I think the math is a little dodgy there: 70 miles per hour is 70 (mi/h) * 5280 (ft/mi) / 3600 (s/h) ~= 103 ft/s. For two seconds this number is 206 feet. 315 feet is a little over three seconds, and I don't know where you're getting it from. 206 ft is 15 car lengths, which is still not likely on a busy highway, but it's actually almost attainable.
And remember that your 16 cars per mile is also per lane. Fixing the numbers up: A front bumper every 2.00s + 0.13 (13 ft / 103 (ft/s) = 2.1 seconds per car yields 60 (s/min) / 2.1 (s/car) = 29 car/min (per lane!) * 3 lanes is 87 car/min, and times 4 lanes is 116 car/min, or rounding to 120 to two significant figures. I'd say that 30 cars/min/lane is a handy estimate for the number of cars that should be able to be nominally serviced by a 70 MPH freeway.
I guess it's all luck of the draw. My PS2, not manhandled by kids, only occasionally used, and never left on didn't last two years. Maybe it died of loneliness.
What's screwed up about this is that it's actually an interesting article, but it's not enough for actual USERS to find what's interesting. They've got to lead us to it.
Screw you, BusinessWeek, and screw you, PreacherTom.
My favorite part was the effort to overcome security wasn't just to type in "OVERRIDE" or run a "nth complexity binary bogon insertion" or such shit, but he actually did a lot of fairly mundane grunt work, going to libraries, and talking to other experts. Though the solution to gain access was almost too simple, it was (and still is) the only example I saw in popular culture of hacking (in both senses of the word) for what it really was: a continuing intellectual endeavor that requires time, patience, determination, and love for the craft.
"The glaring technical problem is that you can't auto dial with an acoustic coupler because the computer obviously has no mechanism for pressing down the hookswitch on the damn phone to hang up between calls."
Sure ya could. You could hack a relay into the phone that would be controlled by the computer in the software. A real hacker of the early-mid 80s could wire that up and have driver done for it in an hour. Pretty simple, really.
You could even use that relay to dial the phone if the coupler didn't speak DTMF.
I understand some of it. It's not my favorite language, by far, and it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it.
I'm guessing most who bash PHP as a "horrible" programming language have ever been exposed to true crawling horrors like COBOL and RPG. At least PHP has functions with local variables.
"The only difficulty I can see is that you would have to explain what an object is first (same problem with Java)."
You can program Python procedurally and could certainly get new programmers comfortable and acclimatized to the language without covering OO stuff first. Python is a great language with an excellent object model, but in contrast to Java it doesn't push you to do everything the OO way. As a simple example, Compare and contrast the Java hello world program with Python's.
Questionable analogy aside, there are grocery stores that let you do this if you were to just ask. I know it's a Whole Foods chainwide policy to let you do this, and if you at least ask nicely, many other grocers will let you try a new product free. Some days, they even try to push samples of new or featured products on you. Barring all that, call a manufacturer. They are very likely to give out a "get our product free" coupon and send it to you if you only ask.
Movie makers could learn from this, put the first 15-30 minutes of a movie on line and then say "To see the rest, here's the showtimes for your local theatre". At least they'd be forced to make a few minutes of decent movie, instead of just enough to make a catchy 60 second trailer.
I've been doing this stuff a long time now and still when I'm handed a new project, I have absolutely no idea how to code it... to start. But, I start researching, planning, and organizing what I know, what I should know, and what I have to do.
After a lot of WTF? moments followed by AHA! moments, this system that a few short months ago you had no clue how to build starts to take shape. When it's finished[1], congratulations! You're now the expert.
I have found that in software development, just having confidence in yourself enough to jump in and trust that eventually things will make sense to you is half the battle. Hand-in-hand with this ethic is you've got to really love what you're doing. If you're only in it for the money then you will fail.
[1] - No system is ever really finished. Once it gets used to solve real world problems, the real world reconfigures itself to require changes. Welcome to maintenance!
Actually, it makes we want to use Google all the more.
I think about all the volume of completely irrelevant (to them, anyway) shit I have in my gmail account (mostly emails from friends here on slashdot and from people I play Tribal Wars with), and multiply that by the millions of other gmail users out there, I think about how much time, money, and resources they're using to not actually do actual bad things and it makes me smile.
"They want something good that doesn't crash all the time, but they don't want something that's perfect, because they don't want to take the extra time necessary to do it right the first time."
Real engineers also understand that perfection, while a laudable goal, is nearly impossible in the real world, and that engineering is a series of trade-offs and compromises in design, functionality, cost, and time. Not that I'm advocating creating shit, but the "good enough" solution that cost a million dollars and generates five million in cost savings or revenue is better than the "perfect" solution that cost four million dollars and generates seven million in cost savings or revenue.
A couple years ago I put in a 120Gig HD in my computer. Imagine my surprise on moving an install of the latest Dawn of War expansion to my drive to get "No space left on device."
I cleaned up crap and managed to fit it in, but on my "to do" list is to install a 250 Gig drive I have laying around. This will no doubt get filled 24 months from now.
And I thought what a vast expanse of storage space I had when I got a 160kB 5 1/4 floppy for my Trash-80 CoCo as a high school graduation present in 1985. I've got source code for personal projects that wouldn't fit on that, now.
By the time we have portable petabyte-sized consumer devices, they'll probably have holographic high definition movies or something like that to eat it up. And storing it on a portable device will probably be a crime carrying a life sentence.:-)
Re:If the review is accurate, the book is revision
on
In Search of Stupidity
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I tried like heck to get us to use OS/2 desktop systems at a place I worked in 1993. I gave up when I tried to connect our IBM brand (PS/ValuePoint!) PCs, running IBM's OS/2, to an IBM midrange computer, using an IBM 5250 emulation card, only to be told by IBM technical support that the 5250 software written by IBM only supported Microsoft Windows. At this point, I knew OS/2 was doomed as a desktop OS. When you can't even convince another division of your own company to interoperate with your product, you've got some serious problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the math is a little dodgy there: 70 miles per hour is 70 (mi/h) * 5280 (ft/mi) / 3600 (s/h) ~= 103 ft/s. For two seconds this number is 206 feet. 315 feet is a little over three seconds, and I don't know where you're getting it from. 206 ft is 15 car lengths, which is still not likely on a busy highway, but it's actually almost attainable.
And remember that your 16 cars per mile is also per lane. Fixing the numbers up: A front bumper every 2.00s + 0.13 (13 ft / 103 (ft/s) = 2.1 seconds per car yields 60 (s/min) / 2.1 (s/car) = 29 car/min (per lane!) * 3 lanes is 87 car/min, and times 4 lanes is 116 car/min, or rounding to 120 to two significant figures. I'd say that 30 cars/min/lane is a handy estimate for the number of cars that should be able to be nominally serviced by a 70 MPH freeway.
I guess it's all luck of the draw. My PS2, not manhandled by kids, only occasionally used, and never left on didn't last two years. Maybe it died of loneliness.
What's screwed up about this is that it's actually an interesting article, but it's not enough for actual USERS to find what's interesting. They've got to lead us to it.
Screw you, BusinessWeek, and screw you, PreacherTom.
Those guys even logged lyger's rot-26 hack!
I tell people all the time though that double rot-13 is much harder to detect than rot-26.
Ask... and ye shall receive.
My favorite part was the effort to overcome security wasn't just to type in "OVERRIDE" or run a "nth complexity binary bogon insertion" or such shit, but he actually did a lot of fairly mundane grunt work, going to libraries, and talking to other experts. Though the solution to gain access was almost too simple, it was (and still is) the only example I saw in popular culture of hacking (in both senses of the word) for what it really was: a continuing intellectual endeavor that requires time, patience, determination, and love for the craft.
"The glaring technical problem is that you can't auto dial with an acoustic coupler because the computer obviously has no mechanism for pressing down the hookswitch on the damn phone to hang up between calls."
Sure ya could. You could hack a relay into the phone that would be controlled by the computer in the software. A real hacker of the early-mid 80s could wire that up and have driver done for it in an hour. Pretty simple, really.
You could even use that relay to dial the phone if the coupler didn't speak DTMF.
I understand some of it. It's not my favorite language, by far, and it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it.
I'm guessing most who bash PHP as a "horrible" programming language have ever been exposed to true crawling horrors like COBOL and RPG. At least PHP has functions with local variables.
So, if I hand wash the dishes first, I'll save a ton on electricity!
I think the young people enjoy it when I "get down" verbally, don't you?
Not very interested, really. I generally keep Javascript turned off in my soul.
Yeah, I was gonna say those were in common use on BITNET Relay in 1985 when I started college. I figure they've got to date back way before then.
"The only difficulty I can see is that you would have to explain what an object is first (same problem with Java)."
You can program Python procedurally and could certainly get new programmers comfortable and acclimatized to the language without covering OO stuff first. Python is a great language with an excellent object model, but in contrast to Java it doesn't push you to do everything the OO way. As a simple example, Compare and contrast the Java hello world program with Python's.
Shudder... I'll take my chances with the regular Borg.
Questionable analogy aside, there are grocery stores that let you do this if you were to just ask. I know it's a Whole Foods chainwide policy to let you do this, and if you at least ask nicely, many other grocers will let you try a new product free. Some days, they even try to push samples of new or featured products on you. Barring all that, call a manufacturer. They are very likely to give out a "get our product free" coupon and send it to you if you only ask.
Movie makers could learn from this, put the first 15-30 minutes of a movie on line and then say "To see the rest, here's the showtimes for your local theatre". At least they'd be forced to make a few minutes of decent movie, instead of just enough to make a catchy 60 second trailer.
How about these?
asshole
shithead
Pretty slick how they convinced a charitable trust to pony up six figures to grant us rights we pretty much already have.
I was really stoked until I went to the page and saw that.
No, silly. The $ sign means "snake on a stick." They're throwing 75 million snakes on a stick at it.
Cue the Samuel L. Jackson "snakes on a..." jokes.
Spot on.
I've been doing this stuff a long time now and still when I'm handed a new project, I have absolutely no idea how to code it... to start. But, I start researching, planning, and organizing what I know, what I should know, and what I have to do.
After a lot of WTF? moments followed by AHA! moments, this system that a few short months ago you had no clue how to build starts to take shape. When it's finished[1], congratulations! You're now the expert.
I have found that in software development, just having confidence in yourself enough to jump in and trust that eventually things will make sense to you is half the battle. Hand-in-hand with this ethic is you've got to really love what you're doing. If you're only in it for the money then you will fail.
[1] - No system is ever really finished. Once it gets used to solve real world problems, the real world reconfigures itself to require changes. Welcome to maintenance!
Actually, it makes we want to use Google all the more.
I think about all the volume of completely irrelevant (to them, anyway) shit I have in my gmail account (mostly emails from friends here on slashdot and from people I play Tribal Wars with), and multiply that by the millions of other gmail users out there, I think about how much time, money, and resources they're using to not actually do actual bad things and it makes me smile.
"They want something good that doesn't crash all the time, but they don't want something that's perfect, because they don't want to take the extra time necessary to do it right the first time."
Real engineers also understand that perfection, while a laudable goal, is nearly impossible in the real world, and that engineering is a series of trade-offs and compromises in design, functionality, cost, and time. Not that I'm advocating creating shit, but the "good enough" solution that cost a million dollars and generates five million in cost savings or revenue is better than the "perfect" solution that cost four million dollars and generates seven million in cost savings or revenue.
He's already at -1. Further downmodding is not possible.
of storage media is full.
A couple years ago I put in a 120Gig HD in my computer. Imagine my surprise on moving an install of the latest Dawn of War expansion to my drive to get "No space left on device."
I cleaned up crap and managed to fit it in, but on my "to do" list is to install a 250 Gig drive I have laying around. This will no doubt get filled 24 months from now.
And I thought what a vast expanse of storage space I had when I got a 160kB 5 1/4 floppy for my Trash-80 CoCo as a high school graduation present in 1985. I've got source code for personal projects that wouldn't fit on that, now.
By the time we have portable petabyte-sized consumer devices, they'll probably have holographic high definition movies or something like that to eat it up. And storing it on a portable device will probably be a crime carrying a life sentence. :-)
Direct to video!
I tried like heck to get us to use OS/2 desktop systems at a place I worked in 1993. I gave up when I tried to connect our IBM brand (PS/ValuePoint!) PCs, running IBM's OS/2, to an IBM midrange computer, using an IBM 5250 emulation card, only to be told by IBM technical support that the 5250 software written by IBM only supported Microsoft Windows. At this point, I knew OS/2 was doomed as a desktop OS. When you can't even convince another division of your own company to interoperate with your product, you've got some serious problems.