Brilliant, just brilliant. It needs to have a $600 million maintenance visit by human repairmen. A large chunk of that money, of course, will be spent on ensuring that humans can continue to eat, shit, breathe, move around, use hand tools, etc. in the life-hostile orbital environment.
It was too much to ask to make the design rely on robotic repair. We had to include it in the ridiculous series of projects that require a human presence in space. Instead of spending a couple of hundred million (more? less?) on tele-operated and quasi-robotic equipment, we will destroy a telescope that cost about 6 billion dollars. There is one word for this result. Stupid. Or maybe a pair of words, colossally wasteful. Or maybe a whole series of words, but I'm sure you all are quite capable of composing them.
A nice trick would be to have a set of molecular parts that self-assemble into neurodes usable in artificial neural networks, and are able to use the gold conductors as artificial axons and dendrites. Some other molecules would be needed to form an interface to the outside world for I/O. Imagine the number of connections per cubic millimeter.
I say ban *all* advertising (regardless of the consequences).
O what decisiveness! What elegant parsimony! By God, this man has a profound point! Forbid a vast, general category, and damn the consequences!
You are either with us, or against us!
Pre-emptively destroy all advertising!
The enemy on the 'Net believes web surfers will run. That's why we're willing to filter out banner ads, pop-ups, click-throughs, login pop-ups, help pop-ups, and arbitrary secondary content of any kind. Blindly. Pre-emptively. Web surfers will never run!
So, banner ads are good, and spam is bad. What about pop-ups? HTML emails with CGI links (or similar) to see if you opened them? Spyware? Ad busters? Tobacco? Alcohol? Marijuana? Crack? Methamphetamine? Hand guns? Assault rifles? First-trimester abortion? Copyright-infringing music downloads? Software piracy ("I'm not making money on it so it's OK")? Pre-emptively bombing other countries? Getting pre-emptively bombed by other countries?
Tsk, tsk. Decisions, decisions. And as if that weren't enough, they want you to be consistent?
I read the review, bought the book, and very happily and quickly put eclipse to use. It is now my Java IDE, although I find I still prefer TextPad for lengthy editing sessions.
I found the first half of the book to be simply horrible. A supposed introduction to actually using Eclipse this section concentrates more on the "Agile" toolset that all competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process should already be using. Well, that's what all the books say anyway.
There are a few things about this remark that are at very least unrealistic. Not everyone uses agile methodology. Agile developers are hardly the only people who are "competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process." The first half of the book does not focus on agile methodology. The use of the word "horrible" is frivolous and without merit.
If you read and work through the first six chapters, you will
Quickly and easily set up eclipse on your favorite platforms
In a couple days be competent enough to move your day to day work to eclipse with few or no hassles
Set up CVS on windows or linux
Point all of your eclipse installations to the CVS repositories you created, and use CVS as your repository via eclipse menu commands
Integrate ant, log4j, and junit with eclipse
Before eclipse, I was a Textpad/Cygwin Command Line developer, having abandonded JBuilder over a year ago. Eclipse is easy, versatile, and doesn't get in your way. Eclipse in Action is your fastest and easiest ticket to getting up to speed with it. My coworkers just dropped $1700 a pop for their JBuilder upgrades. I spent less than $100 on Eclipse in Action and Eclipse Modeling Framework.
"Quantum Computing," a field that does not yet fully exist, is not magic. No miracles will occur, they will be as reliable or unreliable as current systems, and may well be crippled in the market due to the exotic technologies they may need to be tied to.
By the time actual commercial products roll out, massively parallel machines evolved from current technologies will beat the shit out of them for virtually all general-purpose applications. Technologies that will evolve at about the same time as QC, such as hardware and/or software modelled neural networks with massive numbers of "neurodes" and implemented as building-block style modules, will allow the simulation of animal-like behavior and form the basis of the much feared robotic revolution that will overwhelm us sometime this century. When convincing simulation of human behavior emerges, we will all be, um, distracted from quantum computing.
Quantum computing, like fusion energy, is the technology of the future, and always will be.
I guess if you pay several hundred "legislators" to sit around writing shit, they come up with this kind of stuff. Of course, we all know they are representing the interests of the general populace, not the narrow interests of a handful of people looking to increase their already significant wealth and power.
The bandwith issue seems reasonable, although I suspect that if I poked around a bit behind the curtains, it might turn out to be less compelling.
Why not let TV manufacturers decide? This seems like pointless meddling. Non-HDTV should die a natural death, meaning it will continue to be manufactured and broadcast as long as there is enough consumer demand.
What am I missing here? TV is given vastly more importance than it merits. I suspect this is only a big issue for those with big expensive TV altars in their living rooms.
Manned space flight is the wrong way to go. If it were all machines, nobody would be perceiving any serious problems here. Not to mention far more bang for the buck, pay as you go, don't worry about anyone getting stranded or hurt, etc.
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. If there are no people there, then we aren't exercising our adventurous human spirit, expressing our curiosity, daring to do eexciting things, being spiritually aware (or whatever), making startling new advances in medical technology, and all those great things that can only be done with manned space flight.
With machines, we would only be exploring the solar system more quickly and more cheaply, on a larger scale, with more general technological development by more individuals and organizations, and hastening the appearance of relatively regular voyages to the asteroids and the other planets, eventually by people. They would be mostly unmanned though. Dull and boring.
As you may recall, this same line about precision and avoiding civilian casualties was in vogue when laser- or GSM-guided munitions were deployed by the US. While there has been a remarkable decrease in collateral damage thanks to these new guidance systems, the same may not be true with regards to laser weapons. If they blast a building with it, and Joe Bozo happens to be looking in that direction from a relatively close distance, he may be blinded or even receive severe burns. I recall a discussion on/. not long ago about a 100,000 watt airborne laser weapon with some discussion of this, but was not able to find the original article. Will this revert the historical trend towards lower collateral damage?
Does anyone in a position of responsibility even give a flying fuck?
Mandrake changed their site recently, and I could no longer find 9.2 RC2. It also looks and feels corporate, not the friendly, geeky old Mandrake of ages past.
I confess that I have been guilty of using Mandrake software in the past without ever paying. Since we use RedHat at work, I have been switching over home machines from Mandrake to RedHat, and actually forked out a big $60 to RedHat for their annual support.
Years ago, I switched from RedHat to Mandrake for its ease of installation and update, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that now RedHat is also quite easy to install and update.
Believe me, I had a fervent desire for one of the Atari MC68000 boxes. They did indeed have everything I wanted. I was broke, though, and at the mercy of what systems I could bum off of others.
In the early 80's I wanted to do molecular mechanics and molecular graphics. Most C64 folks will also remember that back then, "real" computers were not so easy to get access to, graphics sucked or were non-existent, and many other problems. I tried working with as many 8-bit systems as I could, C64, TRS-80, and a Sinclair 2068 that was my very own. On the latter I was able to make some primitive 16-color molecule drawings, but it was depressing and of no practical use. Not until I got my hands on an 8088/8087 box with a whopping 640 kb RAM, 5 Mb HDD and the great Turbo Pascal 3.0 was I finally able to do it. I was even able to do CNDO/INDO quantum-mechanical calcs, even though the average run took 9 hr or so.
8 bit machines? Don't miss 'em. BASIC interpreters? Don't miss 'em either.
Sun has 5 billion in cash reserves, and a profitable high end server business that will shrink somewhat, but not completely.
If that is the case, then we should suspect that a certain common "market analyst" business pattern is in operation. When analysts loudly proclaim bad news about a profitable company with good cash reserves, the stock price plummets. A few weeks later, all is forgotten, and analysts start parisning the company as an overlooked gem, and of course the stock price rises significantly.
The astute reader will note that there is a significant opportunity when this pattern is detected in a timely manner.
Slashdot Mirror
It was too much to ask to make the design rely on robotic repair. We had to include it in the ridiculous series of projects that require a human presence in space. Instead of spending a couple of hundred million (more? less?) on tele-operated and quasi-robotic equipment, we will destroy a telescope that cost about 6 billion dollars. There is one word for this result. Stupid. Or maybe a pair of words, colossally wasteful. Or maybe a whole series of words, but I'm sure you all are quite capable of composing them.
A nice trick would be to have a set of molecular parts that self-assemble into neurodes usable in artificial neural networks, and are able to use the gold conductors as artificial axons and dendrites. Some other molecules would be needed to form an interface to the outside world for I/O. Imagine the number of connections per cubic millimeter.
O what decisiveness! What elegant parsimony! By God, this man has a profound point! Forbid a vast, general category, and damn the consequences!
You are either with us, or against us!
Pre-emptively destroy all advertising!
The enemy on the 'Net believes web surfers will run. That's why we're willing to filter out banner ads, pop-ups, click-throughs, login pop-ups, help pop-ups, and arbitrary secondary content of any kind. Blindly. Pre-emptively. Web surfers will never run!Tsk, tsk. Decisions, decisions. And as if that weren't enough, they want you to be consistent?
$5 Netgear cards, check.
I found the first half of the book to be simply horrible. A supposed introduction to actually using Eclipse this section concentrates more on the "Agile" toolset that all competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process should already be using. Well, that's what all the books say anyway.
There are a few things about this remark that are at very least unrealistic. Not everyone uses agile methodology. Agile developers are hardly the only people who are "competent, well-informed Java developers that care about the quality of their code, products and development process." The first half of the book does not focus on agile methodology. The use of the word "horrible" is frivolous and without merit.If you read and work through the first six chapters, you will
- Quickly and easily set up eclipse on your favorite platforms
- In a couple days be competent enough to move your day to day work to eclipse with few or no hassles
- Set up CVS on windows or linux
- Point all of your eclipse installations to the CVS repositories you created, and use CVS as your repository via eclipse menu commands
- Integrate ant, log4j, and junit with eclipse
Before eclipse, I was a Textpad/Cygwin Command Line developer, having abandonded JBuilder over a year ago. Eclipse is easy, versatile, and doesn't get in your way. Eclipse in Action is your fastest and easiest ticket to getting up to speed with it. My coworkers just dropped $1700 a pop for their JBuilder upgrades. I spent less than $100 on Eclipse in Action and Eclipse Modeling Framework .MySQL AB even wrote a thank you letter to the FSF.
...they may not have the brains, but they certainly have the balls.
That's why I just don't get quantum mechanics...
By the time actual commercial products roll out, massively parallel machines evolved from current technologies will beat the shit out of them for virtually all general-purpose applications. Technologies that will evolve at about the same time as QC, such as hardware and/or software modelled neural networks with massive numbers of "neurodes" and implemented as building-block style modules, will allow the simulation of animal-like behavior and form the basis of the much feared robotic revolution that will overwhelm us sometime this century. When convincing simulation of human behavior emerges, we will all be, um, distracted from quantum computing.
Quantum computing, like fusion energy, is the technology of the future, and always will be.
I guess if you pay several hundred "legislators" to sit around writing shit, they come up with this kind of stuff. Of course, we all know they are representing the interests of the general populace, not the narrow interests of a handful of people looking to increase their already significant wealth and power.
The bandwith issue seems reasonable, although I suspect that if I poked around a bit behind the curtains, it might turn out to be less compelling.
What am I missing here? TV is given vastly more importance than it merits. I suspect this is only a big issue for those with big expensive TV altars in their living rooms.
Send in the robots.
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. If there are no people there, then we aren't exercising our adventurous human spirit, expressing our curiosity, daring to do eexciting things, being spiritually aware (or whatever), making startling new advances in medical technology, and all those great things that can only be done with manned space flight.
With machines, we would only be exploring the solar system more quickly and more cheaply, on a larger scale, with more general technological development by more individuals and organizations, and hastening the appearance of relatively regular voyages to the asteroids and the other planets, eventually by people. They would be mostly unmanned though. Dull and boring.
Sorry, I meant GPS, not GSM.
Oh, what fun. I'm so excited. What a great new leap forward, blah blah blah.
How you can be blinded by one of these things. More. Still more with a pic of a laser cannon.
I'm sure you folks can find more.
As you may recall, this same line about precision and avoiding civilian casualties was in vogue when laser- or GSM-guided munitions were deployed by the US. While there has been a remarkable decrease in collateral damage thanks to these new guidance systems, the same may not be true with regards to laser weapons. If they blast a building with it, and Joe Bozo happens to be looking in that direction from a relatively close distance, he may be blinded or even receive severe burns. I recall a discussion on /. not long ago about a 100,000 watt airborne laser weapon with some discussion of this, but was not able to find the original article. Will this revert the historical trend towards lower collateral damage?
Does anyone in a position of responsibility even give a flying fuck?
I confess that I have been guilty of using Mandrake software in the past without ever paying. Since we use RedHat at work, I have been switching over home machines from Mandrake to RedHat, and actually forked out a big $60 to RedHat for their annual support.
Years ago, I switched from RedHat to Mandrake for its ease of installation and update, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that now RedHat is also quite easy to install and update.
Ah, youth...
8 bit machines? Don't miss 'em. BASIC interpreters? Don't miss 'em either.
Insipid? Damn, Dude, I thought that picture was pretty disturbing.
$1,300,000 worth of Lintel boxes. Fuck. I could rule the world...
If that is the case, then we should suspect that a certain common "market analyst" business pattern is in operation. When analysts loudly proclaim bad news about a profitable company with good cash reserves, the stock price plummets. A few weeks later, all is forgotten, and analysts start parisning the company as an overlooked gem, and of course the stock price rises significantly.
The astute reader will note that there is a significant opportunity when this pattern is detected in a timely manner.
Objectivism?
Please consider it to be hyperbole.
Hey, no problem, Dude. I had written it off as physically impossible bullshit, but whatever you say.