I looked at your webpage. That R850R is a brilliant commuter weapon with tons of pull at street speeds---hardly "the most mundane of motorcycles" except maybe in looks.
Which raises an interesting point: your Roadster has a 700W alternator, enormous by most standards. How much power are all these fancy electric geegaws like heads up displays going to draw? Will sorry little riceburners (or for that matter, Airheads) be able to run them?
The attitude I see in car drivers towards motorcycles taking advantage of their vehicles' superior acceleration and maneuverability is almost always along the lines of "How dare he, when I'm stuck here?" Yes, a bike can outaccelerate your car, probably by a dramatic margin. That means a motorcyclist can find and take advantage of a hole in traffic much more effectively than can a car. Cars do move in and out of traffic in the same manner as motorcycles, but they do it so ponderously that it hardly draws the eye.
To bring this back on topic, I don't think I'd want an IHD while runnning my morning gauntlet^W commute. Maybe, at most, a little number to tell me what gear I'm in, maybe a little dot to tell me when I'm near my shift RPM, and a little dot when the radar detector goes off.
The first advice I got about cagers was, "Ride as though they don't see you." This seemed like a great idea at the time. But in competitive urban traffic, it turns out that the correct advice is: "Drive like they do see you, and are actively trying to kill you." I've had just a few too many SUV drivers actually grin at me as they continued their slow merge into my lane. Gotta learn how to kick a door.
Or better yet, a way to switch modes. Even in the corners, a little dot that comes on at my shift point would be helpful. Maybe even a small digit for my gear indicator. Most racebike instrument clusters already have a programmable shift light; moving it up to the helmet would hardly be a bad thing.
The helmet will accelerate towards the ground at 9.8 m/s^2, so if it is about 2.2 meters off the ground, about 6.6 m/s.
Helmets are designed to protect your head from three things: the elements, the impact against the ground, and the slide along the ground. No helmet will protect you if you decide to go into a tree headfirst at road speeds.
And at the end of a month, he will probably know a thing or two about managing video streams, caching, fs tuning, how TiVo works in the first place, and probably a thing or two about building small databases with large BLOBs attached, and maybe start figuring out how to network the FreeVo together with the rest of his LAN so he can watch CNN from his laptop on the porch.
At the end of the same month, however, one who just buys a TiVo will probably know how to watch television.
Whatever happened to taking on a challenge just because it's there?
Accepted. There's a Heinlein short story you should read, called "The Roads Must Roll." I try to remember that one every time I start thinking my job is the reason the world turns.
you should be greatful that we have other things to worry about than the 8th grade bullshit you do!
So, I take it you are in the ninth grade now?
This is the sort of arrogance that, when combined with laziness and a general lack of competence, leads to fuckups in the Chernobyl category. I have seen this sort of egomania crop up in nearly every field, where people in that field who know a small amount of what is going on assume they are the reason their department exists, their department is the reason their industry exists, and to support and glorify that industry is the purpose of the entire world.
This is shortsighed in a way that is not merely spectacular: it is profound. Developmentally, this is how three-year-olds see the world. JohnwheeleR, you are not the center of the universe. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you may accomplish something worthwhile.
Special ops teams have 6--7 members because that's the biggest team it is practical to deliver/extract in one shot using one smallish vehicle. It is the smallest practical team size for many missions requiring less than a platoon. If two or three is the right number for a job, then two or three will be sent, and if the number is three, you can bet your all one of them is the mission leader.
Disclaimer: I ain't in special ops.
Re:SCO's indemnification scam
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 1
Almost forgot: I found a great quote from Linus today:
"If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution."
SCO's indemnification scam
on
SCOrched Earth
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· Score: 1
SCO has been publicly baiting IBM into indemnifying its customers, and here's why: the day after IBM indemnifies its customers, SCO will sue said customers, thereby effectively suing IBM thousands of times over. Please bear in mind that SCO has already subpoenaed IBM for a list of all their AIX and Linux customers.
Besides, it's a lovely bit of FUD, trying to get IBM's customers to say, "Gee, I'm not so confident in this vendor's product anymore."
Or you we would spawn a generation of premature optimisors.
An excellent point, and one that bit me in my youth. Atari BASIC required (I think) seven bytes for a new line but only two bytes to separate statements on one line with a semicolon. I got into the habit of piling as much work onto a single line (or into single statement) as possible, and I carried that habit forward into "real" environments and programming languages later on. I had never heard "trust the compiler" before. Once I read Code Complete, I was a changed man.
A good eye, had Anthony Hyman. The wired home isn't quite here, but the computer as information appliance seems to have migrated from Dad's hobby shop and into the living room
I was in my mother's attic over Thanksgiving, and came across my box of Atari 400 stuff. Yep, among the books was De Re Atari. That book changed my life: before, I was just doggedly typing in BASIC programs from magazines; after, I was inventing programs, hand-coding machine language DATA statements, PEEKing and POKEing all sorts of funky effects onto my TV screen. I wrote an arcade game to play with my brother (and rigged my "fire" button to help me cheat to win). I did player-missile graphics. I watched in horror as my computer rebooted when I typed RUN against code I'd spent hours putting together. I cringed to read code I'd written just months before. I was hooked.
Now I play with computers for a living, and it ain't nearly as much fun: who can keep an entire computer's architecture in their head anymore?
It amazes me how thoroughly 1984's personal computer futurists missed the idea of an internet. From one of the articles:
When it comes time to list the century's great orphaned ideas, the computerized checkbook will rank with the lava lamp. I can't remember the last time I wrote a physical check to pay a bill.
"Family budget spreadsheet" programs exist because somewhere along the line software makers got confused between "the American family" and "the limited partnership." Quicken. Quicken Quicken Quicken.
Next we come to the computerized electronic calendar...If I relied only on what I could put in an electronic address book, my personal relationships, would fall apart. The other problem, of course, is that electronic address books don't fit in your pocket. Not only did he miss the PDA, he cited the reason he missed the PDA.
A subset of this silliness [on-line chatting] involves phone-line news services... At the average rate of $25 per hour, you can order up in just a few hours the equivalent of a year's subscription to the New York Times, which gives you grocery coupons and stuff with which to line bird cages. Hoo boy. I pay about $50/month for good DSL and read the news from five different sources every day, cross check two or three different weather reports, and waste unlimited amounts of time here. This guy didn't just miss the Internet, he missed BBSes.
I'm wondering which of today's slammed-on technology waves will actually take hold ten years from now. If I could figure it out, I'd be rich enough to pay somebody to waste time here for me.
The longer programs, especially THE CITADEL OF PERSHU and CHATEAU GAILLARD, take up a fair amount of memory: almost 20K for the first, and close to 25K for the second. If memory is in short supply on your system, see Chapter 19 for some hints on how to "compress" the amount of memory the programs require.
If more programmers today realized what can be done in that amount of memory, or better yet had to spend a few months programming in such an environment before being allowed to touch a "real" computer, I'm thinking we would have far more stable and efficient software today.
As an aside, it was interesting to see the introduction to this book making note of the variants of BASIC out there, and how to adapt the programs to each one. I was an Atari bigot back then (at the righteous age of 12), and remember ignoring articles that primarily targeted other, inferior, machines.
Whenever I get fill out a form that asks me for my race, if there is a box for "Other_____" I check it and write "honkey" (and for country I write "Estados Unidos", but that's another thing).
Hopefully I've cheered up some poor bored clerk. Even more hopefully, they went ahead and entered it into the computer, skewing their marketing demographics ever so slightly.
In truth, if it's a government agency's form, they probably held a meeting to decide whether to classify me as white or to add a record to the ethnicity table. See, no matter what a person tells you their race is, that's how you have to enter them. Billy D. Williams could stand in front of you and tell you he's an Eskimo, and that's how you have to enter him. If I haul my lilly-white ass down to the health clinic and tell them I'm black, they have to check the box that says I'm black. Hell, even if Michael Jackson tells you he's black, you have to enter it that way.
Time was in the U.S., the government decided what you were. Mixed-race problems were handily solved by considering any "dilution" of the white race to be overriding: even fifteen years ago an observably white Mississippian lost a court battle against a state law that said that since her great great great grandmother was black, she was black!
The whole "white paper"/"colored paper" thing happened at Harvard University around then, too. Someone scribbled out "colored paper" and wrote "paper of color." You'll recall that "person of color" was one of the first pitiful late-1980's PC stab at fucking up everything.
Okay. So, when I was working for Georgia Public Health on some clinic management software, we decided that reindexing all those Clipper.NTX files should be a distributed task. One machine was set up as the controller, and other PCs on the LAN asked it which table to reindex next. During the implementation discussions, we always referred to the machine doing the telling as the master and the machines doing the work as the slaves.
The team on this project was about half black and half white. I was having an animated discussion with another of the (white) programmers when a couple of the (black) programmers came in. They watched the discussion for a little while. I looked up at them, and one said, "Don't say slave."
"No?" I asked.
"Nuh uh," he replied, with just slightly too straight a face.
So I bet my career: I turned to the other (white) programmer and said, "Fine. So the Massah machine needs to hold record counts in the array so it can..." and everybody cracked up. We discussed terminology a bit, and decided to call the controlling box the "controller" and the indexing boxes the "indexers." About 70% of the folks actually using our application were black, we figured, and not too savvy on computer terminology, so fuck it: we caved, just to be on the polite side.
Moral: we all had a good laugh. Here in Atlanta proper, there are more white than blacks. In state government, there is plenty of minority representation. And we all get along pretty damned well---I was voted the second whitest white boy in the office by the (mostly black) administrative staff (and damn was the whitest white boy pissed).
I'm increasingly convinced that the people we're trying desperately not to piss off are not minorities, but liberal white jackasses who think they're under some sort of obligation to rescue all those poor defenseless minorities from oppressive words. Most actual black people can look after themselves, and, having better things to worry about, tend not to give a damn.
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Which raises an interesting point: your Roadster has a 700W alternator, enormous by most standards. How much power are all these fancy electric geegaws like heads up displays going to draw? Will sorry little riceburners (or for that matter, Airheads) be able to run them?
To bring this back on topic, I don't think I'd want an IHD while runnning my morning gauntlet^W commute. Maybe, at most, a little number to tell me what gear I'm in, maybe a little dot to tell me when I'm near my shift RPM, and a little dot when the radar detector goes off.
And yet again I've responded to an AC.
The first advice I got about cagers was, "Ride as though they don't see you." This seemed like a great idea at the time. But in competitive urban traffic, it turns out that the correct advice is: "Drive like they do see you, and are actively trying to kill you." I've had just a few too many SUV drivers actually grin at me as they continued their slow merge into my lane. Gotta learn how to kick a door.
Or better yet, a way to switch modes. Even in the corners, a little dot that comes on at my shift point would be helpful. Maybe even a small digit for my gear indicator. Most racebike instrument clusters already have a programmable shift light; moving it up to the helmet would hardly be a bad thing.
Helmets are designed to protect your head from three things: the elements, the impact against the ground, and the slide along the ground. No helmet will protect you if you decide to go into a tree headfirst at road speeds.
And at the end of a month, he will probably know a thing or two about managing video streams, caching, fs tuning, how TiVo works in the first place, and probably a thing or two about building small databases with large BLOBs attached, and maybe start figuring out how to network the FreeVo together with the rest of his LAN so he can watch CNN from his laptop on the porch.
At the end of the same month, however, one who just buys a TiVo will probably know how to watch television.
Whatever happened to taking on a challenge just because it's there?
Accepted. There's a Heinlein short story you should read, called "The Roads Must Roll." I try to remember that one every time I start thinking my job is the reason the world turns.
It figures that you would be.
So, I take it you are in the ninth grade now?
This is the sort of arrogance that, when combined with laziness and a general lack of competence, leads to fuckups in the Chernobyl category. I have seen this sort of egomania crop up in nearly every field, where people in that field who know a small amount of what is going on assume they are the reason their department exists, their department is the reason their industry exists, and to support and glorify that industry is the purpose of the entire world.
This is shortsighed in a way that is not merely spectacular: it is profound. Developmentally, this is how three-year-olds see the world. JohnwheeleR, you are not the center of the universe. The sooner you realize that, the sooner you may accomplish something worthwhile.
Disclaimer: I ain't in special ops.
Besides, it's a lovely bit of FUD, trying to get IBM's customers to say, "Gee, I'm not so confident in this vendor's product anymore."
This won't affect my digital camera, but it will affect many portable .mp3 players.
This is probably the greatest victory Microsoft could ever have handed Open Source.
An excellent point, and one that bit me in my youth. Atari BASIC required (I think) seven bytes for a new line but only two bytes to separate statements on one line with a semicolon. I got into the habit of piling as much work onto a single line (or into single statement) as possible, and I carried that habit forward into "real" environments and programming languages later on. I had never heard "trust the compiler" before. Once I read Code Complete, I was a changed man.
A good eye, had Anthony Hyman. The wired home isn't quite here, but the computer as information appliance seems to have migrated from Dad's hobby shop and into the living room
Now I play with computers for a living, and it ain't nearly as much fun: who can keep an entire computer's architecture in their head anymore?
I'm wondering which of today's slammed-on technology waves will actually take hold ten years from now. If I could figure it out, I'd be rich enough to pay somebody to waste time here for me.
As an aside, it was interesting to see the introduction to this book making note of the variants of BASIC out there, and how to adapt the programs to each one. I was an Atari bigot back then (at the righteous age of 12), and remember ignoring articles that primarily targeted other, inferior, machines.
Nearly all blacks whose families have been in the United States for at least three generations have at least one ancestor who was a slave.
Hopefully I've cheered up some poor bored clerk. Even more hopefully, they went ahead and entered it into the computer, skewing their marketing demographics ever so slightly.
In truth, if it's a government agency's form, they probably held a meeting to decide whether to classify me as white or to add a record to the ethnicity table. See, no matter what a person tells you their race is, that's how you have to enter them. Billy D. Williams could stand in front of you and tell you he's an Eskimo, and that's how you have to enter him. If I haul my lilly-white ass down to the health clinic and tell them I'm black, they have to check the box that says I'm black. Hell, even if Michael Jackson tells you he's black, you have to enter it that way.
Time was in the U.S., the government decided what you were. Mixed-race problems were handily solved by considering any "dilution" of the white race to be overriding: even fifteen years ago an observably white Mississippian lost a court battle against a state law that said that since her great great great grandmother was black, she was black!
The whole "white paper"/"colored paper" thing happened at Harvard University around then, too. Someone scribbled out "colored paper" and wrote "paper of color." You'll recall that "person of color" was one of the first pitiful late-1980's PC stab at fucking up everything.
Now you're just niggle-baiting.
Or maybe to "troll/target"?
The team on this project was about half black and half white. I was having an animated discussion with another of the (white) programmers when a couple of the (black) programmers came in. They watched the discussion for a little while. I looked up at them, and one said, "Don't say slave."
"No?" I asked.
"Nuh uh," he replied, with just slightly too straight a face.
So I bet my career: I turned to the other (white) programmer and said, "Fine. So the Massah machine needs to hold record counts in the array so it can..." and everybody cracked up. We discussed terminology a bit, and decided to call the controlling box the "controller" and the indexing boxes the "indexers." About 70% of the folks actually using our application were black, we figured, and not too savvy on computer terminology, so fuck it: we caved, just to be on the polite side.
Moral: we all had a good laugh. Here in Atlanta proper, there are more white than blacks. In state government, there is plenty of minority representation. And we all get along pretty damned well---I was voted the second whitest white boy in the office by the (mostly black) administrative staff (and damn was the whitest white boy pissed).
I'm increasingly convinced that the people we're trying desperately not to piss off are not minorities, but liberal white jackasses who think they're under some sort of obligation to rescue all those poor defenseless minorities from oppressive words. Most actual black people can look after themselves, and, having better things to worry about, tend not to give a damn.