Please... I'm always annoyed with slashkwak stories about hi-tech cars that totally miss the cheap, elegant solution of biking / walking / public transportation. Want to save the planet? Get out and bike to work.
(Side effects include: getting a tan, losing weight, stronger heart, lower blood pressure, enjoying fresh air, less stress, better sleep, sexy legs, meeting healthy people, "stickin' it to tha' man", and having something to talk about other than computers. Please consult your doctor if erections last longer than 10 hours.)
That's nonsense, you're just making excuses. We're not in a city and most of my co-workers live within 5mi of work and only one other guy rides.
Take a day to ride to work and you'll never regret it. You'll get healthier, save money, help the earth, sleep better, get fresh air, and fight the tarraristas.
Sadly 40% of all trips made by car are less that 2 miles, i.e. 10mins by bike. So really all this money, time, energy, and man power is put towards solving only 60% of the problem.
Anyways, go to google maps, right-click on where you live and select "Directions from here" then right-click on where you work and select "Directions to here". If the result is less than 5mi, you should be biking to work.
Help the planet, help the country, help yourself, ride a bike.
Always amazed by the posters on this site never consider that you can live just fine without a car or being car light. Programmers should appreciate this simple, elegant solution to the oil problem by just reducing the number of miles you travel by car.
Get fresh air, get exercise, get sick less often, get healthy, get energy, pollute less, enjoy your commute, use a means of transportation that you can actually repair and maintain. Ride a bike.
This has been discussed to death and the reply is to think of the children. Kids look up to professional athletes and if they see them doing drugs, they'll start doing them too. Also athletes would push themselves to the breaking point and run the risk of seriously injuring themselves. This is what happened to Gagne, he didn't pace out his drug use so his muscles grew faster than the tendons could handle and totally messed up his arm.
I believe this kind of activity can be prevented or at least flagged. Couldn't the wikipedia software good a google search on the article title and if the person's ip was in the top XX hits, flag the edit. Certainly won't catch everything and will have false positives, but would at least do something.
I agree that newpapers are the best way to get any news. Although I certainly don't have enough time to read it each morning, I highly recommend getting the Sunday Times and the Weekend Edition of WSJ for anyone looking for a better news source. Another excellent source is the Economist, but with that you're stuck reading week old news (should also mention that the good people behind flavorpill are now doing a weekly about news like the Economist first few pages.) I do admit that BBC World News is pretty good if you can find it on PBS.
On the point about transcripts, I would also suggest people read some of the transcipts online for documentaries on PBS and Discovery. You'll be amazed that the entire episode can be read in about 10mins and a lot of it is just fluff or leads to get you through the next commercial break.
Here's one of my favorite wacky tech stories to tell. Working offsite my boss and I went back to the hotel and were trying to wrap some things up. We had some files that we wanted to get off a USB drive, one of those Firelite 80GB drives which do not require an external power supply, it's just powered off the USB. The drive worked fine earlier in the day, but for some reason it was not turning on when plugged into the laptop. We tried different USB ports, plugged it in a number of times, shoved that cable in good, rebooted, etc but it would never spin up.
So what's my genius boss do? He turns off the table lamp and immediately the drive turns on. I guess there was some bad wiring in the electrical outlet that was shared by the laptop and table lamp. Once the lamp was no longer on it allowed more juice to flow to the laptop which trickled down to the usb ports.
I'd also recommend bean shell over groovy. I went through this a year ago trying to add some scripting capability to a graphics library. What I like about groovy was that you could derive from an abstract class while for beanshell you can only derive from an interface and then need to add an invoke() method if you don't handle all the functions in the interface. Also there was a little problem with the fact that groovy did not work at all with jogl, it would give a stack overflow error what with all the reflection method calls. No complaints with bean shell and now that it passed some jsr voting it will have an even larger following.
No it isn't. It's yet another awful picture-and-paragraph article with about as much content as the side of my coffee mug. Wired used to be an amazing magazine with long, researched articles about pave the earth devil bunnies, but unfortunately has turned into little more than a gadget magazine with a few short tech articles and tons of pictures.
Sunday Styles article people! Relax, it's just a light-hearted review meant to entertain, not inform. Read the article, the guy gets all hopped up and decides to organize his ties. Plus it's written by William Grimes who has absolutely nothing to prove and has no need to make a name for himself by riding on the coattails of some lame documentary. This guy cares so little about fame that no one even knows what he looks like so he can honestly review restaurants anonymously.
No this is not a science story. It is written by William Grimes, perhaps the most famous and most influential restaurant critic in America. Plus it's in the Sunday Styles sections which means it's just a light-hearted article not to be taken too seriously.
What are people switching to that can't be outsourced and is mildly interesting? I'm working on a fallback career as a teacher which I hope I'll never have to do.
I actually wonder if the author knew what he was doing by making unrarlib GPL instead of LPGL. There is the possibility that he just didn't know the difference since all this licensing stuff if a tad confusing.
I also think the whole linking deal of the GPL license is too restrictive.
Quoting from the GPL
FAQ:
You have a GPL'ed program that I'd like to link with my code to build a
proprietary program. Does the fact that I link with your program mean I have
to GPL my program? Yes.
Great, say I spend many months developing some great software and I want this
program to read RAR files. I look around and find unrarlib, but if I simply
link to that GPL'd source all my hard work has to be GPL even though GPL'd code
compromises less than 1% of my program. So now I'm forced to either write my
own RAR implementation or just drop that functionality altogether.I understand
unrarlib could have been made LGPL or included another bit of legalese to allow
linking, but I think that forcing code linked to GPL'd code to also fall under
GPL is asking too much.
Wired did this recently and used up about half the magazine. This is not why I subscribe. I want long, informative articles on new trends, research, and innovative people; not a rehashing of the latest Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.
Read the latest human rights report on them. They are the most repressive country on the planet.
Highlights:
Citizens lacked both the freedom to peacefully express opposition to the
party-led political system and the right to change their national leaders
or form of government.
Instances of extrajudicial killings, torture and mistreatment of prisoners,
forced confessions, arbitrary arrest and detention, lengthy incommunicado
detention, and denial of due process.
Severely restricted freedom of assembly and continued to restrict freedom
of association and freedom of movement.
Religious freedom remained poor and crackdowns against Muslim Uighurs, Tibetan
Buddhists, and unregistered groups, including underground Protestant and Catholic
groups
Violence against women (including imposition of a birth limitation policy
coercive in nature that resulted in instances of forced abortion and forced
sterilization)
The Government continued to deny internationally recognized worker rights,
and forced labor in prison facilities remained a serious problem. (So that's
why Walmart products are so cheap)
So pretty much you can't vote, can't complain, and can't pray for help. bUt th3y m1ght t4k3 0n micro$hl0th#@!
Well, if pharmaceutical companies don't get a return on the billions of dollars they invested in those drugs then they're not going to bother researching them. Would be nice to think otherwise but companies have bills to pay.
Re:this better not replace what's already at museu
on
Real-World Hyperlinks
·
· Score: 1
Most museums I've been to prohibit the use of cell phones and if you get a call a guard will immediately walk up to you and tell you to hang up. So this really wouldn't be a problem.
I understand the Slashdot has some silly qualms about caching websites which are linked in stories, but the benefit of caching screenshots, test images, etc. outways whatever it is that keeps/. from caching sites altogether.
Hit the DEL key so you can see what you are typing. Then type "KRADRULES" in honor of the demo group, K-Rad Productions. Hit ENTER and walk around the map.
I still can't believe none of my project members ever noticed this in the code.
2001 A Beautiful Mind - Best Picture 2001 Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind - Best Director 1998 Shakespeare in Love - Best Picture 1997 Titanic - Best Picture 1997 James Cameron, Titanic - Best Director 1994 Forrest Gump - Best Picture 1994 Forrest Gump - Robert Zemeckis - Best Director 1990 Dances With Wolves - Best Picture 1990 Kevin Costner, Dances With Wolves - Best Director
The Germans weren't even close to making the bomb so the raid on the Norsk Hydroelectric plant and other destruction of heavy water didn't really make a difference.
First, heavy water is not the only moderator available to someone who wants to make a chain reaction (the first US pile used very pure carbon) and heavy water isn't used in an atomic weapon (although it is used in a thermonuclear weapon but you have to crawl before you can run.)
Second, the Germans didn't even have the explosive material to make a bomb. In an atomic bomb you can use either plutonium or enriched uranium. The Manhattan Project got it's plutonium from the residue of a self-sustaining chain reaction and the Germans hadn't even completed a self-sustaining chain reaction by the war's end, hell they weren't even close. Heisenberg kept insisting on creating these elaborate designs of natural uranium for the pile such as concentric spheres or huge disks which took a lot of time and labor to produce when the best configuration for a chain reaction is small cyclinders which was the only configuration the Manhattan Project ever used. Using enriched uranium was just out of the question for the overworked German war machine. America had the money and resources to build gaseous diffusion plants and centrifuges, but what with fighting two fronts Germany had better things to do with its money and Heisenberg was not really pushing for more resources since he couldn't convince himself let alone Hitler that they would be able to produce a bomb.
And then had they somehow had a chain reaction they would have to extract the plutonium (not easy), then they still have to construct the bomb (not easy), and figure out a way of delivering it (not easy.) For more information I highly recommend the Richard Rhodes book, Making of the Atomic Bomb.
Slashdot Mirror
Please... I'm always annoyed with slashkwak stories about hi-tech cars that totally miss the cheap, elegant solution of biking / walking / public transportation. Want to save the planet? Get out and bike to work.
(Side effects include: getting a tan, losing weight, stronger heart, lower blood pressure, enjoying fresh air, less stress, better sleep, sexy legs, meeting healthy people, "stickin' it to tha' man", and having something to talk about other than computers. Please consult your doctor if erections last longer than 10 hours.)
That's nonsense, you're just making excuses. We're not in a city and most of my co-workers live within 5mi of work and only one other guy rides.
Take a day to ride to work and you'll never regret it. You'll get healthier, save money, help the earth, sleep better, get fresh air, and fight the tarraristas.
Sadly 40% of all trips made by car are less that 2 miles, i.e. 10mins by bike. So really all this money, time, energy, and man power is put towards solving only 60% of the problem.
Anyways, go to google maps, right-click on where you live and select "Directions from here" then right-click on where you work and select "Directions to here". If the result is less than 5mi, you should be biking to work.
Help the planet, help the country, help yourself, ride a bike.
http://www.bikeleague.org/resources/why/environment.php
Better yet, don't drive and ride a bike.
Always amazed by the posters on this site never consider that you can live just fine without a car or being car light. Programmers should appreciate this simple, elegant solution to the oil problem by just reducing the number of miles you travel by car.
Get fresh air, get exercise, get sick less often, get healthy, get energy, pollute less, enjoy your commute, use a means of transportation that you can actually repair and maintain. Ride a bike.
This has been discussed to death and the reply is to think of the children. Kids look up to professional athletes and if they see them doing drugs, they'll start doing them too. Also athletes would push themselves to the breaking point and run the risk of seriously injuring themselves. This is what happened to Gagne, he didn't pace out his drug use so his muscles grew faster than the tendons could handle and totally messed up his arm.
I believe this kind of activity can be prevented or at least flagged. Couldn't the wikipedia software good a google search on the article title and if the person's ip was in the top XX hits, flag the edit. Certainly won't catch everything and will have false positives, but would at least do something.
I agree that newpapers are the best way to get any news. Although I certainly don't have enough time to read it each morning, I highly recommend getting the Sunday Times and the Weekend Edition of WSJ for anyone looking for a better news source. Another excellent source is the Economist, but with that you're stuck reading week old news (should also mention that the good people behind flavorpill are now doing a weekly about news like the Economist first few pages.) I do admit that BBC World News is pretty good if you can find it on PBS.
On the point about transcripts, I would also suggest people read some of the transcipts online for documentaries on PBS and Discovery. You'll be amazed that the entire episode can be read in about 10mins and a lot of it is just fluff or leads to get you through the next commercial break.
Here's one of my favorite wacky tech stories to tell. Working offsite my boss and I went back to the hotel and were trying to wrap some things up. We had some files that we wanted to get off a USB drive, one of those Firelite 80GB drives which do not require an external power supply, it's just powered off the USB. The drive worked fine earlier in the day, but for some reason it was not turning on when plugged into the laptop. We tried different USB ports, plugged it in a number of times, shoved that cable in good, rebooted, etc but it would never spin up.
So what's my genius boss do? He turns off the table lamp and immediately the drive turns on. I guess there was some bad wiring in the electrical outlet that was shared by the laptop and table lamp. Once the lamp was no longer on it allowed more juice to flow to the laptop which trickled down to the usb ports.
I'd also recommend bean shell over groovy. I went through this a year ago trying to add some scripting capability to a graphics library. What I like about groovy was that you could derive from an abstract class while for beanshell you can only derive from an interface and then need to add an invoke() method if you don't handle all the functions in the interface. Also there was a little problem with the fact that groovy did not work at all with jogl, it would give a stack overflow error what with all the reflection method calls. No complaints with bean shell and now that it passed some jsr voting it will have an even larger following.
No it isn't. It's yet another awful picture-and-paragraph article with about as much content as the side of my coffee mug. Wired used to be an amazing magazine with long, researched articles about pave the earth devil bunnies, but unfortunately has turned into little more than a gadget magazine with a few short tech articles and tons of pictures.
Sunday Styles article people! Relax, it's just a light-hearted review meant to entertain, not inform. Read the article, the guy gets all hopped up and decides to organize his ties. Plus it's written by William Grimes who has absolutely nothing to prove and has no need to make a name for himself by riding on the coattails of some lame documentary. This guy cares so little about fame that no one even knows what he looks like so he can honestly review restaurants anonymously.
No this is not a science story. It is written by William Grimes, perhaps the most famous and most influential restaurant critic in America. Plus it's in the Sunday Styles sections which means it's just a light-hearted article not to be taken too seriously.
What are people switching to that can't be outsourced and is mildly interesting? I'm working on a fallback career as a teacher which I hope I'll never have to do.
I actually wonder if the author knew what he was doing by making unrarlib GPL instead of LPGL. There is the possibility that he just didn't know the difference since all this licensing stuff if a tad confusing.
I also think the whole linking deal of the GPL license is too restrictive. Quoting from the GPL FAQ:
You have a GPL'ed program that I'd like to link with my code to build a proprietary program. Does the fact that I link with your program mean I have to GPL my program?
Yes.
Great, say I spend many months developing some great software and I want this program to read RAR files. I look around and find unrarlib, but if I simply link to that GPL'd source all my hard work has to be GPL even though GPL'd code compromises less than 1% of my program. So now I'm forced to either write my own RAR implementation or just drop that functionality altogether.I understand unrarlib could have been made LGPL or included another bit of legalese to allow linking, but I think that forcing code linked to GPL'd code to also fall under GPL is asking too much.
Wired did this recently and used up about half the magazine. This is not why I subscribe. I want long, informative articles on new trends, research, and innovative people; not a rehashing of the latest Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.
- Citizens lacked both the freedom to peacefully express opposition to the
party-led political system and the right to change their national leaders
or form of government.
- Instances of extrajudicial killings, torture and mistreatment of prisoners,
forced confessions, arbitrary arrest and detention, lengthy incommunicado
detention, and denial of due process.
- Severely restricted freedom of assembly and continued to restrict freedom
of association and freedom of movement.
- Religious freedom remained poor and crackdowns against Muslim Uighurs, Tibetan
Buddhists, and unregistered groups, including underground Protestant and Catholic
groups
- Violence against women (including imposition of a birth limitation policy
coercive in nature that resulted in instances of forced abortion and forced
sterilization)
- The Government continued to deny internationally recognized worker rights,
and forced labor in prison facilities remained a serious problem. (So that's
why Walmart products are so cheap)
So pretty much you can't vote, can't complain, and can't pray for help. bUt th3y m1ght t4k3 0n micro$hl0th#@!Well, if pharmaceutical companies don't get a return on the billions of dollars they invested in those drugs then they're not going to bother researching them. Would be nice to think otherwise but companies have bills to pay.
LOL!
Most museums I've been to prohibit the use of cell phones and if you get a call a guard will immediately walk up to you and tell you to hang up. So this really wouldn't be a problem.
I understand the Slashdot has some silly qualms about caching websites which are linked in stories, but the benefit of caching screenshots, test images, etc. outways whatever it is that keeps /. from caching sites altogether.
Speaking of Orwell, doesn't this whole post and subsequent comments remind just a bit of the 2 minute hate from 1984?
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~teg205/final/Game.html
Hit the DEL key so you can see what you are typing. Then type "KRADRULES" in honor of the demo group, K-Rad Productions. Hit ENTER and walk around the map.
I still can't believe none of my project members ever noticed this in the code.
2001 A Beautiful Mind - Best Picture
2001 Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind - Best Director
1998 Shakespeare in Love - Best Picture
1997 Titanic - Best Picture
1997 James Cameron, Titanic - Best Director
1994 Forrest Gump - Best Picture
1994 Forrest Gump - Robert Zemeckis - Best Director
1990 Dances With Wolves - Best Picture
1990 Kevin Costner, Dances With Wolves - Best Director
Everything mentioned above objectively sucks.
The Germans weren't even close to making the bomb so the raid on the Norsk Hydroelectric plant and other destruction of heavy water didn't really make a difference.
First, heavy water is not the only moderator available to someone who wants to make a chain reaction (the first US pile used very pure carbon) and heavy water isn't used in an atomic weapon (although it is used in a thermonuclear weapon but you have to crawl before you can run.)
Second, the Germans didn't even have the explosive material to make a bomb. In an atomic bomb you can use either plutonium or enriched uranium. The Manhattan Project got it's plutonium from the residue of a self-sustaining chain reaction and the Germans hadn't even completed a self-sustaining chain reaction by the war's end, hell they weren't even close. Heisenberg kept insisting on creating these elaborate designs of natural uranium for the pile such as concentric spheres or huge disks which took a lot of time and labor to produce when the best configuration for a chain reaction is small cyclinders which was the only configuration the Manhattan Project ever used. Using enriched uranium was just out of the question for the overworked German war machine. America had the money and resources to build gaseous diffusion plants and centrifuges, but what with fighting two fronts Germany had better things to do with its money and Heisenberg was not really pushing for more resources since he couldn't convince himself let alone Hitler that they would be able to produce a bomb.
And then had they somehow had a chain reaction they would have to extract the plutonium (not easy), then they still have to construct the bomb (not easy), and figure out a way of delivering it (not easy.) For more information I highly recommend the Richard Rhodes book, Making of the Atomic Bomb.