Wooden piles have worked in Venice for quite some time - I beleive some of them are heading for a thousand years. (And no, the building in Venice aren't sinking - they were, but they've stopped taking water from the aquifer [why does everyone say "underground" aquifer - where the heck else would it be?] and they've stopped sinking. The lagoon's still rising though, and global warming is yet to show much effect).
I've always found it amazing how, should accidentally challenge someone's "right" to own a big, thirsty car, they always come up some great excuses. And yet, looking at the road, there they are, thousands of them, huge ugly offroad vehicles with shiny paint that have never been near a dirt road, carrying a single fat passenger.
I have a small car that we drive less than 8,000km (thats 5,000 miles to you weird non-metric folk) that consumes a mere 5.5lt per 100km (no idea what that is in hogsheads per league, sorry, but it's 1/2 or 1/3 what big SUVs use). I seem to manage. With a family of 4. So what is their special problem?
I've never driven a large 4WD (SUV). It must be nice perched way up there, I guess. But they handle like trucks, they must be horrible to park, they're really hard to clamber into, they cost a fortune to buy, insure, run, and fuel.
What IS the attraction? (It isn't the off-road capability, virtually none of them ever go there - do people beleive they are safer? They aren't. Is it the view? Maybe. Perhaps it's the "armoured car syndrome").
Grandfather?.. I have a five year old child. Grandfather status does not seem imminent. Ok, I bred late.
Stories of our recent past do seem long ago in a fast moving subject like computing, don't they? Perhaps if we were talking of, oh I don't know, bricklaying, things might not have changed.
But we aren't bricklayers, are we? (Actually I can't believe we don't have house printing machines - what's wrong with us? I reckon a souped up ink jet printer would do a nice job. Cabling and piping would be a pain - and that already takes up a considerable amount of time.. sorry, drifted off).
Grandfather indeed... why if you were here, you young whippersnapper, I'd put you over my knee and give you such a thrashing, that I would.
I guess that'd be it, then. Doesn't ring a bell, though.
Actually, it was amazing. I left universtity in 1976 with an honours degree in Computer Science from Essex Uni. I briefly worked for Plessey UK, building part of the radar system for commercial airlines over SE England, then - aged a mere 22, went to Holland (to make my fortune, I guess, or maybe it was the pot) to work for Holec (in Hattem) leading a software project for the said nuclear reactor monitoring. Quite a lot of responsibility for a little lad, I thought then - and now.
Jah, ik ben Engels. But I don't speak a lot of Dutch, that's for sure. Some, though. I'm always amused by Dutch tourist in Sydney who think they speak a secret toungue...
I don't remember its name ort location, though I think it was up north, as I was working in Zwolle. Cleanest power station I've ever seen.
I do recall, a couple of years leater being mightily nervous to hear its name on the shortwave Dutch news program I was listening (on a small catamaran in the middle of the Atlantic, but that's another story). After listening intently, with my very poor Dutch, I came to the conclusion there was some sort of student protest against nuclear power in general, as opposed to some catastrophic failure that my system had possibly not noticed - or worse, caused..
But I went rather pale. (Pale-er anway - I start off pretty pale. Most unsuited to sunny Sydney where I now live).
Some time back (ok, 1979) I built a system to monitor a Dutch nuclear reactor. It monitored temperatures, rod positions, and so on. Nothing important (cough). There was no suggestion of keeping costs down to save money (and I'm glad).
The system had two colour graphic displays, a printer or two, and 4 operator terminals. It ran a real time, multi tasking operating system (called RSX11).
The main system had 128kb of memory. Yes, 128kb.
Today my dev machine has 2Gb of memory and the 3Ghz processor must - surely - be some thousands of times as fast. So I have 15,000 times as much memory, a processor perhaps 3,000 times as fast (I'm guessing, as figures are hard to pin down). That sounds like 445 million times as much power to me.
And what do we do with all this grunt? Well damn, solitare looks good these days.
So, were the old programmers really, really good? [We were, we were...] Are the new ones really, really bad? [hang on, I'm still at it...] Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?
I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't. I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well. Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.
And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.
I have one of these Toshibas. The fingerprint scan works mostly - but it doesn't work very well if you are cold (maybe it thinks you are dead... how would Spike [a vampire - info for those foolish few who don't follow Buffy] operate one of these?) Also the software for handling the login process is pretty sucky - it's hard to handle the mail server which tends to come up with different names, etc etc. I eventually disabled it for all except the main login, which works well enough to cope with. I have done better than most - who have given in.
On a phone, it could be a pain - but at least it has to do only one thing. Entering a six digit password (as I must on my corporate Blackberry) is *very* painful, though, and a fingerprint scan would defintely be better than that.
Really? It worked for Alf Garnet. Er, and pretty much ever Jew I have ever met...
Making jokes about painful things is the best known way to solve the problem. It forces them out from under dark rocks. It releves some of the pain.
When a racial group starts accepting the racial jokes made about it, and playing them back, is often the time that group comes of age. With luck, the jokes move on to being funny and rather dated. And that is good.
We have certainly seen this in Australia - the jokes about Mediteranean folk - Italian, Greeks, etc - that they have now embraced, have tranformed their acceptance in society. Perhaps it was happening anyway, but it was certainly part of the process.
So if you don't think it's funny, maybe you're part of the problem..? Smile, laugh, and don't be a dickhead.
Now where was I... Ah yes, Borat nice man. You come Kahzikstan and he show you good time. Unless you bad man.
Borat is your friend. I am sixth most famous man from Kazikstan. How come you no like him? I am come to Amerika to find friend and prostitutes to take home with me. You are not friend then you be prostitute?
Borat am still your friend. Come to Kazikstan and you get good welcome party, no?
It seems incredible someone wanting to perform perfectly reasonable activities should turn to Slashdot, of all places, to attempt to get some sort of help. Either someone is having a bit of a joke, or, just possibly, Microsoft has truly lost the plot.
Ok, this is Slashdot. Let's assume MS has lost the plot.
What have they done - and why have they done it?
Well, it would appear they have entirely sold their souls to the content owners (not producers). [Note, this assumes they had souls.. and that souls actually exist.. but let's not get into that]. They have created a computer system so perverted to the content owners' cause it will spend half the power of the hosting computer in checking to make sure no content is inadvertently revealed in some copiable way. To this end, they have an extraordinary scheme of in-computer and on-line checking. They will even disable computers if they believe them to be misbehaving. The merest hint of a possibility will cause quality downgrading...
Not, personally, a direction I wanted to go in. Or Microsoft to go in, actually (like most people, I actually try to use their systems... is it me, or does everyone thing the "new and improved" help systems are damned near useless.. it's just me. Sorry. I digress. I'm sure when I used to hit F1 I would actually get something vaguely useful and vaguely relevant, fairly quickly... nah, surely not).
But the questions is - why? It's possible that someone else sold *their* soul, someone who could put in place laws to force all this to happen. Or it's possible that some sort of deal/deals was/were done so MS would get better content. (Before Apple, maybe? Are they really such a threat?)
Well, you know, we don't have crocodiles in Sydney (just lawyers), and no box jellyfish. I admit we do have a bit of a drought, but it doesn't affect the cities too much.
But tornados... oh boy. Ice storms. Nah, I'll stay here. England was bad enough for me to leave.. tornados - I'm outa there.
Oh, and we don't have poison ivy, nor poison oak. Not even stinging nettles.
Maybe this could work. A small fee on storage devices, with the proceeds going to... ah, now there's the rub.
To whom?
The performer? The writer? The producer? The person who "owns" the copyright? The record company?
Britain used to do this cassette tapes, I think.
Bah! As far as I can see, the whole record industry is a trap, a snare for small players, who they rip off unmercifully. And this is balanced by some succesful bands who make a lot of money. But basically it's a nasty, self serving industry.
It suprises me that more (especially new, small) bands have not said "The heck with it, let's just bung all our music on MP3.com and see if we can boost our concert prices". But no, they seem unable to resist the charm of the BIG record copany. And they get ripped off. Again.
And so do we with pretty high CD prices. About AU$29 here in Sydney. Which ain't bad for a marginal cost of $0.50.
Various econimies, as they have started up, have begun by copying other countries products.
Hong Kong, Japan, and now - China.
Oh, and one mustn't forget - USA.
Some time ago, as the USA economy was just beginning, the USA did not respect copyright laws in any way. Notably, they copied books. There were loud complaints from - I believe - Charles Dickens, among others.
As their economies move along, their copies became better, then, eventually, they would start to create inovations of their own.
Then they would start to want copyright laws. And perhaps obey them.
Just the other day I went to Ausatralia Post to send a small packet. The postal folk wanted me to show them some photo id before they couold sent it. No, they didn't copy it or anything, just looked at it.
How absurd is this? Do they seriouosly beleiove any self respecting terrorist would not have some sort of photo id - even, just possibly, fake? And what in heck was mildly annoying millions of people sending parcels going to achieve?
The mind boggles.
I'm flying to London next week. Let me see... no eye drops, no hair gel, slip-on shoes.. it's going to be great. If the terrorist want to drag us back to the middle ages, I guess this is a small step in the right direction.
What about changes NOT sourced from the browser end?
All the AJAX code I have seen concentrates on events starting at the client - the browser.
This is all very nice, but not useful for any complex realtime system - any form of monitoring for example. It IS possible to do this sort of thing (I do it by keeping a constant connection, rotated on timeouts, but it feels a bit tacky and doesn't scale well - it's just equivalent to polling, albeit faster), but I haven't seen open source (or indeed commercial) code to do it.
40 miles. Hmm, that's 65km, 130km for the round trip. My vehicle (Hyundai Excel) gets about 6.5 litres per 100km, thus it would use about 14 litres (3.8 gallons). (US$15, say) My fuel tank holds 50 lt it is claimed, but I never seem to get more than 38 lt into it (every few weeks).
You must have a really, really small tank.
We pay (Sydney Australia) about $1.40 per litre (and rising). That comes out at US$4 per US gallon (how did you guys end up with a different sized gallon, isn't one dopey size silly enough?)
Hmm. Are you suggesting they grow fruit locally? In Sweden? Mangoes - I don't think so.
Even here in Australia we move fruit around a fair bit - after all, Queensland, where they grow mangos (is it mangos or mangoes - I don't know) is a heck of a long way from Sydney.
But it really doesn't matter as much as you might think. I seem to recall the major consumption of fuel in food is it being actually driven home from the supermarket. Moving stuff in bulk is very efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
Wooden piles have worked in Venice for quite some time - I beleive some of them are heading for a thousand years. (And no, the building in Venice aren't sinking - they were, but they've stopped taking water from the aquifer [why does everyone say "underground" aquifer - where the heck else would it be?] and they've stopped sinking. The lagoon's still rising though, and global warming is yet to show much effect).
I've always found it amazing how, should accidentally challenge someone's "right" to own a big, thirsty car, they always come up some great excuses. And yet, looking at the road, there they are, thousands of them, huge ugly offroad vehicles with shiny paint that have never been near a dirt road, carrying a single fat passenger.
I have a small car that we drive less than 8,000km (thats 5,000 miles to you weird non-metric folk) that consumes a mere 5.5lt per 100km (no idea what that is in hogsheads per league, sorry, but it's 1/2 or 1/3 what big SUVs use). I seem to manage. With a family of 4. So what is their special problem?
I've never driven a large 4WD (SUV). It must be nice perched way up there, I guess. But they handle like trucks, they must be horrible to park, they're really hard to clamber into, they cost a fortune to buy, insure, run, and fuel.
What IS the attraction? (It isn't the off-road capability, virtually none of them ever go there - do people beleive they are safer? They aren't. Is it the view? Maybe. Perhaps it's the "armoured car syndrome").
Grandfather? .. I have a five year old child. Grandfather status does not seem imminent. Ok, I bred late.
.. sorry, drifted off).
... why if you were here, you young whippersnapper, I'd put you over my knee and give you such a thrashing, that I would.
Stories of our recent past do seem long ago in a fast moving subject like computing, don't they? Perhaps if we were talking of, oh I don't know, bricklaying, things might not have changed.
But we aren't bricklayers, are we? (Actually I can't believe we don't have house printing machines - what's wrong with us? I reckon a souped up ink jet printer would do a nice job. Cabling and piping would be a pain - and that already takes up a considerable amount of time
Grandfather indeed
I guess that'd be it, then. Doesn't ring a bell, though.
...
Actually, it was amazing. I left universtity in 1976 with an honours degree in Computer Science from Essex Uni. I briefly worked for Plessey UK, building part of the radar system for commercial airlines over SE England, then - aged a mere 22, went to Holland (to make my fortune, I guess, or maybe it was the pot) to work for Holec (in Hattem) leading a software project for the said nuclear reactor monitoring. Quite a lot of responsibility for a little lad, I thought then - and now.
Jah, ik ben Engels. But I don't speak a lot of Dutch, that's for sure. Some, though. I'm always amused by Dutch tourist in Sydney who think they speak a secret toungue
I don't remember its name ort location, though I think it was up north, as I was working in Zwolle. Cleanest power station I've ever seen.
I do recall, a couple of years leater being mightily nervous to hear its name on the shortwave Dutch news program I was listening (on a small catamaran in the middle of the Atlantic, but that's another story). After listening intently, with my very poor Dutch, I came to the conclusion there was some sort of student protest against nuclear power in general, as opposed to some catastrophic failure that my system had possibly not noticed - or worse, caused..
But I went rather pale. (Pale-er anway - I start off pretty pale. Most unsuited to sunny Sydney where I now live).
Some time back (ok, 1979) I built a system to monitor a Dutch nuclear reactor. It monitored temperatures, rod positions, and so on. Nothing important (cough). There was no suggestion of keeping costs down to save money (and I'm glad).
...] ...]
The system had two colour graphic displays, a printer or two, and 4 operator terminals. It ran a real time, multi tasking operating system (called RSX11).
The main system had 128kb of memory. Yes, 128kb.
Today my dev machine has 2Gb of memory and the 3Ghz processor must - surely - be some thousands of times as fast.
So I have 15,000 times as much memory, a processor perhaps 3,000 times as fast (I'm guessing, as figures are hard to pin down). That sounds like 445 million times as much power to me.
And what do we do with all this grunt? Well damn, solitare looks good these days.
So, were the old programmers really, really good? [We were, we were
Are the new ones really, really bad? [hang on, I'm still at it
Have we stopped caring about size and performance of programs?
I think all of these things are slightly true - we used to care deeply about program speed and footprint. Now we don't.
I suspect it has gone much too far - programs are far slower to load than they were even 5 years ago - they are large and bloated, and don't share things well. Anybody remember Sidekick - it was wonderful - and it was available at the touch of key (ok, 2 keys). Remember how FAST it was? I know it didn't do much, but it was dashed useful.
And I still can't beleive I still write "for" loops.
>> she points in a random direction and says "look at (random object well outside viewing distance) what do you think of it?"
This is because women have far superiour peripheral vison to men. (That's why they can find things in the fridge and you can't).
They really ought to be far better drivers than men - but they aren't, are they? Slightly, perhaps, according to insurance companies.
Maybe they keep getting distracted. Possibly by their passengers.
Or their cellphones.
I have one of these Toshibas. The fingerprint scan works mostly - but it doesn't work very well if you are cold (maybe it thinks you are dead ... how would Spike [a vampire - info for those foolish few who don't follow Buffy] operate one of these?)
Also the software for handling the login process is pretty sucky - it's hard to handle the mail server which tends to come up with different names, etc etc. I eventually disabled it for all except the main login, which works well enough to cope with. I have done better than most - who have given in.
On a phone, it could be a pain - but at least it has to do only one thing. Entering a six digit password (as I must on my corporate Blackberry) is *very* painful, though, and a fingerprint scan would defintely be better than that.
A Slashdot reader that drags his knuckles on the ground ... what's going on here?
Really? It worked for Alf Garnet. Er, and pretty much ever Jew I have ever met ...
..? Smile, laugh, and don't be a dickhead.
... Ah yes, Borat nice man. You come Kahzikstan and he show you good time. Unless you bad man.
Making jokes about painful things is the best known way to solve the problem. It forces them out from under dark rocks. It releves some of the pain.
When a racial group starts accepting the racial jokes made about it, and playing them back, is often the time that group comes of age. With luck, the jokes move on to being funny and rather dated. And that is good.
We have certainly seen this in Australia - the jokes about Mediteranean folk - Italian, Greeks, etc - that they have now embraced, have tranformed their acceptance in society. Perhaps it was happening anyway, but it was certainly part of the process.
So if you don't think it's funny, maybe you're part of the problem
Now where was I
What you mean mean you no like Borat?
Borat is your friend. I am sixth most famous man from Kazikstan.
How come you no like him? I am come to Amerika to find friend and prostitutes to take home with me. You are not friend then you be prostitute?
Borat am still your friend. Come to Kazikstan and you get good welcome party, no?
It seems incredible someone wanting to perform perfectly reasonable activities should turn to Slashdot, of all places, to attempt to get some sort of help.
.. and that souls actually exist .. but let's not get into that]. ...
... is it me, or does everyone thing the "new and improved" help systems are damned near useless .. it's just me. Sorry. I digress. I'm sure when I used to hit F1 I would actually get something vaguely useful and vaguely relevant, fairly quickly ... nah, surely not).
Either someone is having a bit of a joke, or, just possibly, Microsoft has truly lost the plot.
Ok, this is Slashdot. Let's assume MS has lost the plot.
What have they done - and why have they done it?
Well, it would appear they have entirely sold their souls to the content owners (not producers). [Note, this assumes they had souls
They have created a computer system so perverted to the content owners' cause it will spend half the power of the hosting computer in checking to make sure no content is inadvertently revealed in some copiable way.
To this end, they have an extraordinary scheme of in-computer and on-line checking. They will even disable computers if they believe them to be misbehaving. The merest hint of a possibility will cause quality downgrading
Not, personally, a direction I wanted to go in. Or Microsoft to go in, actually (like most people, I actually try to use their systems
But the questions is - why?
It's possible that someone else sold *their* soul, someone who could put in place laws to force all this to happen.
Or it's possible that some sort of deal/deals was/were done so MS would get better content. (Before Apple, maybe? Are they really such a threat?)
It's got to be one or the other, surely.
Either way, I don't like the sound of it.
Well, you know, we don't have crocodiles in Sydney (just lawyers), and no box jellyfish. I admit we do have a bit of a drought, but it doesn't affect the cities too much.
... oh boy. Ice storms. Nah, I'll stay here. England was bad enough for me to leave .. tornados - I'm outa there.
...
But tornados
Oh, and we don't have poison ivy, nor poison oak. Not even stinging nettles.
And we have beer
... two category 2 tornados and an ice storm ...
Have you thought about moving to Australia?
Maybe this could work. A small fee on storage devices, with the proceeds going to ... ah, now there's the rub.
...
To whom?
The performer?
The writer?
The producer?
The person who "owns" the copyright?
The record company?
Britain used to do this cassette tapes, I think.
Bah! As far as I can see, the whole record industry is a trap, a snare for small players, who they rip off unmercifully. And this is balanced by some succesful bands who make a lot of money. But basically it's a nasty, self serving industry.
It suprises me that more (especially new, small) bands have not said "The heck with it, let's just bung all our music on MP3.com and see if we can boost our concert prices". But no, they seem unable to resist the charm of the BIG record copany. And they get ripped off. Again.
And so do we with pretty high CD prices. About AU$29 here in Sydney. Which ain't bad for a marginal cost of $0.50.
Hmm, back to writng code
Various econimies, as they have started up, have begun by copying other countries products.
Hong Kong, Japan, and now - China.
Oh, and one mustn't forget - USA.
Some time ago, as the USA economy was just beginning, the USA did not respect copyright laws in any way. Notably, they copied books. There were loud complaints from - I believe - Charles Dickens, among others.
As their economies move along, their copies became better, then, eventually, they would start to create inovations of their own.
Then they would start to want copyright laws. And perhaps obey them.
I have bad news for you. I'm a baby boomer (tail ender - 1955) .. and I'm NEVER going to retire.
I can't afford to.
Feeding the kids is killing me.
They should get jobs and leave home.
But they won't/can't.
Maybe it's because they can't get a job because those old farts won't retire.
Damn.
No, absolutely not.
...
We're not letting them in until they pay the tax on that tea
Bruce has hit the nail on the head.
... no eye drops, no hair gel, slip-on shoes .. it's going to be great. If the terrorist want to drag us back to the middle ages, I guess this is a small step in the right direction.
Just the other day I went to Ausatralia Post to send a small packet. The postal folk wanted me to show them some photo id before they couold sent it. No, they didn't copy it or anything, just looked at it.
How absurd is this? Do they seriouosly beleiove any self respecting terrorist would not have some sort of photo id - even, just possibly, fake? And what in heck was mildly annoying millions of people sending parcels going to achieve?
The mind boggles.
I'm flying to London next week. Let me see
It killed my machine, anyway ...
You're new around here, aren't you?
What about changes NOT sourced from the browser end?
All the AJAX code I have seen concentrates on events starting at the client - the browser.
This is all very nice, but not useful for any complex realtime system - any form of monitoring for example.
It IS possible to do this sort of thing (I do it by keeping a constant connection, rotated on timeouts, but it feels a bit tacky and doesn't scale well - it's just equivalent to polling, albeit faster), but I haven't seen open source (or indeed commercial) code to do it.
Does any exist? Have I been missing something?
40 miles. Hmm, that's 65km, 130km for the round trip.
My vehicle (Hyundai Excel) gets about 6.5 litres per 100km, thus it would use about 14 litres (3.8 gallons). (US$15, say)
My fuel tank holds 50 lt it is claimed, but I never seem to get more than 38 lt into it (every few weeks).
You must have a really, really small tank.
We pay (Sydney Australia) about $1.40 per litre (and rising). That comes out at US$4 per US gallon (how did you guys end up with a different sized gallon, isn't one dopey size silly enough?)
Now where's my bicycle?
Hmm. Are you suggesting they grow fruit locally? In Sweden? Mangoes - I don't think so.
Even here in Australia we move fruit around a fair bit - after all, Queensland, where they grow mangos (is it mangos or mangoes - I don't know) is a heck of a long way from Sydney.
But it really doesn't matter as much as you might think. I seem to recall the major consumption of fuel in food is it being actually driven home from the supermarket. Moving stuff in bulk is very efficient.
One can only hope fines go more like this ...
...
.. in a while.
$1 the first day
$2 the second day
$4 the third day
Now that's going to hurt