Let us instead praise ESA and the European space scientists for this mission. I agree. It was very misleading to read the article on the NASA page and read the announcement from the JPL. How silly. It is also silly to interpret the one comment tagged on the end of the article by the Slashdot editor as sarcastic. It was clearly meant to praise the geniuses involved in the mission no matter what their national origin... and I happen think the folks that help change the course of human history by advancing our understanding of the universe don't really get their fair due no matter where they come from.
And I'm sure ESA is very grateful for the launch from a NASA shuttle. Okay, you got me. oops. Americans suck. I suck. We all suck and all we can do is invade other countries and take their accomplishments as our own.
You can feel "American pride", but it makes you look stupid when it's misplaced. All sarcasm aside. There were still Americans involved... and as a rule of thumb Americans celebrate drug-dealers that survive drive-by-shootings and then rap about it more. That is truly shameful. Or, should I take it you think that the European Space Agency should take no pride in this either?
Congratulations to all the geniuses involved in this one. Indeed, it was monumental and all those geniuses should have their names go down in history as a matter of American pride.
While developing software I find that a minimum of a dual cores at 2 GHz and a minimum of 4GB of RAM are barely acceptable. How did you survive the first ten years of your career? Beowulf clusters. And, I was working in C on Unix back then.
For the niche market of people who write incessantly and don't want to deal with a tiny pain-inducing keyboard and small screen in order to write everywhere they go, it is a winner. And there will be other niche markets like that, where everything comes together with it and it is a 5 star laptop for those people. For people who don't fit into one of those niches, it won't be a good choice. A very good point. I am a programmer and I like to write a lot. I hate laptops because to use them well you can't put them in your lap. So what's the point? I'd rather have a desk and desktop then thank you. I saw the Air and realized that somebody had seen this as a problem too. I saw the air and saw something that would be either a good tool for writing and browsing or a good wireless dumb terminal to hook up to my real workstation/server while I was lounging on a couch.
As a workstation replacement the Macbook air's specs are laughable. But, it's *not* a workstation replacement for people like me who genuinely use the power of a full-blown Linux Workstation as part of our jobs. It is either a workstation accessory or a portable wireless terminal to hook up to a real computer. If I wanted to use either of these machines to develop software with I'd need to have a VNC or other connection back to a much more powerful machine... but I'm sure these are both fine for writing things like blog entries, slashdot posts, and books about programming.
While developing software I find that a minimum of a dual cores at 2 GHz and a minimum of 4GB of RAM are barely acceptable. I couldn't imagine shoe-horning my typical work load into anything as tiny and slow as a Macbook air or the new laptop from Lenovo.
The thing folks like us need to realize is that we aren't typical users. These things aren't built for us. They are built for your non-hacker types. And, my wife is one of those people and she loves the idea of a Macbook air. It would be worse than useless for me. For her, it's probably a perfect fit since her typical computing tasks require such little processing power and are more communications bound.
Climate change (which is really what I ought to call global warming)
I call it global pwning
And, maybe there's something after mammal... like... nammal. Or a reptile-mammal thingy... like a remmal... in other words mammals aren't the end-all of evolution. Perhaps the gigantic land-squid is.
On the other hand, I think it's fairly obvious that mammals will outlive reptiles. Sorry to any reptiles here at/.
Actually, that's a fairly interesting assumption. What if the world gets a whole lot warmer and that whole "internal body heat" thing becomes more of a burden than a benefit? So a big extinction also crops back the number of species and it turns out that not wasting energy maintaining body heat means you are more efficient. If there isn't much to eat being super efficient might be a bigger benefit than having quick reflexes by wasting calories to keep your muscles warm and ready all the time... in other words global warming is a friend to the exotherm.
A fairer analogy would be dinosaurs vs mammals (mammals win) or reptiles vs mammals (reptiles win). Both still exist. The ones that don't exist lose. Groups dominate (or not) by natural selection and chance. It is rarely because the new dominant group is "superior" to the old and usually because an extinction event eliminates the old dominant group and makes way for the new one. So no real "winners" as that would imply some kind of intrinsic merit where there is none.
The idea that mankind is the "winner" on planet earth should be qualified with "at the moment". Dinosaurs were "the winners" longer than we have been and they eventually failed. seems kind of obvious that the jury is still out on us. There are no winners, at least not in that sense, just survivors. The survivors live and breed and that's it. There is no great prize or contest other than continued existence. If your genes continue to exist or not. The jury is always out, every day, it never ends. The dinosaur's genes are alive and well to day in chickens. Our genes might also be alive and well in 80 million years in some kind of devolved primate-rabbit thingy that is fed upon by giant centipedes*. Or, perhaps the technological singularity that Kurzweil talks about will render all this meat-world natural selection business obsolete.
Point is there are no winners but there are definitely losers in natural selection.
Note: (* that was an H. G. Wells reference from the censored text from "The Time Machine" some copies do not include it as it was too shocking)
This thing looks so cool I might just go out and buy a computer to play it on. I hear you can get on the webbernet and play on the video games with those.
No really. I really might have to buy a windows PC to play the game on... because I don't have one. I only have Linux workstations. I'm not joking... stop laughing...
So just like NTT DoCoMo which takes the first two letters of each word for the abbreviation... Microsoft plus Yahoo Corporation should be MiYaCo... or maybe Yahoo Microsoft Corporation should be YaMiCo!
So, physical tool use in primates is result of a trick of the mind... activating and training certain regions of neurons to perceive the new tool as part of the body... what does it mean that I use a computer which is a mental tool? Does that mean my psyche is extended into my computer? If so, it would explain a great many things...
I feel like I sort of knew this already. It make sense. In a video game I don't think about smashing "A", "B", or "X", "Y" I just think about the action I want to perform and I hit the right keys... after a learning period. Same with touch typing. I just think about characters and they come out of the keyboard. But, I can't think without a computer anymore... or at least if I don't have one I feel like part of my mind has gone missing. Perhaps it's the part that can spell? I mean I've got the firefox spell checker plugin or else this post would be full of badly spelled words.
All the productivity you could want gets lost by working with Java and its bloated, overengineered, god awful API and toy object model that gets forced upon you all the time. Um, Grails works with Groovy not Java. Groovy does Functional Programming stuff like code currying:
def joinTwoWordsWithSymbol = { symbol, first, second -> first + symbol + second } assert joinTwoWordsWithSymbol('#', 'Hello', 'World') == 'Hello#World'
Wait...there are ways to use perl in a non-obfuscated fashion!? yes. comment code. don't use the fancy tricks unless you really, really have to. Ask yourself "I can be clever at this point, but do I really have to be?" In short be humble and use the simplest thing that will work. Then why on Arth would bother using Perl? Take all the fun out of it why don't you?
It's the programmer that creates slow, unreadable code, not the language. I'd like to follow you around for a while is that okay? Do you have a newsletter?
I have only limited exposure to "C++BVB" and no experience in BVB in Perl, Java, Python,... yet. Don't show me, please. Actually it's just plain Bad Coding... or BC... the language is irrelevant. Perhaps Bad Coding is a more universal language than even Engrish.
We could get kids playing games right after birth. Just outfit them with a nifty baby electrode cap that would read their brain-waves allowing them to manipulate colored lights on a screen. This generation of kids would have an intuitive interface with technology no one alive today could imagine.
Heck put the electrodes in their brains while they are developing... connect via blue-tooth... imagine blue-tooth baby monitors that actually monitored the baby's brain! Yes I can envision a baby nursery of the future rigged with bio-feedback devices that would let the baby link up with nursery computers and the baby would learn from infancy how to control machines with their thoughts. It would be like learning to speak a non-verbal language.
Look out the future is here!
Seriously... I've seen the exact same thing happen, even with verbal confirmation from the director that promoted the "not so great" sysadmin to manager.
He had soft skills.
No really. Most IT guys seem to think that technical excellence is what you need to become a manager. It is not. You need these soft skills that aren't taught in tech programs. If you are a really good system administrator then they keep you a system administrator because they need really good system administrators. If you are a pretty good system administrator and you can coach others then you are someone that they can afford to lose as a system administrator transition to a manager.
Personally, I have no desire to go into management.
Slashdot Mirror
everyone involved in this project should have their names recorded on a large bronze plaque in front of the library as a matter of American pride.
By the way, I'm being completely sarcastic right now.
I call it global pwning
And, maybe there's something after mammal... like... nammal. Or a reptile-mammal thingy ... like a remmal... in other words mammals aren't the end-all of evolution. Perhaps the gigantic land-squid is.
Actually, that's a fairly interesting assumption. What if the world gets a whole lot warmer and that whole "internal body heat" thing becomes more of a burden than a benefit? So a big extinction also crops back the number of species and it turns out that not wasting energy maintaining body heat means you are more efficient. If there isn't much to eat being super efficient might be a bigger benefit than having quick reflexes by wasting calories to keep your muscles warm and ready all the time... in other words global warming is a friend to the exotherm.
Just a thought.Point is there are no winners but there are definitely losers in natural selection.
Note: (* that was an H. G. Wells reference from the censored text from "The Time Machine" some copies do not include it as it was too shocking)
This thing looks so cool I might just go out and buy a computer to play it on. I hear you can get on the webbernet and play on the video games with those.
No really. I really might have to buy a windows PC to play the game on... because I don't have one. I only have Linux workstations. I'm not joking... stop laughing...
Does this mean the writers are all posting on Slashdot again?
So just like NTT DoCoMo which takes the first two letters of each word for the abbreviation... Microsoft plus Yahoo Corporation should be MiYaCo ... or maybe Yahoo Microsoft Corporation should be YaMiCo!
I for one... welcome our new yodeling software overlords.
So, physical tool use in primates is result of a trick of the mind... activating and training certain regions of neurons to perceive the new tool as part of the body... what does it mean that I use a computer which is a mental tool? Does that mean my psyche is extended into my computer? If so, it would explain a great many things...
I feel like I sort of knew this already. It make sense. In a video game I don't think about smashing "A", "B", or "X", "Y" I just think about the action I want to perform and I hit the right keys... after a learning period. Same with touch typing. I just think about characters and they come out of the keyboard. But, I can't think without a computer anymore... or at least if I don't have one I feel like part of my mind has gone missing. Perhaps it's the part that can spell? I mean I've got the firefox spell checker plugin or else this post would be full of badly spelled words.
I'm impressed, you whooshed the whooshed whoosher's whoosh of the whooshing whooosher.
We could get kids playing games right after birth. Just outfit them with a nifty baby electrode cap that would read their brain-waves allowing them to manipulate colored lights on a screen. This generation of kids would have an intuitive interface with technology no one alive today could imagine. Heck put the electrodes in their brains while they are developing... connect via blue-tooth... imagine blue-tooth baby monitors that actually monitored the baby's brain! Yes I can envision a baby nursery of the future rigged with bio-feedback devices that would let the baby link up with nursery computers and the baby would learn from infancy how to control machines with their thoughts. It would be like learning to speak a non-verbal language. Look out the future is here!
He had soft skills.
No really. Most IT guys seem to think that technical excellence is what you need to become a manager. It is not. You need these soft skills that aren't taught in tech programs. If you are a really good system administrator then they keep you a system administrator because they need really good system administrators. If you are a pretty good system administrator and you can coach others then you are someone that they can afford to lose as a system administrator transition to a manager.
Personally, I have no desire to go into management.
OMFG... i think I just divided by zero.