If the cat is really, really dead, there will be mould on the fur [I'm assuming that the box isn't very airtight], so analysis of the reflected spectrum from the weak quantumy torch [to use the precise technical term] should pick that up.
Oh yes, exactly, had this from a motorbike this week, bad scare AND I [like the [some of] drivers] signal and use road-position to signal 'intention'. Best reason to be out front on the reserved bit at junctions.
Yes, agree and plus cyclists that 'undertake' into the blind spot of large vehicles especially when there are railings on the pedestrian side, that's a good way to be crushed.
I live near the infamous Bow/Stratford roundabout and, frankly, I usually get off and walk it, it's the poorly designed junction 'best of breed'.
I ride a bike in London, don't own a car and am in my 60s, to declare interest. I don't wear a helmet and am unwilling to do so.
The arguments that I citing in the heading are summarised here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Social_Cost that is, neither car nor bike is particularly 'wrong' about any of this. The best thing [that we don't really have in London] is safe bike lanes.
However there's also more economics that probably shows that safety features make activities more unsafe by making the operators more reckless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Peltzman the younger bikers who run lights seem to prove this.
Finally I like to appear as a soft, helmetless pink squishy thing with white hair, I suspect these signals make motorists more careful around me. But, for certain, the debate tends to be emotion rather than reason and statistics.
It's uncool to self-promote but I'm old [therefore uncool anyway] but that's exactly what I've done for every iteration of http://sourceforge.net/projects/cclite/ which is alternative currency and LETS software.
A few remarks about this:
1. I did tech writing for a computer manufacturer in the 1980s, so I had some previous experience, it's harder and more labour intensive than it looks.
2. If you have the manual, you have to update it for releases, otherwise it's getting bit-rot
3. Give it to someone else [preferably not deeply in your project] to read through
4. Give it to someone who is second-language English if the manual is in English [probably the best choice]
5. Give it to someone else to edit, if possible, my ex was a newspaper sub-editor
6. Read a grammar and style manual once anyway, Elements of Style and trawl through this: http://technicalwritingworld.com/forum/topics/list-of-books-every-technical
7. Plan the manual [by making a table of contents, for example] before you write it and use the heading hiearchy to give you a 'house style'
I can probably think of more, it's actually creative and fun, but it's not an easy thing to do well [and I'm OK but not the 'best of the best']. Like code the more you, the better it gets to be. Incidentally I spent a while with A5 so I could publish on Lulu as paperback size, but I've gone back to A4 currently, that's 'another' choice.
People do say 'hey there's a manual!' from time to time. Reward enough.
I used to spend quite a lot of time worrying that I'd go 250 million light years north and it would be quite different. Now that I know this I'm much happier to go.
Yes agree, I've been using for about 5 years, mainly Ubuntu, now Mint, there's nothing much wrong. As semi-retired I do some voluntary work and recently a kid said to me 'I need Powerpoint', so I said 'we haven't got that but we have something that does the same thing'. So some of this is branding, perception the fact that all the courses and certifications are Microsoft etc. etc. It's not that the Linux desktop is particularly defective of itself.
I'm from the UK and we've tried with a couple of pretty successful petitions to have 'none of the above' put on the list of choices. Trouble is, they're scared to death of it because it would win nearly every time. Then we could spend a pleasant five years, moron-free, building small alternative structures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-voting
Ray Nelson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Nelson wrote Eight O'Clock in the Morning which became the wonderful John Carpenter film: They Live. But, he also co-wrote the first P.K. Dick book I ever read [and which would make a fantastic shoot-em-up big-budget film] in the 1960s, The Ganymede Takeover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ganymede_Takeover that was our first introduction to Dick, autonomic darts, robots that own human beings, the rather ridiculous Vugs etc. etc.
I'm surprised no-one has said that already. Maybe with AI in the cloud 'authorised' to do 'stuff', it's a lot less like a geeky joke too. Tinfoil hat please.
For me, the real dangers with smart meters, are coupled, big-data style data collection followed by well-targeted demand pricing. Remember the 'concept' Coca-Cola machine that made drinks more expensive when it was hotter?
Also, and I made a submission in the UK about this, I'd like the raw data stream to be available on the 'consumer' side rather than patronising LCDs with smiley and frowny faces, for example. The UK suppliers currently seem to believe that this is 'their' data exclusively, because, of course, as above, it's very valuable.
I'm pretty unconvinced that the RF, for example, is worse that all the other techno-**** that we have around us, already.
Given the news about Barclays today: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18622264 perhaps we should block all the banking sites too...and the arms dealers. Oh wait, they have friends in [what we laughingly call] our government don't they?
Ha! I'm 61 still programming, having demoted myself back to freelance coding and I'll come and work for you. Just joking, I get plenty of work, for the reasons in your last paragraph, I turn up at the right time each day and get on with it. Also, I've seen plenty of stuff to have fairly good intuitions about what's going to be problematic before we're three months in.
As for the subject of the post, do these HR/cool-corporate trends never end? We're through the bean-bag and table football now, I guess. So, my suggestion for the next cool thing is piggy back races in a room partially filled with jello [that's jelly to us, I'm a Brit] whilst yodelling something appropriate from Britney's back catalogue. Now, there's a test of stamina, multitasking and musical talent.
Yes, as an EU 'citizen' and someone who worked for the EEC for about ten years [as a consultant, to my shame] I agree with this. The apparatus of Brussels is divorced from the wishes of the great unwashed [us], non-transparent, mediocre, subject to continual lobbying [Axa, Microsoft, Monsanto], undemocratic [the votes 'for' the Euro were exceptionally thin, even in France, had to be 'done again' in Ireland] and unresponsive.
Sanity is a relative thing, it's saner than Gadaffi's Libya and probably saner than the worst of corporate America, but not healthy in many other ways.
I've been using Perl on small and big projects [both my own and commercial] since about 1994 and am very aware of its defects, terse and sometimes confusing syntax, especially 'things that work but somewhat unexpectedly', weak typing unless you add module magic etc. etc.
However, it has always felt incredibly intuitive and efficient, because, I suspect, that a linguistics person rather than a hard-IT construct-elegance person is behind its design. That and the fact that you can find a library for anything you want on CPAN, a good thing and a bad thing means that it remains my language of choice.
Natural languages are messy but expressive, intuitive and efficient, with a downside of [for example] some ambiguity, there's no reason not to try this a programming language. As I said in another post, I'm not sure I'd use Perl for avionics though.
>> They will not last forever. It would be very costly to buy something that would last twice as long.
Depends on how one looks at 'costly', just as money or as energy, non-renewal materials, time to re-manufacture etc. etc. Our money-only value system is part of what hurts us at the moment.
It had expansion slots! Oh, how I loved that idea. Something that PC copied and improved on and that we are heading towards again with Arduino shields etc.
My gut feeling [and I'm a greenie too] is that we need to modularise all our electronics so that we are not constantly throwing and recycling large hunks of kit. I'm aware that the structure and economics of the industry would have to change. But, after all, I'm from the post-war where things got mended and there were whole industrial 'ecologies' that did that.
About the only product that really has that now is the bicycle, you can replace nearly every bit of it. After you have done so, is it the same bicycle though? One needs to ask Heraclitus: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/heraclitus107157.html sorry, I'm beginning to ramble now...
I had a similar thing in my mid 40s. I'd worked in computing all my life, had a science degree but felt that I lacked structure in my knowledge and therefore lacked confidence in many fairly areas of judgement. One example, I didn't really know how to normailse database structures, although I knew most of the arguments for and against.
I ended up doing an MSc for Commerce and Industry at the Open University, since I'm from the UK. There were a lot of foundation modules to do, project management, the databases, communications [now pretty outdated, modems and Erlang calculations] etc. and an MSc thesis.
It improved my professional confidence and helped me along. I mainly work freelance, so I don't have a lot of conventional career progression anyway. Two other important features, I didn't stop work so it took a while [and was hard] and I really enjoyed it, a key thing, for something like this done part time.
So if Business Informatics is anything like that, go for it and enjoy!
First to declare interest, I'm a 61 year old Perl person, although, in my mid 40s I did an MSc project using Java and still 'do' a little Java.
That said, one of the things I love about the open source landscape is being able to try new languages without spending [even the modest amounts, in the 'old' days for the fairly awesome Borland compilers] cash. A big public thank-you to all open source interpreter and compiler maintainers.
There seems to be a specific objective in the OP, so I would say short list according to the needs of the project. I love Perl but probably wouldn't use it for avionics, for example. I hate Java but would probably use it to 'finish' something that was already 85% Java, ugly to introduce another language into the architecture. I wouldn't use COBOL to write a small footprint real-time operating system. I think you see what I mean.
I live near the proposed site on a council estate [that's a 'project' for US folks]. The missiles are going onto the roof of a yuppie-style gated community [a bad habit that we seem to have imported from the US, incidentally]. So, at least, they can point the missiles downwards and use them on the feckless poor who can be troublesome at any time. In main ha,ha it's this class of people that want to be protected from absolutely everything, they've got their wish.
More seriously, no-one asked us about the Olympics, no-one I know wants them and they're just a huge taxpayer funded sponsorship of some of the worst companies in the world. Last thing, we've actually lost viable playing fields [you know, like, for 'sport' played by 'people'] to Olympic car parks. Bah!
Actually reading through the BBC story, I feel it's yet another example of the BBC's declining grasp of anything technical. Long term capital management called into question Black-Scholes and demonstrated extreme events in markets, sure. But the elements of the recent crash were also to do with greed, arrogance, mis-selling [of mortgages that were then securitised in un-auditable and therefore un-priceable mixtures] bad-fatih [banks selling both complex derivatives AND insurance for the failure of these complex derivatives] and a general credit-bubble that distorted asset pricing. Michael Lewis' the Big Short: http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Short-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393072231 is very good on the detail of this.
Then, because the firewalls between speculation and retail banking had been removed, there was a great deal of general contagion and bank to bank movements froze.
However, one can't conclude that all mathematical pricing is wrong from these two separate events. One can reach conclusions regulation, capital adequacy, firewalls etc/ Above all, if the public is well protected and genuine industry is well protected, these idiots [of which I was one once] can do what they like and then suffer the consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
If the cat is really, really dead, there will be mould on the fur [I'm assuming that the box isn't very airtight], so analysis of the reflected spectrum from the weak quantumy torch [to use the precise technical term] should pick that up.
Can I have my Nobel prize now please?
Oh yes, exactly, had this from a motorbike this week, bad scare AND I [like the [some of] drivers] signal and use road-position to signal 'intention'. Best reason to be out front on the reserved bit at junctions.
Yes, agree and plus cyclists that 'undertake' into the blind spot of large vehicles especially when there are railings on the pedestrian side, that's a good way to be crushed.
I live near the infamous Bow/Stratford roundabout and, frankly, I usually get off and walk it, it's the poorly designed junction 'best of breed'.
I ride a bike in London, don't own a car and am in my 60s, to declare interest. I don't wear a helmet and am unwilling to do so.
The arguments that I citing in the heading are summarised here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Social_Cost that is, neither car nor bike is particularly 'wrong' about any of this. The best thing [that we don't really have in London] is safe bike lanes.
However there's also more economics that probably shows that safety features make activities more unsafe by making the operators more reckless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Peltzman the younger bikers who run lights seem to prove this.
Finally I like to appear as a soft, helmetless pink squishy thing with white hair, I suspect these signals make motorists more careful around me. But, for certain, the debate tends to be emotion rather than reason and statistics.
It's uncool to self-promote but I'm old [therefore uncool anyway] but that's exactly what I've done for every iteration of http://sourceforge.net/projects/cclite/ which is alternative currency and LETS software.
A few remarks about this:
1. I did tech writing for a computer manufacturer in the 1980s, so I had some previous experience, it's harder and more labour intensive than it looks.
2. If you have the manual, you have to update it for releases, otherwise it's getting bit-rot
3. Give it to someone else [preferably not deeply in your project] to read through
4. Give it to someone who is second-language English if the manual is in English [probably the best choice]
5. Give it to someone else to edit, if possible, my ex was a newspaper sub-editor
6. Read a grammar and style manual once anyway, Elements of Style and trawl through this: http://technicalwritingworld.com/forum/topics/list-of-books-every-technical
7. Plan the manual [by making a table of contents, for example] before you write it and use the heading hiearchy to give you a 'house style'
I can probably think of more, it's actually creative and fun, but it's not an easy thing to do well [and I'm OK but not the 'best of the best']. Like code the more you, the better it gets to be. Incidentally I spent a while with A5 so I could publish on Lulu as paperback size, but I've gone back to A4 currently, that's 'another' choice.
People do say 'hey there's a manual!' from time to time. Reward enough.
I used to spend quite a lot of time worrying that I'd go 250 million light years north and it would be quite different. Now that I know this I'm much happier to go.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055830/ which is from 1962. It's a terrific film BTW.
Yes agree, I've been using for about 5 years, mainly Ubuntu, now Mint, there's nothing much wrong. As semi-retired I do some voluntary work and recently a kid said to me 'I need Powerpoint', so I said 'we haven't got that but we have something that does the same thing'. So some of this is branding, perception the fact that all the courses and certifications are Microsoft etc. etc. It's not that the Linux desktop is particularly defective of itself.
I'm from the UK and we've tried with a couple of pretty successful petitions to have 'none of the above' put on the list of choices. Trouble is, they're scared to death of it because it would win nearly every time. Then we could spend a pleasant five years, moron-free, building small alternative structures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-voting
Ray Nelson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Nelson wrote Eight O'Clock in the Morning which became the wonderful John Carpenter film: They Live. But, he also co-wrote the first P.K. Dick book I ever read [and which would make a fantastic shoot-em-up big-budget film] in the 1960s, The Ganymede Takeover: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ganymede_Takeover that was our first introduction to Dick, autonomic darts, robots that own human beings, the rather ridiculous Vugs etc. etc.
Actually or anecdotally [you choose] Dimension of Miracles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimension_of_Miracles by Robert Sheckley probably inspired Hitchhiker's Guide. Rober Sheckley, Alfred Bester: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Bester [in my opinion the godfather of cyberpunk, The Demolished Man] and John Sladek: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thomas_Sladek are some of my under-the-radar favourites. Also Thomas Disch who wrote the wonderful and increasingly relevant Camp Concentration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Concentration
I'm surprised no-one has said that already. Maybe with AI in the cloud 'authorised' to do 'stuff', it's a lot less like a geeky joke too. Tinfoil hat please.
It's Hedley: http://www.hark.com/clips/vyrqyrqsbv-thank-you-hedy-its-not-hedy-its-hedley
For me, the real dangers with smart meters, are coupled, big-data style data collection followed by well-targeted demand pricing. Remember the 'concept' Coca-Cola machine that made drinks more expensive when it was hotter?
Also, and I made a submission in the UK about this, I'd like the raw data stream to be available on the 'consumer' side rather than patronising LCDs with smiley and frowny faces, for example. The UK suppliers currently seem to believe that this is 'their' data exclusively, because, of course, as above, it's very valuable.
I'm pretty unconvinced that the RF, for example, is worse that all the other techno-**** that we have around us, already.
Given the news about Barclays today: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18622264 perhaps we should block all the banking sites too...and the arms dealers. Oh wait, they have friends in [what we laughingly call] our government don't they?
Ha! I'm 61 still programming, having demoted myself back to freelance coding and I'll come and work for you. Just joking, I get plenty of work, for the reasons in your last paragraph, I turn up at the right time each day and get on with it. Also, I've seen plenty of stuff to have fairly good intuitions about what's going to be problematic before we're three months in.
As for the subject of the post, do these HR/cool-corporate trends never end? We're through the bean-bag and table football now, I guess. So, my suggestion for the next cool thing is piggy back races in a room partially filled with jello [that's jelly to us, I'm a Brit] whilst yodelling something appropriate from Britney's back catalogue. Now, there's a test of stamina, multitasking and musical talent.
Yes, as an EU 'citizen' and someone who worked for the EEC for about ten years [as a consultant, to my shame] I agree with this. The apparatus of Brussels is divorced from the wishes of the great unwashed [us], non-transparent, mediocre, subject to continual lobbying [Axa, Microsoft, Monsanto], undemocratic [the votes 'for' the Euro were exceptionally thin, even in France, had to be 'done again' in Ireland] and unresponsive.
This book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Democracy-Europe-Larry-Siedentop/dp/0140287930 deals with some of the arguments about drift, neo-liberalism and democratic deficit.
Sanity is a relative thing, it's saner than Gadaffi's Libya and probably saner than the worst of corporate America, but not healthy in many other ways.
I've been using Perl on small and big projects [both my own and commercial] since about 1994 and am very aware of its defects, terse and sometimes confusing syntax, especially 'things that work but somewhat unexpectedly', weak typing unless you add module magic etc. etc.
However, it has always felt incredibly intuitive and efficient, because, I suspect, that a linguistics person rather than a hard-IT construct-elegance person is behind its design. That and the fact that you can find a library for anything you want on CPAN, a good thing and a bad thing means that it remains my language of choice.
Natural languages are messy but expressive, intuitive and efficient, with a downside of [for example] some ambiguity, there's no reason not to try this a programming language. As I said in another post, I'm not sure I'd use Perl for avionics though.
>> They will not last forever. It would be very costly to buy something that would last twice as long.
Depends on how one looks at 'costly', just as money or as energy, non-renewal materials, time to re-manufacture etc. etc. Our money-only value system is part of what hurts us at the moment.
Good morning America!
It had expansion slots! Oh, how I loved that idea. Something that PC copied and improved on and that we are heading towards again with Arduino shields etc.
My gut feeling [and I'm a greenie too] is that we need to modularise all our electronics so that we are not constantly throwing and recycling large hunks of kit. I'm aware that the structure and economics of the industry would have to change. But, after all, I'm from the post-war where things got mended and there were whole industrial 'ecologies' that did that.
About the only product that really has that now is the bicycle, you can replace nearly every bit of it. After you have done so, is it the same bicycle though? One needs to ask Heraclitus: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/heraclitus107157.html sorry, I'm beginning to ramble now...
I had a similar thing in my mid 40s. I'd worked in computing all my life, had a science degree but felt that I lacked structure in my knowledge and therefore lacked confidence in many fairly areas of judgement. One example, I didn't really know how to normailse database structures, although I knew most of the arguments for and against.
I ended up doing an MSc for Commerce and Industry at the Open University, since I'm from the UK. There were a lot of foundation modules to do, project management, the databases, communications [now pretty outdated, modems and Erlang calculations] etc. and an MSc thesis.
It improved my professional confidence and helped me along. I mainly work freelance, so I don't have a lot of conventional career progression anyway. Two other important features, I didn't stop work so it took a while [and was hard] and I really enjoyed it, a key thing, for something like this done part time.
So if Business Informatics is anything like that, go for it and enjoy!
First to declare interest, I'm a 61 year old Perl person, although, in my mid 40s I did an MSc project using Java and still 'do' a little Java.
That said, one of the things I love about the open source landscape is being able to try new languages without spending [even the modest amounts, in the 'old' days for the fairly awesome Borland compilers] cash. A big public thank-you to all open source interpreter and compiler maintainers.
There seems to be a specific objective in the OP, so I would say short list according to the needs of the project. I love Perl but probably wouldn't use it for avionics, for example. I hate Java but would probably use it to 'finish' something that was already 85% Java, ugly to introduce another language into the architecture. I wouldn't use COBOL to write a small footprint real-time operating system. I think you see what I mean.
Enjoy!
I live near the proposed site on a council estate [that's a 'project' for US folks]. The missiles are going onto the roof of a yuppie-style gated community [a bad habit that we seem to have imported from the US, incidentally]. So, at least, they can point the missiles downwards and use them on the feckless poor who can be troublesome at any time. In main ha,ha it's this class of people that want to be protected from absolutely everything, they've got their wish.
More seriously, no-one asked us about the Olympics, no-one I know wants them and they're just a huge taxpayer funded sponsorship of some of the worst companies in the world. Last thing, we've actually lost viable playing fields [you know, like, for 'sport' played by 'people'] to Olympic car parks. Bah!
Actually reading through the BBC story, I feel it's yet another example of the BBC's declining grasp of anything technical. Long term capital management called into question Black-Scholes and demonstrated extreme events in markets, sure. But the elements of the recent crash were also to do with greed, arrogance, mis-selling [of mortgages that were then securitised in un-auditable and therefore un-priceable mixtures] bad-fatih [banks selling both complex derivatives AND insurance for the failure of these complex derivatives] and a general credit-bubble that distorted asset pricing. Michael Lewis' the Big Short: http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Short-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393072231 is very good on the detail of this.
Then, because the firewalls between speculation and retail banking had been removed, there was a great deal of general contagion and bank to bank movements froze.
However, one can't conclude that all mathematical pricing is wrong from these two separate events. One can reach conclusions regulation, capital adequacy, firewalls etc/ Above all, if the public is well protected and genuine industry is well protected, these idiots [of which I was one once] can do what they like and then suffer the consequences.