cost of the existing system) to buy the advertised system that wasn't designed to work either internationally or with more than 40-50 users. Oh and it didn't do the tracking part or generate the reports people needed.
They went out of there way to exclude the technical experts thay had, mostly because we would disgree with them. After firing one person and trying to fire another, we finally realized our doom and the rest of us transferred to other projects.
We called this phenomenon 'management by magazine'. For some reason, once they got beyond first level management, they stopped thinking critically and started believing everything they read. My final project with the company had much saner management who just stuck to doing management things and left the engineers to do the engineering.
I've never quite understood what value most management added anyway and this just reinforced that. Maybe the problem is that management was promoted from engineering and realized their mistake only after they had lost their engineering skills. **kent
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds a bit like the old Microsoft Courier. I really wanted one of those at the time but it never came to life
I had forgotten about my copy of the Veronica Mars movie until I saw this article. That triggered a search of old email and sure enough, it was distributed through Flixster/ultraviolet. Some more digging around and recovering accounts and I got it transferred to Vudu/MoviesAnywhere This is why I buy movies I care about on disc. Streaming movies can disappear at any moment.
My first job out of grad school in 1981 was with the University of Wisconsin clinical cancer center. We built a DB to track clinical trial data. I was 1/2 the programming staff and we wrote the code in MUMPS running on a special purpose OS that ran on a Data General minicomputer. The base of our code was a DB-like program written by the VA and distributed all over. The OS was the truly terrible part. The disk was formatted into 1K blocks and these blocks were the closest things to files that it had. The blocks had names and were organized alphabetically. Programs that didn't fit in 1K had to be broken into multiple blocks, executed in a chain alphabetically. Mumps had some OK features like good string pattern matching and the array like structures were handy. Each array was the equivalent to a DB table and each row a tuple. No query language though. To effectively use the ridiculous 1K block structure, all reserved words were 1 character and so where all variable names. A legal statement was I I W W So, as others have said, just writable but un-readable. I gave a talk at a MUMPS conference and was one of very few trained programmers there. Most were medical professionals who did some coding. Some of the people who had worked on this project before me had gone off to form Epic Systems. I wouldn't want to code in it again, but it was a good job.
I'm no meteorologist but those wind speeds would make this an F4 tornado. We get tornadoes here in the middle of North America, but they don't last for days. Good luck to everybody there.
My pacemaker should be replaced in 2-3 years, what should I ask my cardiologist about the new one to address security concerns? Are there vendors, models or features I should request?
I was there and the whole day was unpleasant due to the insane crowds drawn by a chance to see Shatner and company. However, whenever the PA announced the ex-Governor Rod was signing, you could hear thousands of people booing. I saw people taking pictures, but almost none going up to see him. I doubt he made much money.
I have taught intro programming classes in VB, C, C++, Java, C# and Pascal. VB is clumsy and it is awkward to say some things. Besides, the .Net version looks too much like C#.
C# and Java are interchangable in this sense. Java wins by portability. But you have to jump a bit into the deep end. I have to explain OO programming almost before discussing variables.
Pascal has too many types.
C and C++ are great languages but it's a bit like teaching intro to wood carving using chainsaws.
I have only looked a little at Python but have a hard time getting by the use of whitespace as syntax.
So I suggest JavaScript (or ECMAScript).
Everybody has the development toolset already on their computer. The console in FireFox is handy for error discovery. Working in a web page is more fun than most IDEs. The basic syntax is the same as C, C++, Java and C# so the skills carry over. Pretty weak on OO programming, though.
Good discussion.
Inspired by Junkyard wars, I built a trebuchet from Legos and Duplos (base and supports) and K'nex (frame and throwing arm, counterweight, etc.) I think there are some bits of Erector set in there too. There are some pictures here until my ISP yells at me. It also threw a marble but not nearly so far. Very cool job.
I used to work for a large telecom equipment company.
One of my projects was the development of a large
scale project tracking system. This is similar in purpose to project management systems except it also
kept detailed info on how the project was doing, who was assigned to what and such.
We couldn't use commercial tools due to the scale
(1000's of users scattered across the planet) and
the fact that we had dozens of variations on the development process to track. The stuff we had built
was rather beyond the commercial tools anyway.
But, our 3rd or 4th level management read a book
about project management (a novel, really a 250
page advertising brochure) and came to the conclusion that they knew far more about the problem and the solution than did the people who
actually did the work.
So they spent millions (several times the cost of the existing system)
to buy the advertised system that wasn't designed to work either internationally or with more than 40-50
users. Oh and it didn't do the tracking part or
generate the reports people needed.
They went out of there way to exclude the technical experts thay had, mostly because we
would disgree with them. After firing one person and trying
to fire another, we finally realized our doom and the rest of us transferred to other projects.
We called this phenomenon 'management by magazine'.
For some reason, once they got beyond first level management, they stopped thinking critically and started believing everything they read.
My final project with the company had much saner management who just stuck to doing management things and left the engineers to do the engineering.
I've never quite understood what value most management added anyway and this just reinforced that. Maybe the problem is that management was promoted from engineering and realized their mistake only after they had lost their engineering skills.
**kent