Excellent post. I'm a Christian - pretty conservative, evangelical, Southern Baptist, blah, blah, blah for whatever that's worth.
My main concern with Global Warming is not that we're actually changing the environment, but that we're being bad stewards of the planet God entrusted us with. By spewing chemicals into the atmosphere and water and ground, killing off lots of plants & animals, we're just being messy, negligent slobs.
For a long time there were relatively few of us on this ball of mud and we didn't have the technology to do much permanent harm. Now we can cover big chunks of ground with chemicals that leech into the rivers & bays killing things & polluting the water for ourselves; we can spew garbage into the air that kills millions of trees - and people.
It's just plain slovenly mismanagement of the resources we've been given.
They do not consider us smart enough to decide what we like or dislike,
Should what the majority "likes" be the basis for all decisions/policies? Perhaps in a pure democracy it should - by definition, but that does not ensure the majority will choose what's "best" for themselves, their children, and the long-term health of the State. The USA is not a pure democracy; it's a representative democracy. I fully expect the Representatives to occasionally make decisions that the majority does not like based on their opinion of what is best for the long term health of the State. A big problem these days (and it's likely been a problem as long as people have been elected) is that representatives do not make the "best" decisions, but decisions that will get themselves re-elected.
I believe Wall Street and corporations are a good analogy for this. One constantly hears about those at the top making decisions to boost short-term profits and personal gain rather than what is good for the long-term, e.g. sacrificing short-term gain to boost reliability or do R&D, whatever.
Totally agree. I don't know why people can't grasp the concept that no matter how much work you do today there will be more to do tomorrow. I hear people all in a tizzy say, "I HAVE to get this done" and I just shake my head. Why? What will happen if you don't? A deadline will slip? They've been slipping for thousands of years. Yours slipping won't bring civilization crashing down. Use this crisis to learn to set realistic deadlines and manage expectations.
Now I'm not advocating being slack or lazy. Put in a full day's work. Work hard. Get things done. But GO HOME! If you can't set borders on your life and personal time, your employer will happily work you 80 hours per week - and you'll still have too much to do, just like when you were only working 50 hours a week.
I think some people just operate in perpetual crisis mode. There's something about the feeling of urgency and immediacy that drives and sustains them. Not me.
FWIW, I'm 41, been a programmer/"software engineer" for going on 20 years, have been at my current position at a large company for 10 years. All my customers praise my performance and results. I deliver solutions that work on time - with very rare extra hours.
I continue to enjoy the software development process: study problem, select solution platform, implement. I'm mostly a Java hack (learned Pascal & C in school), am picking up Groovy & Grails, do a fair bit of XSLT, and am getting more versed in "semantic web" technologies (RDF, OWL, Sesame). Being a coder does mean constant learning, but I'm finding the things I'm learning these days are "higher up the stack" than earlier in my career.
As others have pointed out, the young bucks tend to have fewer obligations outside work (read family), and are more eager to make a name for themselves impressing management. I don't know that there's a way to solve that. I enjoy my job, but it is a job; I have other things to do with my life. If management chooses to discard the institutional knowledge and experience I have, that's their choice.
That was a long rambling response, but it is a subject I am definitely familiar with and interested in.
Traditional (or "everyone's first project"). This one is easy: don't even think about the possibility of maintenance. Hard-code constants, avoid subroutines, use all global variables, use short and non-meaningful variable names. In other words, make it difficult to change any one thing without changing everything.
Sorry, they already lost me. They start out with the assumption that "traditionally" people write bad code. Sorry, but if you're writing code like this you need to go back to school and learn not to. Then come try to get a programming job again.
To make an opening statement of "your code sucks" turns me right off.
Agreed. There were holes in the plot big enough to drive a truck through. Of course, there are always ways to fill in those holes. Like perhaps the refugees are wrong about the ship. Maybe it had people on board (thus atmosphere) but everyone left (abandoned ship in the battle the ship has apparently been in), and the ship just kept going. That event could have been hundreds or thousands of years ago and the ship might not have crashed into a star - yet.
I'm waiting for the episode where they reveal the camera balls are really "drones", i.e. super-powerful explosive weapons. As with Atlantis, they pulled the old "the ship is ginormous" so they can conveniently find anything they need later on.
The first few episodes should focus on getting a sustainable living environment going - air, water, food, sanitation.
I'm not excited about the whole passive-aggressive, dysfunctional group dynamic. But with such a small pool to pull from, they have to generate conflict somewhere.
As others have said, I'll watch it because there's not much other Sci-Fi around. It'd be nice to see them take a bit of a "hard" sci-fi angle, but I won't hold my breath.
Are they just completing a reactor that was designed and started over 30 years ago? Or are they incorporating modern designs, techniques, & technologies?
Another vote for the Apple aluminum keyboard. I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I do. But after borrowing my officemate's for a few days I bought my own and one for home.
Here's a different idea: Try turning the GH Tunes store into iTunes for Guitar Hero. And turn the Guitar Hero engine and tools into the Unreal Engine of rhythm games.
Let third party developers produce full-quality songs and let them sell them on GH Tunes. (For a price of course.)
Activision can then focus on making the Guitar Hero engine and instruments better, and release first party titles - like Aerosmith, AC/DC, & Metallica - but also benefit from others making less blockbuster games - see Guitar Praise http://www.guitarpraise.com/. That would solidify Activision's peripherals as the industry standard, their tools and environment as standard, and allow them to reap profits from selling the tools and licensing fees from third-party games.
For what it's worth, I've had less fun with Guitar Hero: WT than Rock Band Wii
How so? I've only played RB briefly on the 360, and now have GH:WT. To me, they are largely the same - at least in song playing gameplay.
I haven't bothered with the character editor, buying "stuff" and most of the other peripheral elements. I did spend some time in the Mii freestyle area and found that pretty fun.
We can only hope we'll actually know tomorrow. Another Florida hanging chad incident could well be in the cards. And the reports I've heard about recounts being totally inaccurate in FL doesn't give me hope, either.
I suspect there will be LOTS of lawsuits filed by whichever side loses. They will challenge the validity of votes in any district Acorn was active in. They will challenge the electronic machines and the trustworthiness of their results. They will claim voter intimidation and disenfranchisement. And on and on. I think the 2000 election was the first of many drawn out election result proceedings.
that real change is affecting the culture through the Gospel, NOT by trying to make sinners not sin through the law.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for saying this. I am SO sick of Christians who believe we should legislate our morality onto those who don't share our convictions.
There are limits to this, and it gets sticky. For example abortion. If a person believes abortion is murder, then they should do what they can to oppose state sanctioning of murder. But when it gets to the point of advocating dress codes on beaches (see FL bans on T-back bikinis), I think Christians have gone off the deep end.
- Jasen.
Re:Expresso S3 review (I've used one)
on
The Gym Arcade
·
· Score: 1
There are a bunch of these at the Y I belong to. They are all networked together and if you ride the same course as someone else, you can see each other on the track. I think they are hooked up to a national network, too, and you can go online to check your records.
Ours have a few different seats/saddles available so you can use a more racing oriented saddle or the big cushy ones.
I totally agree with the above review about the shifting. It is inconvenient and could/should be done much better. From a workout perspective I don't see the point. Some of the courses have WIDE resistance swings and running up and down the shifter to maintain cadence & resistance is not like real riding at all. Also, the bikes do not coast realistically, i.e. you have very little inertia/momentum.
The dragon game is mildly fun. You ride around running into coins which tell you what color of dragon to hit for points. Different colored dragons have different point values. There are also multipliers and other bonus goodies to pick up.
They are definitely a step in the right direction, but they could use some refinement.
In my area (Virginia Beach, VA), the cheapy boxes are a rental only - no purchase option, at least over the phone. Maybe there is a special deal if you go to a service center, but not that I know of.
And the fee is $5/mo for the cheapy boxes.
I'd also love the option of buying a box. I hope this suit goes the way it went with Ma Bell and telephones.
Perhaps you haven't read Revelation recently. There are a number of environmental catastrophes listed there, most of which are part of the global warming doomsday scenario.
I truly believe when the time comes, Christians will be running around saying, "Look! Right here the Bible said this was going to happen! Repent!" And "the World" will be all, "No, no. This is just a result of the build-up of blahbitty-blah. There is no God."
No. Because SproutCore takes the normal JavaScript conventions, tosses them out and replaces them with a bunch of Objective-C conventions - which as the OP mentioned are only useful if you are a hardcore Apple programmer.
IF you are an Objective-C programmer THEN SproutCore gives you a familiar environment to write webapps in. For the rest, it's just another JavaScript framework - and one that does things rather oddly.
IMHO, this is by design. And is one of MS's problems. Vista is designed for PCs of the future - with more RAM, GPU and CPU power than most machines circa 2004 - 2007. I think Vista needs at least 2GB RAM, 2+GHz CPU, and a pretty beefy GPU to be usable; your "standard" machine is about there now.
MS's big mistake was trying to end of life XP while the vast majority of the installed base could not meet those requirements. So you had people buying Vista to try out the new OS, it ran poorly on their under-specced machines, and Vista gets a black eye.
People are starting to check out the other OS offerings and finding that they run fine on their older machines. And in Apple's case 1) OS X degrades nicely and runs pretty good on older hardware and 2) People are having to buy new machines to try it out on, so there isn't as much of the legacy hardware issue.
Vista is also a horrible, designed-by-committee, affront to user interface design. But that is another post.
Government != Federal Government. You have confused ANY government involvement, regulation, whatever, with FEDERAL government regulation.
Ron Paul is for a more Constitutional federal government - that means the feds get their noses out of a lot of places the Constitution doesn't give them permission to be.
Agreed. Ring tones!?!? Sounds like someone finally put enough zeros on the check and Led Zep couldn't resist.
It'd be nice if one of these hold out bands would agree to a CD lossless, 96kHz 24bit or higher resolution distribution. MP3 and other heavily compressed formats may have been great when bandwidth was something that needed to be conserved, but now it is just holding back the quality of digital music.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent post. I'm a Christian - pretty conservative, evangelical, Southern Baptist, blah, blah, blah for whatever that's worth.
My main concern with Global Warming is not that we're actually changing the environment, but that we're being bad stewards of the planet God entrusted us with. By spewing chemicals into the atmosphere and water and ground, killing off lots of plants & animals, we're just being messy, negligent slobs.
For a long time there were relatively few of us on this ball of mud and we didn't have the technology to do much permanent harm. Now we can cover big chunks of ground with chemicals that leech into the rivers & bays killing things & polluting the water for ourselves; we can spew garbage into the air that kills millions of trees - and people.
It's just plain slovenly mismanagement of the resources we've been given.
They do not consider us smart enough to decide what we like or dislike,
Should what the majority "likes" be the basis for all decisions/policies? Perhaps in a pure democracy it should - by definition, but that does not ensure the majority will choose what's "best" for themselves, their children, and the long-term health of the State. The USA is not a pure democracy; it's a representative democracy. I fully expect the Representatives to occasionally make decisions that the majority does not like based on their opinion of what is best for the long term health of the State. A big problem these days (and it's likely been a problem as long as people have been elected) is that representatives do not make the "best" decisions, but decisions that will get themselves re-elected.
I believe Wall Street and corporations are a good analogy for this. One constantly hears about those at the top making decisions to boost short-term profits and personal gain rather than what is good for the long-term, e.g. sacrificing short-term gain to boost reliability or do R&D, whatever.
- Jasen.
Totally agree. I don't know why people can't grasp the concept that no matter how much work you do today there will be more to do tomorrow.
I hear people all in a tizzy say, "I HAVE to get this done" and I just shake my head. Why? What will happen if you don't? A deadline will slip? They've been slipping for thousands of years. Yours slipping won't bring civilization crashing down. Use this crisis to learn to set realistic deadlines and manage expectations.
Now I'm not advocating being slack or lazy. Put in a full day's work. Work hard. Get things done. But GO HOME! If you can't set borders on your life and personal time, your employer will happily work you 80 hours per week - and you'll still have too much to do, just like when you were only working 50 hours a week.
I think some people just operate in perpetual crisis mode. There's something about the feeling of urgency and immediacy that drives and sustains them. Not me.
FWIW, I'm 41, been a programmer/"software engineer" for going on 20 years, have been at my current position at a large company for 10 years. All my customers praise my performance and results. I deliver solutions that work on time - with very rare extra hours.
I continue to enjoy the software development process: study problem, select solution platform, implement. I'm mostly a Java hack (learned Pascal & C in school), am picking up Groovy & Grails, do a fair bit of XSLT, and am getting more versed in "semantic web" technologies (RDF, OWL, Sesame). Being a coder does mean constant learning, but I'm finding the things I'm learning these days are "higher up the stack" than earlier in my career.
As others have pointed out, the young bucks tend to have fewer obligations outside work (read family), and are more eager to make a name for themselves impressing management. I don't know that there's a way to solve that. I enjoy my job, but it is a job; I have other things to do with my life. If management chooses to discard the institutional knowledge and experience I have, that's their choice.
That was a long rambling response, but it is a subject I am definitely familiar with and interested in.
- Jasen.
Study: Doodling Helps You Pay Attention http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1882127,00.html
I prefer to mix doodling & note taking. Much harder to doodle with a laptop.
- Jasen.
Traditional (or "everyone's first project"). This one is easy: don't even think about the possibility of maintenance. Hard-code constants, avoid subroutines, use all global variables, use short and non-meaningful variable names. In other words, make it difficult to change any one thing without changing everything.
Sorry, they already lost me. They start out with the assumption that "traditionally" people write bad code. Sorry, but if you're writing code like this you need to go back to school and learn not to. Then come try to get a programming job again.
To make an opening statement of "your code sucks" turns me right off.
- Jasen.
Agreed. There were holes in the plot big enough to drive a truck through. Of course, there are always ways to fill in those holes. Like perhaps the refugees are wrong about the ship. Maybe it had people on board (thus atmosphere) but everyone left (abandoned ship in the battle the ship has apparently been in), and the ship just kept going. That event could have been hundreds or thousands of years ago and the ship might not have crashed into a star - yet.
I'm waiting for the episode where they reveal the camera balls are really "drones", i.e. super-powerful explosive weapons. As with Atlantis, they pulled the old "the ship is ginormous" so they can conveniently find anything they need later on.
The first few episodes should focus on getting a sustainable living environment going - air, water, food, sanitation.
I'm not excited about the whole passive-aggressive, dysfunctional group dynamic. But with such a small pool to pull from, they have to generate conflict somewhere.
As others have said, I'll watch it because there's not much other Sci-Fi around. It'd be nice to see them take a bit of a "hard" sci-fi angle, but I won't hold my breath.
- Jasen.
Mod parent up. I has no mod points so can't do it myself.
- Jasen.
DNRTFA, but came here to say this.
Are they just completing a reactor that was designed and started over 30 years ago? Or are they incorporating modern designs, techniques, & technologies?
- Jasen.
The main Academy Awards may not be news for nerds, but the Sci-Tech Awards are certainly full of /. fodder.
- Jasen.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I think Congress has known this and been operating on it for a while. We're really starting to see the fruits of this.
Another vote for the Apple aluminum keyboard. I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I do. But after borrowing my officemate's for a few days I bought my own and one for home.
Here's a different idea:
Try turning the GH Tunes store into iTunes for Guitar Hero.
And turn the Guitar Hero engine and tools into the Unreal Engine of rhythm games.
Let third party developers produce full-quality songs and let them sell them on GH Tunes. (For a price of course.)
Activision can then focus on making the Guitar Hero engine and instruments better, and release first party titles - like Aerosmith, AC/DC, & Metallica - but also benefit from others making less blockbuster games - see Guitar Praise http://www.guitarpraise.com/. That would solidify Activision's peripherals as the industry standard, their tools and environment as standard, and allow them to reap profits from selling the tools and licensing fees from third-party games.
Sounds like win-win all around to me.
- Jasen.
For what it's worth, I've had less fun with Guitar Hero: WT than Rock Band Wii
How so? I've only played RB briefly on the 360, and now have GH:WT. To me, they are largely the same - at least in song playing gameplay.
I haven't bothered with the character editor, buying "stuff" and most of the other peripheral elements. I did spend some time in the Mii freestyle area and found that pretty fun.
- Jasen.
We can only hope we'll actually know tomorrow. Another Florida hanging chad incident could well be in the cards. And the reports I've heard about recounts being totally inaccurate in FL doesn't give me hope, either.
I suspect there will be LOTS of lawsuits filed by whichever side loses. They will challenge the validity of votes in any district Acorn was active in. They will challenge the electronic machines and the trustworthiness of their results. They will claim voter intimidation and disenfranchisement. And on and on. I think the 2000 election was the first of many drawn out election result proceedings.
- Jasen.
that real change is affecting the culture through the Gospel, NOT by trying to make sinners not sin through the law.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for saying this. I am SO sick of Christians who believe we should legislate our morality onto those who don't share our convictions.
There are limits to this, and it gets sticky. For example abortion. If a person believes abortion is murder, then they should do what they can to oppose state sanctioning of murder. But when it gets to the point of advocating dress codes on beaches (see FL bans on T-back bikinis), I think Christians have gone off the deep end.
- Jasen.
There are a bunch of these at the Y I belong to. They are all networked together and if you ride the same course as someone else, you can see each other on the track. I think they are hooked up to a national network, too, and you can go online to check your records.
Ours have a few different seats/saddles available so you can use a more racing oriented saddle or the big cushy ones.
I totally agree with the above review about the shifting. It is inconvenient and could/should be done much better. From a workout perspective I don't see the point. Some of the courses have WIDE resistance swings and running up and down the shifter to maintain cadence & resistance is not like real riding at all. Also, the bikes do not coast realistically, i.e. you have very little inertia/momentum.
The dragon game is mildly fun. You ride around running into coins which tell you what color of dragon to hit for points. Different colored dragons have different point values. There are also multipliers and other bonus goodies to pick up.
They are definitely a step in the right direction, but they could use some refinement.
- Jasen.
Earplugs are standard equipment for any concert I go to.
Even my church runs their "contemporary" service - i.e. a band - at over 90 dB, and our high school runs their services at some insane level.
I've never understood the need for such volume.
- Jasen.
Very nice.
In my area (Virginia Beach, VA), the cheapy boxes are a rental only - no purchase option, at least over the phone. Maybe there is a special deal if you go to a service center, but not that I know of.
And the fee is $5/mo for the cheapy boxes.
I'd also love the option of buying a box. I hope this suit goes the way it went with Ma Bell and telephones.
- Jasen.
"God wouldn't let the earth get too hot" crowd.
Perhaps you haven't read Revelation recently. There are a number of environmental catastrophes listed there, most of which are part of the global warming doomsday scenario.
I truly believe when the time comes, Christians will be running around saying, "Look! Right here the Bible said this was going to happen! Repent!" And "the World" will be all, "No, no. This is just a result of the build-up of blahbitty-blah. There is no God."
- Jasen.
No. Because SproutCore takes the normal JavaScript conventions, tosses them out and replaces them with a bunch of Objective-C conventions - which as the OP mentioned are only useful if you are a hardcore Apple programmer.
IF you are an Objective-C programmer THEN SproutCore gives you a familiar environment to write webapps in. For the rest, it's just another JavaScript framework - and one that does things rather oddly.
- Jasen.
IMHO, this is by design. And is one of MS's problems. Vista is designed for PCs of the future - with more RAM, GPU and CPU power than most machines circa 2004 - 2007. I think Vista needs at least 2GB RAM, 2+GHz CPU, and a pretty beefy GPU to be usable; your "standard" machine is about there now.Vista is a resource hog,
MS's big mistake was trying to end of life XP while the vast majority of the installed base could not meet those requirements. So you had people buying Vista to try out the new OS, it ran poorly on their under-specced machines, and Vista gets a black eye.
People are starting to check out the other OS offerings and finding that they run fine on their older machines. And in Apple's case 1) OS X degrades nicely and runs pretty good on older hardware and 2) People are having to buy new machines to try it out on, so there isn't as much of the legacy hardware issue.
Vista is also a horrible, designed-by-committee, affront to user interface design. But that is another post.
- Jasen.
Like this guy?
- Jasen.
Government != Federal Government. You have confused ANY government involvement, regulation, whatever, with FEDERAL government regulation.
Ron Paul is for a more Constitutional federal government - that means the feds get their noses out of a lot of places the Constitution doesn't give them permission to be.
- Jasen.
Agreed. Ring tones!?!? Sounds like someone finally put enough zeros on the check and Led Zep couldn't resist.
It'd be nice if one of these hold out bands would agree to a CD lossless, 96kHz 24bit or higher resolution distribution. MP3 and other heavily compressed formats may have been great when bandwidth was something that needed to be conserved, but now it is just holding back the quality of digital music.
- Jasen.