Still remember the poor guy that dropped his card deck on the floor during finals week. Never did find out if he found all his cards and got them sorted in time.
That's his fault. A floor-sorted deck would be easily put right if he had drawn a thick diagonal line along one of the long edges of his deck, using a straightedge. That way, if a card is out of place, the diagonal is visibly disrupted and the out-of-place card shows up like it was spotlit.
Damn, I'm old.
Back when I was a student programmer, we punched up our 400-card Cobol programs and handed the decks to student computer operators to be run through the batch-submission mainframe system. So, the loving care of apprentice punch-monkeys--already resentful that we programmers were gonna get the big re-enlistment bonuses while they were going to lovely places like Thailand and Korea--guaranteed the decks would look like crap when we got 'em back. With any luck, they ran the deck through the system before scrambling them, otherwise you just wasted an hour submitting your run and waiting for your results only to have the compiler tell you that your identification division was out of place.
Bastards.
Yes, I'm a former military computer programmer. This was tech school. It was long ago and far away.
OK, right, back to the on-topic bit. I recommend a really good card punch, colored markers (fat highlighters are good), and a good steel straightedge. (The latter is both to mark the deck accurately, and to whack the crap out of the operators after they fubar your deck.)
In the modern era:
Multiple workstation areas, each with a modicum of good-quality display space. One or two large-format LCDs, for instance, as long as you can run them at their inherent resolution. A rack of systems for offloading compute and compile. Good environmentals. A decent sound system (not for the computer, for your ears--a real entertainment audio system, not a Sound Blaster on expensive steroids.)
A planning and meeting area, with conventional deskage, good paper management, and file capability.
Whiteboards. Active boards, if you can.
Great chairs. At each desk, 'cuz sometimes you don't really feel like wheeling from one desk to another.
Great keyboard and pointer controller (of you preferred flavor); preferably multiple sets, at different workstation positions, KVM'd smartly.
NAS RAID. Lots of it.
Someplace to veg, like a really comfy couch. Align it so you can lay along it and watch the wall-mounted 50" plasma TV.
Good floors and floor coverings. Smooth, antistatic, firm but not hard. Sometimes it feels good to lay down under the desk.
Walls (the parts not covered with whiteboard) that you can pin stuff up on.
A library, maybe in an adjacent room, full of dead-book goodness. The entire O'Reilly catalog comes to mind.
Sustenance. A small fridge with munchies and beverages, a minor food-prep area for microwaving or whatever, and coffee. A good grinder, a good fast brewer, and some espresso prep equipment. A keg cooler, if you think you can moderate the consumption enough to not affect your code quality. Or if immoderate consumption actually improves your code quality.
Good printers. A color laser, preferably large-format capable. Loaded with both regular and double in two different trays. (Code tends to get too wide for normal portrait-format printouts, and I hate looking at code landscaped onto normal (letter or "A") paper). Also, a quiet and fast wide-carriage (color capable too, if possible) impact printer loaded with continuous greenbar wide paper. Old school, but continuous pages allow you to span long chunks of logic without distracting paper breaks.
You could certainly run a brisk book if you incorporated a wagering system into a "spectator's gallery" in CS2. You could offer all kinds of interesting odds, featuring individual players, or team goals, or specific events. It'd be like boxing betting, but even more interesting (and less crooked, I hope).
Q: How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Six. One to turn the bulb, one for support, and four to relate to the experience.
Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Five. One to change the bulb and four more to chase off the Californians who have come up to relate to the experience
In a van or SUV, the luggage area tends to come flat with the bottom of the door making it hard to pile groceries on top of each other with the door open whereas a car's trunk/boot has a back to it allowing much more piling of groceries
I dunno, in our minivan the "flat floor" hasn't been too much of an obstacle. With that much area, there's no need to stack groceries.
Add in that a van or SUV also is likely to have an extra row of seats (in most cases a PITA to remove)...
In some newer minivans (such as ours), the seats stow away in under-floor compartments. Minimal PITA, compared to the old ones...makes a huge difference as to whether using the entire "flat floor" is worth setting up for.
The van is a good deal for us, a family of 5 largish people (and two more on the way). And it got 22.9 MPG (or 9.7 Km/l for you metric types) on a recent hiway road trip, so it's not the excruciating gas hog some prestige vehicles are.
Looks like corporate management has found a new Fugitve Slave Law to ensure that the full power of the State and its courts enforce their ownership of their human property.
Sigh. Is it this bad in other countries, or is it just the nation formerly known as the United States of America?
You haven't read Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis, have you? A remarkable piece of Christian SF.
If God can create one world, and all life on it, why not others? Just because Scripture is silent about life elsewhere in the universe doesn't mean it doesn't exist, only that it has nothing to do with His plan for Earth.
Blind militant atheism is as bad as blind militant fundamentalism. Open your eyes.
All true, but as you point out, Einstein himself recognized his degree of responsibility in the events which followed.
I don't want to get all Voltaire on this, but all things considered it worked out better than it might have. If Heisenberg hadn't botched slow-neutron diffusion path (and hence, critical mass), the Nazis might have had a practical U235 or PU239 warhead before anyone else. As you say, no one was going to un-invent nuclear fission as a weapons explosive; Einstein's own words indicate that the only reasonable way to excuse the US's creation of nuclear weapons was to prevent the Germans from doing so first, creating "...inconceivable destruction, and the enslavement of the rest of the world..."
It's important to note that Einstein's 1939 and 1940 letters of introduction and warning to Franklin D. Roosevelt can be reasonably called the primary stimulus of the Manhattan Project.
I don't personally use the word "accuse", but he bears some responsibility for the events of 60 years ago, and for the nuclear arms race that followed.
Middle of Kansas/Iowa, flat level ground, deserted road, daylight, no weather. Stopping somebody for speeding is pointless. There was no significant danger. The worst thing that could possibly have happened is some mechanical failure resulting in going off the road, and taking out some corn.
You minimize the effect on society caused by YOU being killed or injured. Your insurance company pays out, you increase my premium. You gouge up the pavement as your vehicle tumbles out out of control, you raise my taxes. Your kid grows up without one parent, becomes a criminal, robs me at gunpoint.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. But it's conceivable. And society often applies controls on a worst-case basis. So, if applying an extremely cautious limit in a situation where it may be inappropriate elminates the risks of social impact, society will do it.
The entity known as "society" doesn't care as much about your individual rights as its collective security. That's because the individuals within society don't generally value the rights of others as much as their own rights. "I want my full rights, but that other guy? He might be a threat to me, or my family, or my wallet, or my rights. Limit his rights."
We're selfish. We want to restrict each other to preserve ourselves. Just be glad it isn't worse right now. (Though it might be getting that way.)
Yeah right, how many cars allow you to install random stuff on the computer?
I don't know about random stuff on the computer (in a car, right? Maybe in the ECM or something?), but you can install random crap in the engine compartment, or on the wheels, or on the brake calipers, or in the steering pump, and have horrid results. (I speak from experience. Never ever mix radial and bias-ply tires. Scary.)
A careless and thoughtless user can install crap in a car that can KILL. It's the rare computer that for which you make that claim.
Anyone who doubts the quality of the hand/eye coordination of a 5-year-old has never watched a toddler playing a console game. My three-year-old (at the time; he's 15 now) could out-Mario any human being in existence. He totally pwn3d at Super Mario World, or virtually any other hand/eye coordination scroller game. It was frightening, and I don't think he was any prodigy.
No the problem with driving is that it's actually a huge task, with lots of full-body coordination (steering, a couple of feet, a hand for the shifter, lots of buttons and levers, two eyes and a head on a swivel, plus near and far focus, PLUS working the cell phone and the drink cup and the CD player and the navigation system.)
Hell, adults have trouble. A kid would skitter around, microfocusing on one aspect at a time and neglecting the others, until CRASH. Just like some adults, but more so I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually that would be good for 100 million individual beats...
This is Slashdot. Same thing.
darwinfi.sh !
I'm a walking patent violation!
Yes, they did. They even killed those who had the books printed.
Damn. I meant "dead-tree". I hate screwing up a treasured geek idiom.
That's his fault. A floor-sorted deck would be easily put right if he had drawn a thick diagonal line along one of the long edges of his deck, using a straightedge. That way, if a card is out of place, the diagonal is visibly disrupted and the out-of-place card shows up like it was spotlit.
Damn, I'm old.
Back when I was a student programmer, we punched up our 400-card Cobol programs and handed the decks to student computer operators to be run through the batch-submission mainframe system. So, the loving care of apprentice punch-monkeys--already resentful that we programmers were gonna get the big re-enlistment bonuses while they were going to lovely places like Thailand and Korea--guaranteed the decks would look like crap when we got 'em back. With any luck, they ran the deck through the system before scrambling them, otherwise you just wasted an hour submitting your run and waiting for your results only to have the compiler tell you that your identification division was out of place.
Bastards.
Yes, I'm a former military computer programmer. This was tech school. It was long ago and far away.
OK, right, back to the on-topic bit. I recommend a really good card punch, colored markers (fat highlighters are good), and a good steel straightedge. (The latter is both to mark the deck accurately, and to whack the crap out of the operators after they fubar your deck.)
In the modern era:
Multiple workstation areas, each with a modicum of good-quality display space. One or two large-format LCDs, for instance, as long as you can run them at their inherent resolution. A rack of systems for offloading compute and compile. Good environmentals. A decent sound system (not for the computer, for your ears--a real entertainment audio system, not a Sound Blaster on expensive steroids.)
A planning and meeting area, with conventional deskage, good paper management, and file capability.
Whiteboards. Active boards, if you can.
Great chairs. At each desk, 'cuz sometimes you don't really feel like wheeling from one desk to another.
Great keyboard and pointer controller (of you preferred flavor); preferably multiple sets, at different workstation positions, KVM'd smartly.
NAS RAID. Lots of it.
Someplace to veg, like a really comfy couch. Align it so you can lay along it and watch the wall-mounted 50" plasma TV.
Good floors and floor coverings. Smooth, antistatic, firm but not hard. Sometimes it feels good to lay down under the desk.
Walls (the parts not covered with whiteboard) that you can pin stuff up on.
A library, maybe in an adjacent room, full of dead-book goodness. The entire O'Reilly catalog comes to mind.
Sustenance. A small fridge with munchies and beverages, a minor food-prep area for microwaving or whatever, and coffee. A good grinder, a good fast brewer, and some espresso prep equipment. A keg cooler, if you think you can moderate the consumption enough to not affect your code quality. Or if immoderate consumption actually improves your code quality.
Good printers. A color laser, preferably large-format capable. Loaded with both regular and double in two different trays. (Code tends to get too wide for normal portrait-format printouts, and I hate looking at code landscaped onto normal (letter or "A") paper). Also, a quiet and fast wide-carriage (color capable too, if possible) impact printer loaded with continuous greenbar wide paper. Old school, but continuous pages allow you to span long chunks of logic without distracting paper breaks.
WHOA! I just had the most unpleasant visual of Blizzard's new MMORPG, World of Slashdot.
<shudder>
Bactria? You're going to insist on Afghan chicken? Or did you mean Bactrian? As in, McCamel?
As to that original Big Mac virus, what's one more pathogen among many?
Hmmm. that makes me hungry.
You could certainly run a brisk book if you incorporated a wagering system into a "spectator's gallery" in CS2. You could offer all kinds of interesting odds, featuring individual players, or team goals, or specific events. It'd be like boxing betting, but even more interesting (and less crooked, I hope).
Q: How many Californians does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Six. One to turn the bulb, one for support, and four to relate to the experience.
Q: How many Oregonians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Five. One to change the bulb and four more to chase off the Californians who have come up to relate to the experience
--From the The Cannonical [sic] Collection of Light Bulb Jokes, Usenet, October 1983 Edition
I dunno, in our minivan the "flat floor" hasn't been too much of an obstacle. With that much area, there's no need to stack groceries.
Add in that a van or SUV also is likely to have an extra row of seats (in most cases a PITA to remove)...
In some newer minivans (such as ours), the seats stow away in under-floor compartments. Minimal PITA, compared to the old ones...makes a huge difference as to whether using the entire "flat floor" is worth setting up for.
The van is a good deal for us, a family of 5 largish people (and two more on the way). And it got 22.9 MPG (or 9.7 Km/l for you metric types) on a recent hiway road trip, so it's not the excruciating gas hog some prestige vehicles are.
Mah Pappy is a wise man. He said to me, once, "Don't mud-wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig secretly enjoys it."
No, really!
Looks like corporate management has found a new Fugitve Slave Law to ensure that the full power of the State and its courts enforce their ownership of their human property.
Sigh. Is it this bad in other countries, or is it just the nation formerly known as the United States of America?
If God can create one world, and all life on it, why not others? Just because Scripture is silent about life elsewhere in the universe doesn't mean it doesn't exist, only that it has nothing to do with His plan for Earth.
Blind militant atheism is as bad as blind militant fundamentalism. Open your eyes.
I don't want to get all Voltaire on this, but all things considered it worked out better than it might have. If Heisenberg hadn't botched slow-neutron diffusion path (and hence, critical mass), the Nazis might have had a practical U235 or PU239 warhead before anyone else. As you say, no one was going to un-invent nuclear fission as a weapons explosive; Einstein's own words indicate that the only reasonable way to excuse the US's creation of nuclear weapons was to prevent the Germans from doing so first, creating "...inconceivable destruction, and the enslavement of the rest of the world..."
I don't personally use the word "accuse", but he bears some responsibility for the events of 60 years ago, and for the nuclear arms race that followed.
Not only does God definitely use rand() on the universe, but He sometimes confuses us by seeding it with /dev/random.
Hey, scrambled ogg and spam is great on slashdot-toasted NetBSD bagels.
Shempicycles? Sempicycles? Begone, you stooge!
You minimize the effect on society caused by YOU being killed or injured. Your insurance company pays out, you increase my premium. You gouge up the pavement as your vehicle tumbles out out of control, you raise my taxes. Your kid grows up without one parent, becomes a criminal, robs me at gunpoint.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. But it's conceivable. And society often applies controls on a worst-case basis. So, if applying an extremely cautious limit in a situation where it may be inappropriate elminates the risks of social impact, society will do it.
The entity known as "society" doesn't care as much about your individual rights as its collective security. That's because the individuals within society don't generally value the rights of others as much as their own rights. "I want my full rights, but that other guy? He might be a threat to me, or my family, or my wallet, or my rights. Limit his rights."
We're selfish. We want to restrict each other to preserve ourselves. Just be glad it isn't worse right now. (Though it might be getting that way.)
Yes, please.. at least 69.34% of us are simply deathly sick and tired of it.
So your overlords will be, as usual, the same decimally-digited humans as they've ever been.
I don't know about random stuff on the computer (in a car, right? Maybe in the ECM or something?), but you can install random crap in the engine compartment, or on the wheels, or on the brake calipers, or in the steering pump, and have horrid results. (I speak from experience. Never ever mix radial and bias-ply tires. Scary.)
A careless and thoughtless user can install crap in a car that can KILL. It's the rare computer that for which you make that claim.
No the problem with driving is that it's actually a huge task, with lots of full-body coordination (steering, a couple of feet, a hand for the shifter, lots of buttons and levers, two eyes and a head on a swivel, plus near and far focus, PLUS working the cell phone and the drink cup and the CD player and the navigation system.)
Hell, adults have trouble. A kid would skitter around, microfocusing on one aspect at a time and neglecting the others, until CRASH. Just like some adults, but more so I think.