80 columns are what you need for punch cards. That's why screens are 80 columns wide. Ergo, if you make them wider, you need to design NEW PUNCH CARDS. That could be very expensive.
Punch cards were based on the civil war era dollar bill. I cannot think of a currency in the world with a longer bill size than that (Somebody else know one?), so I can't think where we'd get the model. Maybe we'd make each card the size of an apartment lease.
We should be laughing at such a question. "How much obvious criminal activity on the part of your administration does it take before you decide they should be locked up?" What has our society decayed to. We need to eliminate huge numbers of executive orders, review the whole premise of those things in the first place, and lock up our president ten seconds after he violates the constitution, much less the penal code.
Somebody else here said, "if only Pelosi would grow a pair" -- how appropriate.
The answer to your question is "Any." When someone violates the law, he gets punished. Period.
If we impeach the top two power-mad kleptomaniacs we have in the executive branch, we have president Nancy Pelosi.
An election of Hillary is LESS likely once that happens.
I'll believe it when I see it. A nickel says if it passes in the House it'll die at the Senate. There's too many extremely evil people who want elections riggable, and want their machines used to do it.
But why use C++ if you're not using pointer arithmetic? If you're not doing that, go to Java. I know this sounds silly, and it opens religious issues, but (aside from legacy apps, like this one) why would I want to use C++ if I'm not doing that?
I use C because it's small, fast, convenient and portable. I can code something tiny quickly.
I use Java because it's an object oriented language that helps with complex app coding.
I use C++ because I want some of that Java stuff, but I want it to bind to my memory model more realistically. ie. Pointer arithmetic.
When AT&T merged with Bellsouth, they agreed to Net Neutrality for 30 months. I'll bet, because this is the pattern with the ILECs and particularly SBC and AT&T (SBC and AT&T merged), that they do their darnedest to get tollbooth legislation in before the window ends. Why? Why not wait? Because these guys just absolutely do things that way. If they do something above-board and honest, it leaves them with a bad taste in their mouths.
I give that legislation (if it passes) 29 months from the merger date. If we get past 30 months, it'll never pass.
When we're just starting a relationship, we're usually looking for validation of our decision. We see reasons why this is a good thing and that this will work -- we don't see what others sometimes do, that this is a crazy, self-destructive decision which will alienate our friends, and cost us a year of happiness as we extricate ourselves. To have a rule of thumb is a VERY GOOD THING. To adhere to it -- trust it -- and let it force us to make the right decision is a VERY GOOD THING.
When we look for a job, many of us us the Dilbert principle. If there are a few Dilbert cartoons on the cubes, work there. If there are a lot or none, don't. (None means that management won't allow them, and people are scared, too many means the company is seriously pooched.) This is a rule. No matter how nice things look, if it doesn't pass the Dilbert test, we don't take it.
The toilet seat thing seems just as useful and important or more so. If she doesn't immediately see that there shouldn't be an issue there, run.
Ok, I've been reading slashdot. I've seen the articles.
So I glean this:
Disconnect the valves from the cam, squirt alcohol in the engines to cool it before compression, run it with biodiesel, put it in a hybrid, and make it talk to other cars -- we should have 100mpg no problem.
Fine. So can you wake me when someone _actually_ sells a car with honestly good gas mileage?
So now you can download at the limit of the bandwidth of the equipment serving your area. Oh, wait, you can already do that.
So CATV guys will have to put in equipment capable of handling more than 10 times this speed upstream, assuming they're going to have 80 customers on this system, and oversubscribe at 8 to 1. Except they'll sell more than that in lots of areas, and they WON'T put in equipment fast enough to handle more than a few of these in the first place.
Well, if they do a decent job at this, in the next version, once they have the bugs out, they could strongarm the mozilla organization into including it in the firefox download. They could muscle them by, for instance, paying them.
That would go a long way toward maiking this idea fly.
True, "Security Isn't Just Avoiding Microsoft", but that's a helluva good start.
When we optimize code, we don't look in the part of the code that the program spends 5% of it's time doing, we look where it spends 80%. Microsoft stuff is incredibly insecure, both because of bad design and because there's little in the way of restrictions on amount of crap those boxes do.
Scrub them out, and a huge amount of security issues go away.
Then, THEN, you worry about the other stuff. ANd yes, then you actually DO worry about that other stuff.
It's a commercial product and a helluva lot less satisfying than what you want. You WANT to take these guys out back and shoot them once in the head, but all you can really do is get them to stop calling.
It sends a "This number is disconnected" tone. Humans ignore it. Automated fax and telemarketer systems note it and remove your number from their database. Why call something which is known to be gone?
It's cheap, and it works fairly well.
Less mess in your local alley, too, though I'd still prefer the stronger solution.
Woa -- I think you're off base here on two levels.
One -- If you can't win, you still have to do it. You cannot let crimes go, even if you cannot succeed in convicting. The problem is not this president/VP. The problem is the next one. To not impeach is to say "if the congress isn't dominated by the other house, you can do anything you want."
Two -- Cheny's not the target. Cheney's going to have to defend himself, and his interactions with the president will come out. It's at least possible that real solid evidence against the president will emerge.
This isn't stupid, it's both the right thing to do, and may help land the big one.
Besides, even Republicans hate Cheney. He's an easier target.
DSL is a 2 wire system, as it's just a POTS line. T1s have a pair for transmit and a pair for receive.
T1s have traditionally cost more than DSL and thus have an expectation of reliability. The expectation translates into extra workers watching, and better equipment used in it.
More wires = more space on equipment and on poles. Better equipment = more money. More expectations = more payrole.
Remember price per quality is a non-linear relationship.
'Someone says "Haiku" / ten blocks away, and I go / all drifting snowflakes'?
If the pattern is 5/7/5, "Somebody" bumps you right out. Slice out that extra syllable. Besides, 'Someone' just sounds more poetic than somebody, at least at the beginning of a line. It's an English Iam/stress/foot thing I suspect. At the end, it has a better match to the lay of the stress: "We hit somebody / with our brand new Subaru / swerve, squish those turtles" -- but then, that last line needs to be more natureful. Oh, well.
My coworker looks over my shoulder and intones: "Matematical / precision in each snowflake / but not your Haiku."
Cringley's getting screwed, as are we all. The technical aspects of how we're getting screwed are important and we need transparency in our ISPs to help resolve that. Then we could go to an ISP that shapes in the way we want.
But look at who we're talking about. We're talking about ILECs and Cable companies. To some small extent we're talking about mom and pop ISPs, but they'll follow the big leaders (or die).
The ILECs were asked about fiber to the home. They said "give us 200 billion dollars, and we'll take care of it." The US government gave them $200,000,000,000 in various forms. (Look at all those zeros.) And what did they deliver? Squat. What do they say they delivered? DSL! That's basically fiber! Did they deliver it everywhere? No. But they delivered it to everyone rich, so that basically everyone!
I feel like Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride:
Inigo Montoya: Offer me everything I ask for. Count [ILEC]: Anything you want. Inigo Montoya: I want my [$200,000,000,000] back you son of a bitch.
Bad move for AMD; Pointless work; Dumb article
on
AMD's New DRM
·
· Score: 1
Ridiculous. An unbreakable link will soon be here to keep HONEST people from accessing their frame buffers. The rest of us will find a circumvention, because this stuff BY DEFINITION has an open hole. This is just silly, and bad for America's productivity (wasted development effort and wasted cycles on useless code, once it's sold to consumers).
AMD is making a colossal mistake here, because it will lose them support from tech people. They will sell LESS chips this way, it won't solve the real problem, and it will increase the pain for of the common user.
It's an idiotic move, and the conclusion of the article is silly. Yager for a moment believes what they want is possible -- Only an executive unwilling to change his business model would listen to such stupidity. It is not new tech which will solve this problem, it is a police-state control of general purpose computers -- and that is where MPAA/RIAA will attempt to take us rather than change.
I'm seeing a lot of text being written here about how desktop apps are wonderful and webapps are crap, or a fad, or difficult, or slow.
Web apps are not desktop apps. They are different. You have different reasons for writing a desktop app than you do for a web app. Web 2.0 interfaces may be a fad, may be painful to write, etc., but webapps as an entire class just don't fit that bill.
Write once, deploy instantly over an entire organization. Write in the environment you like, and yet the whole org doesn't know you wrote it as a wrapper over a bunch of perl scripts you use as command-line apps. Write something using one database connection (where that's a legal option), and thus, write cheaply. Write using a simple interface with fairly low expectations, so that anyone can use it without training (unless you do a VERY BAD JOB INDEED), it takes minutes instead of hours to write, and can work on every single machine of any sort in the org.
Folks, web apps are the best thing since sliced bread.
Desktop apps are a BITCH. As a linux guy, they mean I have to work under windows. That's a showstopper, right there. As a desktop support nightmare, they're immense. They mean you have to standardize on a version of windows in the org, have to have minimum requirements, have to compete with viruses, self-destructing OS installs, etc. Meanwhile your design phase gets much longer, because expectations are higher.
Yes, complex apps often work much better as standalone. Yes, interface design for them is much more complicated, and thus can be more rewarding. But most companies need VERY FEW of these. Web apps are a much better choice for a huge amount of what most companies do. And as programmers, they allow us to maximize our impact on the productivity of the org. Where you can use web apps, you should. For programmer productivity, LAN supportability, and speed of delivery, it's like night and day.
I have a friend who has a degree from a top-tier institution in another country. I help her with her papers for some classes she's taking here. She's having real trouble (but is improving). The trouble is not with English -- it's with constructing arguments. She has an excellent, world-respected degree. The United States is a rarity in the world for relying so much on papers where you construct arguments. It's a fantastic thing which we should jump up and down and sing about. We don't stress memorization as much as thinking. This makes us better. It also means we do less well on standardized test designed to test memorization.
Yes, plagiarism is bad. Yes. But if they're cutting and pasting paragraphs which make a coherent argument, then even as they cheat, they learn. Catch 'em, good. Don't catch 'em, good. Win, win.
I'm not saying there isn't much we can learn from other schooling traditions, but the papers we make children write are a GOOD thing.
Peugeot has a nice message on their website saying that their cars are not legal in the US, and that if you try an import one, it will be confiscated. Why? What are the US regulations which these fuel efficient European cars don't comply with?
THis is an absurd idea for a couple of reasons, but if those reasons could be overcome, it would be VASTLY better than batteries. I think it would require special plugs on outlets, which would be robots in themselves (to eject the power cord) and it would be crazily Rube Goldberg. On the other hand, it would mean being able to vac the whole house with REAL suction. It's nuts but interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
80 columns are what you need for punch cards. That's why screens are 80 columns wide. Ergo, if you make them wider, you need to design NEW PUNCH CARDS. That could be very expensive.
Punch cards were based on the civil war era dollar bill. I cannot think of a currency in the world with a longer bill size than that (Somebody else know one?), so I can't think where we'd get the model. Maybe we'd make each card the size of an apartment lease.
I'm against it.
AN MSN survey has (at the moment I looked at it) 88% out of 482424 respondents saying Bush should be impeached.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10562904/from/ET
We should be laughing at such a question. "How much obvious criminal activity on the part of your administration does it take before you decide they should be locked up?" What has our society decayed to. We need to eliminate huge numbers of executive orders, review the whole premise of those things in the first place, and lock up our president ten seconds after he violates the constitution, much less the penal code.
Somebody else here said, "if only Pelosi would grow a pair" -- how appropriate.
The answer to your question is "Any." When someone violates the law, he gets punished. Period.
If we impeach the top two power-mad kleptomaniacs we have in the executive branch, we have president Nancy Pelosi. An election of Hillary is LESS likely once that happens.
I'll believe it when I see it. A nickel says if it passes in the House it'll die at the Senate. There's too many extremely evil people who want elections riggable, and want their machines used to do it.
This is a remote controlled walker/lifter -- it's not a robot.
A robot version of this thing would be truly creepy.
- Avoid pointer arithmetic.
But why use C++ if you're not using pointer arithmetic? If you're not doing that, go to Java. I know this sounds silly, and it opens religious issues, but (aside from legacy apps, like this one) why would I want to use C++ if I'm not doing that?
I use C because it's small, fast, convenient and portable. I can code something tiny quickly.
I use Java because it's an object oriented language that helps with complex app coding.
I use C++ because I want some of that Java stuff, but I want it to bind to my memory model more realistically. ie. Pointer arithmetic.
When AT&T merged with Bellsouth, they agreed to Net Neutrality for 30 months. I'll bet, because this is the pattern with the ILECs and particularly SBC and AT&T (SBC and AT&T merged), that they do their darnedest to get tollbooth legislation in before the window ends. Why? Why not wait? Because these guys just absolutely do things that way. If they do something above-board and honest, it leaves them with a bad taste in their mouths.
I give that legislation (if it passes) 29 months from the merger date. If we get past 30 months, it'll never pass.
When we're just starting a relationship, we're usually looking for validation of our decision. We see reasons why this is a good thing and that this will work -- we don't see what others sometimes do, that this is a crazy, self-destructive decision which will alienate our friends, and cost us a year of happiness as we extricate ourselves. To have a rule of thumb is a VERY GOOD THING. To adhere to it -- trust it -- and let it force us to make the right decision is a VERY GOOD THING.
When we look for a job, many of us us the Dilbert principle. If there are a few Dilbert cartoons on the cubes, work there. If there are a lot or none, don't. (None means that management won't allow them, and people are scared, too many means the company is seriously pooched.) This is a rule. No matter how nice things look, if it doesn't pass the Dilbert test, we don't take it.
The toilet seat thing seems just as useful and important or more so. If she doesn't immediately see that there shouldn't be an issue there, run.
Ok, I've been reading slashdot. I've seen the articles.
So I glean this:
Disconnect the valves from the cam, squirt alcohol in the engines to cool it before compression, run it with biodiesel, put it in a hybrid, and make it talk to other cars -- we should have 100mpg no problem.
Fine. So can you wake me when someone _actually_ sells a car with honestly good gas mileage?
So now you can download at the limit of the bandwidth of the equipment serving your area. Oh, wait, you can already do that.
So CATV guys will have to put in equipment capable of handling more than 10 times this speed upstream, assuming they're going to have 80 customers on this system, and oversubscribe at 8 to 1. Except they'll sell more than that in lots of areas, and they WON'T put in equipment fast enough to handle more than a few of these in the first place.
That won't stop them from selling it, though.
Well, if they do a decent job at this, in the next version, once they have the bugs out, they could strongarm the mozilla organization into including it in the firefox download. They could muscle them by, for instance, paying them.
That would go a long way toward maiking this idea fly.
True, "Security Isn't Just Avoiding Microsoft", but that's a helluva good start.
When we optimize code, we don't look in the part of the code that the program spends 5% of it's time doing, we look where it spends 80%. Microsoft stuff is incredibly insecure, both because of bad design and because there's little in the way of restrictions on amount of crap those boxes do.
Scrub them out, and a huge amount of security issues go away.
Then, THEN, you worry about the other stuff. ANd yes, then you actually DO worry about that other stuff.
It's a commercial product and a helluva lot less satisfying than what you want. You WANT to take these guys out back and shoot them once in the head, but all you can really do is get them to stop calling.
Get a telezapper or similar product. http://www.telezapper.com/
It sends a "This number is disconnected" tone. Humans ignore it. Automated fax and telemarketer systems note it and remove your number from their database. Why call something which is known to be gone?
It's cheap, and it works fairly well.
Less mess in your local alley, too, though I'd still prefer the stronger solution.
Woa -- I think you're off base here on two levels.
One -- If you can't win, you still have to do it. You cannot let crimes go, even if you cannot succeed in convicting. The problem is not this president/VP. The problem is the next one. To not impeach is to say "if the congress isn't dominated by the other house, you can do anything you want."
Two -- Cheny's not the target. Cheney's going to have to defend himself, and his interactions with the president will come out. It's at least possible that real solid evidence against the president will emerge.
This isn't stupid, it's both the right thing to do, and may help land the big one.
Besides, even Republicans hate Cheney. He's an easier target.
T1 is not the same as DSL.
DSL is a 2 wire system, as it's just a POTS line. T1s have a pair for transmit and a pair for receive.
T1s have traditionally cost more than DSL and thus have an expectation of reliability. The expectation translates into extra workers watching, and better equipment used in it.
More wires = more space on equipment and on poles.
Better equipment = more money.
More expectations = more payrole.
Remember price per quality is a non-linear relationship.
Yes, unless it has a monopoly, at which point it's subject to intense regulation.
Ok, shouldn't your signature be
'Someone says "Haiku" / ten blocks away, and I go / all drifting snowflakes'?
If the pattern is 5/7/5, "Somebody" bumps you right out. Slice out that extra syllable. Besides, 'Someone' just sounds more poetic than somebody, at least at the beginning of a line. It's an English Iam/stress/foot thing I suspect. At the end, it has a better match to the lay of the stress: "We hit somebody / with our brand new Subaru / swerve, squish those turtles" -- but then, that last line needs to be more natureful. Oh, well.
My coworker looks over my shoulder and intones: "Matematical / precision in each snowflake / but not your Haiku."
Cringley's getting screwed, as are we all. The technical aspects of how we're getting screwed are important and we need transparency in our ISPs to help resolve that. Then we could go to an ISP that shapes in the way we want.
But look at who we're talking about. We're talking about ILECs and Cable companies. To some small extent we're talking about mom and pop ISPs, but they'll follow the big leaders (or die).
The ILECs were asked about fiber to the home. They said "give us 200 billion dollars, and we'll take care of it." The US government gave them $200,000,000,000 in various forms. (Look at all those zeros.) And what did they deliver? Squat. What do they say they delivered? DSL! That's basically fiber! Did they deliver it everywhere? No. But they delivered it to everyone rich, so that basically everyone!
I feel like Inigo Montoya in the Princess Bride:
Inigo Montoya: Offer me everything I ask for.
Count [ILEC]: Anything you want.
Inigo Montoya: I want my [$200,000,000,000] back you son of a bitch.
Ridiculous. An unbreakable link will soon be here to keep HONEST people from accessing their frame buffers. The rest of us will find a circumvention, because this stuff BY DEFINITION has an open hole. This is just silly, and bad for America's productivity (wasted development effort and wasted cycles on useless code, once it's sold to consumers).
AMD is making a colossal mistake here, because it will lose them support from tech people. They will sell LESS chips this way, it won't solve the real problem, and it will increase the pain for of the common user.
It's an idiotic move, and the conclusion of the article is silly. Yager for a moment believes what they want is possible -- Only an executive unwilling to change his business model would listen to such stupidity. It is not new tech which will solve this problem, it is a police-state control of general purpose computers -- and that is where MPAA/RIAA will attempt to take us rather than change.
I'm seeing a lot of text being written here about how desktop apps are wonderful and webapps are crap, or a fad, or difficult, or slow.
Web apps are not desktop apps. They are different. You have different reasons for writing a desktop app than you do for a web app. Web 2.0 interfaces may be a fad, may be painful to write, etc., but webapps as an entire class just don't fit that bill.
Write once, deploy instantly over an entire organization. Write in the environment you like, and yet the whole org doesn't know you wrote it as a wrapper over a bunch of perl scripts you use as command-line apps. Write something using one database connection (where that's a legal option), and thus, write cheaply. Write using a simple interface with fairly low expectations, so that anyone can use it without training (unless you do a VERY BAD JOB INDEED), it takes minutes instead of hours to write, and can work on every single machine of any sort in the org.
Folks, web apps are the best thing since sliced bread.
Desktop apps are a BITCH. As a linux guy, they mean I have to work under windows. That's a showstopper, right there. As a desktop support nightmare, they're immense. They mean you have to standardize on a version of windows in the org, have to have minimum requirements, have to compete with viruses, self-destructing OS installs, etc. Meanwhile your design phase gets much longer, because expectations are higher.
Yes, complex apps often work much better as standalone. Yes, interface design for them is much more complicated, and thus can be more rewarding. But most companies need VERY FEW of these. Web apps are a much better choice for a huge amount of what most companies do. And as programmers, they allow us to maximize our impact on the productivity of the org. Where you can use web apps, you should. For programmer productivity, LAN supportability, and speed of delivery, it's like night and day.
I have a friend who has a degree from a top-tier institution in another country. I help her with her papers for some classes she's taking here. She's having real trouble (but is improving). The trouble is not with English -- it's with constructing arguments. She has an excellent, world-respected degree. The United States is a rarity in the world for relying so much on papers where you construct arguments. It's a fantastic thing which we should jump up and down and sing about. We don't stress memorization as much as thinking. This makes us better. It also means we do less well on standardized test designed to test memorization.
Yes, plagiarism is bad. Yes. But if they're cutting and pasting paragraphs which make a coherent argument, then even as they cheat, they learn. Catch 'em, good. Don't catch 'em, good. Win, win.
I'm not saying there isn't much we can learn from other schooling traditions, but the papers we make children write are a GOOD thing.
Peugeot has a nice message on their website saying that their cars are not legal in the US, and that if you try an import one, it will be confiscated. Why? What are the US regulations which these fuel efficient European cars don't comply with?
Anybody know?
I don't know what the record time to claiming the X prize is, but I'll bet this beats it. I give it six months TOPS.
THis is an absurd idea for a couple of reasons, but if those reasons could be overcome, it would be VASTLY better than batteries. I think it would require special plugs on outlets, which would be robots in themselves (to eject the power cord) and it would be crazily Rube Goldberg. On the other hand, it would mean being able to vac the whole house with REAL suction. It's nuts but interesting.