I was demoing mag stripe readers attached to PCs 20 years ago (OK, I exaggerate, I think it was actually 19 years ago). It was entertaining getting volunteers to swipe their cards and 'accidentally' reveal their balances. But even then it was embarassing having French people repeatdely ask me why I was demonstrating such outdated equipment when they'd already been using smart cards for a while.
...tells me if I'm in range of a wireless network, tells me if there is activity on an ethernet network, provides 1GB of storage via USB, tells me if a serial port is working, functions as a logic probe and multimeter and provides a 3V and 5V power supply (not high current, just enough to provide input to a logic gate) and fits in my pocket. If there's room it'd be nice if it were a wireless gateway and serial over bluteooth dongle. In other words, I want a Leatherman for the early part of the 21st century, not some medieval hacking and slashing tool.
In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off-- what are they going to hear?
They're going to hear some sad kid with a defective personality who thinks that by buying a few speed metal records they can make themselves somehow 'different' and more 'interesting' than other people, and who is so inadequate that they have to force this onto other people via their ringtones rather than using vibrate mode like other civilized people.
Having said that, I think that some of the slow bits of 'Master of Puppets' would make great ringtones.
...there is a single atom. Orbiting it is an electron. When it's in a spin up state I consider it to contain a 1. When spin down it's a zero. There: a prototype of a multi exaterapetabit/mm^3 storage device at the end of my nose. Oh wait - I might be able to hype this up more. Oh yes...it's an electron, so it's in a superposition state. It's a multi exapetaterabyte/mm^3 quantum computer at the end of my nose. Surely/. have got to publish this story now.
Reminds me of a project I was working on years ago. We needed to represent a bunch of data as a directed acyclic graph - typically with a bounded number of edges per object. A good way to represent connectivity in such a graph is by storing pointers in the graph vertoces pointing along the directed edges of the graph. With N objects and E edges you need something like O(N+E) storage to represent such a thing. But my colleague had read that you can use adjacency matrices to represent graphs and decided to use them. This uses O(N^2) storage and means many of the algorithms take O(N^2) time instead of O(N) (or worse, O(N) time instead of O(1)). To me this was an obviously brain dead decision to make. But when I pointed this out the guy starts quoting Knuth on me (or Hoare, or whoever) and how it wasn't time to optimize yet. So the moral is: one man's optimization is another man's choice of algorithm. (Of course I was right in this case...)
I thought to myself, what a dumb story. Maybe I'll post a story on Pentium earrings. On a whim I did a search. The moral is: no matter how dumb you think your idea is, someone has actually done it before you.
Yes, I agree. I've argued for a long time that short variable names means that simple expressions can be grouped together by the visual system as a single 'gestalt' or salient feature. Essentially it means that you can look at an expression with short variable names and parse them without your eyes having to scan. Long variables force you to scan the length of expression slowing down comprehension. I also think it's easier to keep short expressions in short-term visual memory making it easier to read code where you have to flick your eye back and forth between lines whose functionality is related.
And obviously one can advocate the use of short variable names without arguing for their use everywhere.
Note that generally "const" isn't there for optimization. It's for safety. For example if you have a pointer to a const struct the compiler can't make the assumption that the object pointed to isn't going to change (through aliasing). It can only report an error if the programmer tries to use that particular pointer to change the data. There are some situations where const makes a difference but many programmers don't realize what those are.
Backspace didn't work out of the box? What did you install, "Larry's Linux Distro Extraordinaire"?
At work we use an older RedHat (5 years old) and are evaluating a recent SUSE. (Can't remember the version numbers. In fact, I don't know how to find the distro version number, only the kernel version.) Backspace problems on both. USB mouse problems on both (note, the mouse was added after the video card was configured). Can't get sound working on either - though I'm sure one of my colleagues here would help me if I asked. This is a pretty standard Dell Precision machine. I think you're feigning surprise. I work with some pretty hard core hackers who've been doing systems programming for years. They are often able to fix my problems but they don't say things like "it's a complete surprise to me your backspace key doesn't work". In fact, they proceed to give long explanations for it talking about decades old legacy.
I've been using Linux since before 1994. It's improved a lot - especially in the video card configuration dept (remember the days when you could ruin your monitor?). Meanwhile Windows (which started out much easier than Linux) has also become quite a lot easier and has caught up with Linux on reliability.
I'd also like to add that I've become much lazier about these things. I'm not interested in spending more than a few seconds trying to fix these problems. I haven't had to spend longer than that on any Windows XP issue except for (1) apparent hardware failure and (2) the Belkin print server thing that I really ought to get a refund for.
Try installing on a computer with an onboard IDE controller that windows doesn't support.
For every 100 devices Linux doesn't support you'll find something Windows doesn't support. I know nothing about Promise IDE controllers. I find it curious they're not supported by Windows. But I'll tentatively believe what you say is for real. I just know that there are many more devices out there not supported by Linux including many standard off-the-shelf parts from CompUSA or Circuit City. (I don't blame Linux developers at all - the vendors refuse to write Linux drivers - but at the end of the day I have to purchase what works, not what would work in an ideal world.)
...only allow device drivers to be loaded from floppies
Eh? The only thing I've used a floppy for in recent years is reinstalling DOS and Windows 95 so I can play some retro games. Are you a time traveler from 1985?
To install Windows XP, say, requires inserting the disk, agreeing to the EULA (that may have involved the oh-so-difficult F8 key, I can't remember which key they chose to mean 'accept') and at some point setting the timezone and password.
Last time I installed Linux (about a year ago) I had to spend hours scouring the web looking for this or that driver and hacking scripts to make sure the devices actually did the right thing. In fact, plenty of my hardware simply doesn't run under Linux. Hell, if I just plug a USB mouse into the Linux workstation I am forced to use at work it's completely ignored. Someone has to edit the XF86Config. I simply can't be bothered. After years of wasting hours of my life here and there hacking this and that config file to make Linux do what I want I've reached my limit and will do it no more. Well, I made one exception - I had to modify a few.*rc files to make the backspace key work correctly. It's astonishing that after over a decade of Linux development there are still mainstream distros for which the backspace key doesn't work out of the box. So don't give us all this BS about how easy it is to install Linux.
With Windows I didn't have to worry about drivers for anything - 90% of drivers I've needed came with the OS, the rest come as easy to install driver disks. In the last 5 years I can recall only one piece of hardware that I haven't been able to get working with Windows (a Belkin print server).
If you weren't willing to pay $102.50, then why did you place a bid of $125?
From an economic standpoint we all try to maximize utility. Part of doing this is paying the lowest you can get away with. You bid $125 because you know that such a payment would increase your utility. But most people like to maximize their utility, not just get a good but suboptimal result. Having your bid raised in this way moves you from optimality. Even the dumbest eBay user intuitively knows this so your question is a little weird.
However, a singular instance of an apple traveling toward the earth, or even a thousand instances...
How many would be enough for you? If you say N I'll modify my statement from one to N. If no N will satisfy you then the word 'gravity' serves little purpose and we might as well drop it from the lexicon.
PS I'd love to do a poll among random people on your "Most people consider gravity to be..." statement to see how many actually agree. I certainly don't thing that the facts that (1) gravity effects every type of matter and (2) gravity follows an inverse square law are actually built into the meaning of the word 'gravity'. For example someone might find a type of particle that doesn't attract other particles and that wouldn't force us to change our usage of the word. Sure, physicists would have a bit of work to do but even they would probably continue to call gravity 'gravity'.
It could very well be that there is absolutely no such thing as gravity
I hold out the apple, open my fingers, the apple falls. Ergo, gravity exists, by definition. If you're worried about the nonexistence of gravity you're using a definition of the word that doesn't correspond to common (or technical) usage. You might as well say that happiness doesn't exist, just happy people. To say such a thing is a linguistic error.
Nobody writes a phrase like that unless they're bogus. That's the kind of language you get in endorsements for the latest diet fad or transcendental meditation technique.
Should? Where the hell do you get a 'should' from? Why shouldn't French include English words? Where do you derive these values? From God? From an ancient tablet forged of gold?
which makes English look weird
Chinese looks weird to me. Turkish looks weird to me. Pitjantjatjara looks weird to me. Are languages degenerate if they look weird?
Now how would English look if you start to you use massively words like "otcha"...
It would look like it had words like "otcha", "guan", "wakabe" etc. in it. What kind of answer can I give? It would look fine if I got used to them.
Do you even know what 'degeneration' means? It certainly doesn't mean "increasing efficiency of communication by finding compact representations of frequently repeated phrases", a feature found in the evolution of every single natural language on the planet, including the degenerate form of Latin commonly called 'French' by English speaking peoples.
Don't ask me. I'm not imaginative enough either. But as long there are smart people out there who know how to use useless looking stuff (and there are plenty) I say we leave them to it.
Well I'd like to see both. But I'd like experience a whole bunch of things in my lifetime. Stuff like the ice cliffs of Europa and and its sub-ice oceans, the oily oceans on Titan, the view of Jupiter as it hangs in the sky from Io and so on. It isn't going to happen in person. But I can do it by proxy with unmanned probes. People aren't traveling to Titan or Europa in my lifetime. And it's not just about pretty pictures. Each of these things offers interesting science too. I'm not convinced that a manned presence in space is going to help with these things much.
there are some behaviors that don't work as advertised in a VMWare
Like what? There can't be many things that don't work seeing as I can run many hardware abusing DOS games in VMWare and Virtual PC. I can imagine timings might be off, but not much else. Certainly core CPU behavior must be pretty well identical.
I was there. From where I was Scarlett Johansson's cleavage was clearly visible. To be honest, I hadn't realized she had anything significant in that department up until that point. But if you find a picture - check out the awful 80s hairdo she was sporting.
Slashdot Mirror
I was demoing mag stripe readers attached to PCs 20 years ago (OK, I exaggerate, I think it was actually 19 years ago). It was entertaining getting volunteers to swipe their cards and 'accidentally' reveal their balances. But even then it was embarassing having French people repeatdely ask me why I was demonstrating such outdated equipment when they'd already been using smart cards for a while.
...tells me if I'm in range of a wireless network, tells me if there is activity on an ethernet network, provides 1GB of storage via USB, tells me if a serial port is working, functions as a logic probe and multimeter and provides a 3V and 5V power supply (not high current, just enough to provide input to a logic gate) and fits in my pocket. If there's room it'd be nice if it were a wireless gateway and serial over bluteooth dongle. In other words, I want a Leatherman for the early part of the 21st century, not some medieval hacking and slashing tool.
Having said that, I think that some of the slow bits of 'Master of Puppets' would make great ringtones.
...there is a single atom. Orbiting it is an electron. When it's in a spin up state I consider it to contain a 1. When spin down it's a zero. There: a prototype of a multi exaterapetabit/mm^3 storage device at the end of my nose. Oh wait - I might be able to hype this up more. Oh yes...it's an electron, so it's in a superposition state. It's a multi exapetaterabyte/mm^3 quantum computer at the end of my nose. Surely /. have got to publish this story now.
Reminds me of a project I was working on years ago. We needed to represent a bunch of data as a directed acyclic graph - typically with a bounded number of edges per object. A good way to represent connectivity in such a graph is by storing pointers in the graph vertoces pointing along the directed edges of the graph. With N objects and E edges you need something like O(N+E) storage to represent such a thing. But my colleague had read that you can use adjacency matrices to represent graphs and decided to use them. This uses O(N^2) storage and means many of the algorithms take O(N^2) time instead of O(N) (or worse, O(N) time instead of O(1)). To me this was an obviously brain dead decision to make. But when I pointed this out the guy starts quoting Knuth on me (or Hoare, or whoever) and how it wasn't time to optimize yet. So the moral is: one man's optimization is another man's choice of algorithm. (Of course I was right in this case...)
I thought to myself, what a dumb story. Maybe I'll post a story on Pentium earrings. On a whim I did a search. The moral is: no matter how dumb you think your idea is, someone has actually done it before you.
And obviously one can advocate the use of short variable names without arguing for their use everywhere.
I've been using Linux since before 1994. It's improved a lot - especially in the video card configuration dept (remember the days when you could ruin your monitor?). Meanwhile Windows (which started out much easier than Linux) has also become quite a lot easier and has caught up with Linux on reliability.
I'd also like to add that I've become much lazier about these things. I'm not interested in spending more than a few seconds trying to fix these problems. I haven't had to spend longer than that on any Windows XP issue except for (1) apparent hardware failure and (2) the Belkin print server thing that I really ought to get a refund for.
Last time I installed Linux (about a year ago) I had to spend hours scouring the web looking for this or that driver and hacking scripts to make sure the devices actually did the right thing. In fact, plenty of my hardware simply doesn't run under Linux. Hell, if I just plug a USB mouse into the Linux workstation I am forced to use at work it's completely ignored. Someone has to edit the XF86Config. I simply can't be bothered. After years of wasting hours of my life here and there hacking this and that config file to make Linux do what I want I've reached my limit and will do it no more. Well, I made one exception - I had to modify a few .*rc files to make the backspace key work correctly. It's astonishing that after over a decade of Linux development there are still mainstream distros for which the backspace key doesn't work out of the box. So don't give us all this BS about how easy it is to install Linux.
With Windows I didn't have to worry about drivers for anything - 90% of drivers I've needed came with the OS, the rest come as easy to install driver disks. In the last 5 years I can recall only one piece of hardware that I haven't been able to get working with Windows (a Belkin print server).
PS I'd love to do a poll among random people on your "Most people consider gravity to be..." statement to see how many actually agree. I certainly don't thing that the facts that (1) gravity effects every type of matter and (2) gravity follows an inverse square law are actually built into the meaning of the word 'gravity'. For example someone might find a type of particle that doesn't attract other particles and that wouldn't force us to change our usage of the word. Sure, physicists would have a bit of work to do but even they would probably continue to call gravity 'gravity'.
Nobody writes a phrase like that unless they're bogus. That's the kind of language you get in endorsements for the latest diet fad or transcendental meditation technique.
Do you even know what 'degeneration' means? It certainly doesn't mean "increasing efficiency of communication by finding compact representations of frequently repeated phrases", a feature found in the evolution of every single natural language on the planet, including the degenerate form of Latin commonly called 'French' by English speaking peoples.
Many printers double as fax machines and so need to print the date in a header.
Don't ask me. I'm not imaginative enough either. But as long there are smart people out there who know how to use useless looking stuff (and there are plenty) I say we leave them to it.
If you can't find a practical use that's your problem. Move over and let someone else more imaginative come up with something.
Well I'd like to see both. But I'd like experience a whole bunch of things in my lifetime. Stuff like the ice cliffs of Europa and and its sub-ice oceans, the oily oceans on Titan, the view of Jupiter as it hangs in the sky from Io and so on. It isn't going to happen in person. But I can do it by proxy with unmanned probes. People aren't traveling to Titan or Europa in my lifetime. And it's not just about pretty pictures. Each of these things offers interesting science too. I'm not convinced that a manned presence in space is going to help with these things much.
I was there. From where I was Scarlett Johansson's cleavage was clearly visible. To be honest, I hadn't realized she had anything significant in that department up until that point. But if you find a picture - check out the awful 80s hairdo she was sporting.