In posting an Ask Slashdot article, he *gasp* actually expected to get some (ready for this?) REAL RESPONSES
That was somewhat naive of him then. If you had both read Slashdot for a week or two before posting then you would know different. He did get real responses amongst the uninformed criticism and both are par for the course here.
Sorry, but all forums & message-boards are a product of the community which participates in them. Slashdot was originally set up as one guy's personal blog - Slashdot might be considered to be "the original blog" in that context - and the owner of the site still reads and posts here.
Tough luck if you don't like the community you asked for help - I guess you should make the effort to become informed before you next put yourself up as a target.
Since you're able to state that he doesn't live with just any woman, but that he does in fact live with his g/f you obviously know the OP personally. You compound this elsewhere in this thread by saying that he gets laid daily so I'm sorry you have taken my comment to heart, but:
1) This is Slashdot. Predictable jokes are allowed here. If you'd made more than 4 posts you'd know this.
2) "I live with a woman" is a funny way to say "I live with my girlfriend / lover / life-partner". My Mom is a woman and "woman" is a word I might use to refer to her, to someone like her, or of her age, or to my landlady, to a customer of mine, or a female I met in the street who I wasn't attracted to. A female I happened to meet whom I am attracted to I would probably call a "girl" or a "lady".
3) If I was writing this from my parent's basement, then that would've made my joke one at my own expense, yes? We do that here.
In particular, posting to the "Ask Slashdot" section is considered to be setting yourself up as a target. I don't believe in flaming someone for posting here, but old and predictable gags are, to me, what makes Slashdot great. With his phrasing - as I explained in (2) above - your hubby was REALLY setting himself up for that - this search will show you a typical example of "the Slashdot humour" and other ways that he can set himself up for similar gags in the future.
I'm really trying not to be confrontational in writing this reply to you. If your reply had made a joke at my expense then I would have laughed about it &/or tried for a witty rejoinder. I mean, the logical answer your question, am I writing from my parents' basement is "duh! yes. where else?". The subtitle of this site is "News for nerds, stuff that matters" and those of us who don't live in our parents' basements pretend to.
As it is, I'm reading your reply as having taken offence over comment which is so obviously trivial in the context of Slashdot, and reading you as having gotten snitty at me in response, and I'm struggling not to be catty back at you.
Oh, and BTW my opinion is that your bloke should get himself known to an open-source project and take the opportunity to do some good with his coding skillz. It sounds like he doesn't really need the money from a second job and this would allow fulfil his criteria for deadlines, because many larger OSS projects do set release dates that they try to keep to. OSS projects vary in how formal they are & some would be pleased to see his CV, others would expect him to pick some open bugs in their database and submit patches in order to make himself "known". Becoming an "authoritative" source in an OSS field is very satisfying - although I don't code myself, I have written a couple of long HOWTOs - I'm a little proud to think they're comprehensive (or were when I wrote them - I can't be arsed to maintain them), it's kinda cool to see my own work come up as a top hit when I Google for something and it's satisfying when I get emails from people saying that they've found my work useful. Your partner would surely find a project that interested him if he browsed through Sourceforge, and find many projects that not only really valued his skills, whether that turned out to be working on a database back-end or a Windows port of an instant-messenger, but also helped him to expand them. Be warned, tho', that OSS projects, at least the larger ones that have the formal release schedules that might suit your guy, tend to have ego conflicts occasionally; you can't please all of the people all of the time and he needs to be prepared to shrug it off & say "that guy's an idiot" when someone criticises all the hard work he's done for nothing. It's no big deal - it happens.
Ummm.... probably just enough that there are a few manufacturers of similar wings and a testing & certification program.
The posts from Thagg and Inflex were posted whilst I was writing my comment and give a better technical explanation than mine - I guess being model-fliers their perspective on aerodynamics relates less to dead people than mine does.
After a quick chat with the designer, I'd be pretty much happy to jump on this thing & fly it tomorrow, had it originated from an existing & reputable manufacturer of aircraft (of microlights for instance). I'm not saying that none of the OpenSky designers know anything about aerodynamics - in fact. they must be pretty good to have got this far - just that I'd like to know how it behaves when it's inverted, when you deliberately try to make it stable in an undesirable attitude (accelerating nose towards the ground, for instance), how quickly it recovers from a flat-spin, that sort of thing. Any existing designer or manufacturer of aircraft would be able to tell you about how their wings behave in these situations, and would at least to be able to discuss the design considerations that they'd taken to manage them on a prototype.
All forms of production aircraft, from Boeing 747s to those silly parachutes I used to fly, are designed with stability & self-recovery in mind - they should (lose height, but) tend to end up flying straight & level, whatever you do to them. Even if you try to loop them but foul-up half-way through, for instance. In good Slashdot style I haven't read the fine article enough to know what the aim of this project is - whether it is to make one fight with a wing like this or to enable regular flights for a number of pilots - but in the latter case they should really be designing with a "what if?" mentality, because accidents DO happen.
One thing that springs to mind is that they're towing for these tests - are they using a weak-link? Kiting was a serious cause of fatality in the early days of hang-gliding and of parascending / low-launched-paragliding and these days no qualified pilot would even THINK about being towed without one - it's one of a handful of complete no-nos that every pilot learns at school. They may not be towing under a heavy load at present, but if a towed glider goes the slightest bit off-centre the pressure of the line and the lift of the aircraft's wing will tend to induce further diversion; this can easily be corrected by the pilot in the early stages, but pressure needs to be relaxed by the tow-winch operator. What happens if the wind gusts? What happens if the winch's motor jams on? (actually it should have a clutch) Tow operations are required to have a sharp blade immediately on hand for the winch-operator, or a guillotine blade that can be manually-operated and cut the line from the operator's working position. I hope these guys have spoken to existing gliding operations about things like this before conducting these tests.
I used to fly paragliders pretty seriously, and there is NO WAY on this planet you would get me up on one of those things until a few people have died flying them.
Under the FAIdefinitionsparagliders and hang-gliders are both in the same category of foot-launced unpowered aircraft, they both have loosely similar flight-characteristsics, tend to share the same airspace and consequently in many countries they (now) share a regulatory body.
Thus it was I came to be on an instructors' course some years ago when the subject of accident prevention and reporting was being discussed and one thing I remember very distinctly about that was that the same mistakes tend to be made time & time again. I guess this applies to all fields, programming as well, but on this occasion it was pointed out how accident reports of 5 years before looked pretty much like the accident reports currently submitted to the association. I guess the statistics were probably lower than you might think and the majority of incidents involved sprained ankles and broken wrists but the causes were typically pilot error, over-confidence, carelessness &/or neglect - the same reasons hang-glider pilots had been having accidents for 20 years.
Likewise it took a few dead paraglider pilots before the introduction of a certification regimen under which manufacturers of gliders were required to submit new their models for testing - a regimen which 10 years ago had recently matured but which bore remarkable similarities to the certification schemes under which hang-gliders had been regulated since the 1970s. And of course the testing for hang-gliders had been introduced for the same reason - dead pilots, just in the early 1970s they were the result of simple Rogalio hang-gliders entering "luffing-dives" whereas in the early 1990s the cause was paragliders "collapsing" in turbulent air &/or finding themselves stable in flat-spins or spirals.
A previous poster wrote that "the freedom with which Nausicaa sails around the skies on a flying machine light enough to carry yet strong enough to carry out some hairy aerobatics has figured in many a daydream" but wings that achieve this goal, this dream, are already widely available. Just because they don't look quite like the one out of your favorite comic book, I don't think that's a great reason to learn aviation design the hard way.
Aviation design is a really complicated discipline with lots of pitfalls, and mistakes may not show up until a wing has been flown for a number of hours, which is kinda inconvenient if you're flying at a few hundred feet at the time. Tailless aircraft are particularly quirky, and last time I checked (a few years ago, admittedly) there weren't many designs available - a tail is just a really easy way to ensure pitch and yaw stability.
Don't get me wrong - this looks like a really great toy, I'd love to have a play with it and I wish these guys the best, but I hope for their sakes that they've done their homework. The veteran pilots I've known who have lost friends to the sport (and I guess that includes me) haven't really known what they were getting into.
I don't know HOW familiar you are with this business "that gets all its IT services through a one-man contracting operation", but if it's that much public knowledge the boss is probably already aware of it.
So why doesn't he go somewhere else?
The reason is that 5% is FUCK ALL. I'm in a similar situation, but I'd MUCH rather the customer went to "Insight or whomever" but they never do. I tell them what they want, where to get it from, and they still ask me to get the hardware for them. I tell them "I'm not VAT registered, so you can save at least 17.5% is you buy direct" and they still never get around to opening an account with my supplier, even though I'd still collect the hardware for them on my way to to their offices.
I installed AVG trial edition on one customers' PCs and when the trial ran out the boss' son downloadeded the free edition (which is "not licensed for commercial use"). So I have a word with the boss and explain that that's not really appropriate and end up reinstalling the trial edition for him again. Now AVG trial edition nags you each day to upgrade - you just click on a button and it takes you to AVG's website, you enter the number of licenses you want, give them your credit card details and Bob's your auntie's brother. So 28 days later I end up back at the office entering my own credit-card details at AVG's website because apparently no-one in the office is capable of entering those of the company credit card. I invoice my time for this, and quite proudly mark up the price of the licenses by 100%.
With my AVG example I do feel that the customer & I are both taking the piss out of each other, but in the case of a 5% mark-up on hardware the customer probably considers it a better bargain than the IT contractor instructing them what to buy - in that case they'd suffer if one of their staff made a mistake in ordering or the goods arrived faulty (as the contractor would charge them the time taken to test the unit at £50 or £60 an hour). I wouldn't consider a 5% mark-up worth my while to take on this extra hassle for my customers - it's more paperwork, it makes me more interesting to the inland revenue, I have to warranty the goods I sell and then fight it out with my supplier later on my time - but I have to do it because my customers expect it. I consider it a favour to them, and the "one-man contracting operation" with which you are familiar is obviously a much nicer guy than me, because I charge a 8% - 15% mark-up for this service - and I'm still usually cheaper than the local PC World, where many of my customers might otherwise buy their hardware.
I've been vaguely aware of this procedure for some time, but - although I haveimplants, tattoos, a vasectomy and another surgical piercing (NSW) - there's something about having my fingertips cut into that just squicks me.
Considering how most people are squicked when they see my modifications, tho', I guess this is more a reflection upon me than upon any procedure.:/
Being a slave isn't so bad, if you're just going to be sitting at the computer anyway.., stare at porn, etc -- whatever it is that you do with your computer. Every few minutes, change the CD. It's no big deal, as long as your CDs aren't too obscure
It's no big deal, as long as you don't mind your CDs getting all sticky.
But I have never understood the rationale for the gold standard. Certainly, having a currency tied to a limited resource is a good thing, but why would you want to exchange a currency for gold...
You might want to exchange currency for gold because you want to make jewellery or hi-fi cable-connectors with it. It doesn't matter what the a "standard" currency is based on - it could be copper or aluminum, but a precious metal is possibly better for stability - as long as it's based on a (mineral?) commodity that is solid and transferrable.
Choosing gold as a currncy is a Good Idea (tm) because there will always be a limited amount of the stuff and (as long as girls like jewellery... so at least until the end of time, then;) a demand for it. The innovation in alchemy required to make a gold-backed currency unstable is unlikely.
This article is shown on the "CBBC Newsround" page of the BBC webpage, For the benefit of anyone not based or raised in the UK, "CBBC" stands for "Childrens' BBC" and as far back as I can remember "Newsround" has been the 5pm news program for kids. No surprise this story makes the front page of Slashdot, huh?
How did they know that his articles weren't being plagurized by Wikipedia?
If you read the fine articles lined to in the summary you'll see the dates are pretty damning. One of the comparisons indicates plagiarism from an article printed in another newspaper a month or so previous to the Honolulu Star Bulletin's publication.
I'm not yet in Spybot's camp here. First of all, one week to investigate and respond to an issue is way too short for a company as large as Symantec.
They've already, presumably, done the investigation that leads them to this conclusion. Since they're not shy of listing Spybot as a virus, all they need to do is give a reason.
A week should be sufficient time to pop down to see the developers, ask them to look up in the version control system who added this detection rule and why, and to even chat with that particular programmer. This should give Symantec's representative plenty enough detail to provide a competent reply to Spybot, but for some reason they haven't done so.
It really shows you've tried neither, nor read any reviews. Adobe's RAW conversion is far better than Aperture's, and Photoshop creates far less noise when heavy colour-balancing is required. And as for Aperture's performance requirements...it's noticeably slow, and the difference quite obvious, on my dual-processor G5.
I can't believe that idiot comment go modded +5 informative! How come the best I ever get is +1 funny???
It was a difficult feat to get his hands on it last week because the public beta you refer to (also linked in the fine summary) was only released yesterday!
"he actually means here we have 5000 or so carefully picked photos... "
Years ago a story come out about MS doing some careful selections for demo (i think it was for XP) and your guys tooled them. I mean many of you were just vicious; "disingenuous, deceitful, EVIL, liars, etc. etc." That was one of the most hate filled threads I has seen. So we fast forward to today and well I guess I just think it's funny that when Apple does it...
Maybe we didn't notice that bit about "5000 or so carefully picked photos" because it's not actually in the article. [1] I don't know where the submitter got that from, but if you'd actually read the article... oh, sorry, this is Slashdot... you'd see that wasn't the case. He was fairly fussy that the video clips picked to be used looked good, but there's no evidence that he manipulated them in any other way.
Stroller.
[1] Either that or my browser's search function is broken. Keywords: "5000", "5,000" and "carefully".
You're not paranoid enough. The phone's serial number (the IMEI) is transmitted with the call. So even though you've changed your number, it can be associated with the old one because the IMEI hasn't changed.
And secondhand mobile phones are available from a tenner from the likes of eBay and your local classified ads. They even get given away on my local Freecycle. So transmission of the phone's serial number is hardly a deterrent to anonymity.
Slashdot Mirror
Stroller.
Stroller.
Sorry, but all forums & message-boards are a product of the community which participates in them. Slashdot was originally set up as one guy's personal blog - Slashdot might be considered to be "the original blog" in that context - and the owner of the site still reads and posts here.
Tough luck if you don't like the community you asked for help - I guess you should make the effort to become informed before you next put yourself up as a target.
Stroller.
1) This is Slashdot. Predictable jokes are allowed here. If you'd made more than 4 posts you'd know this.
2) "I live with a woman" is a funny way to say "I live with my girlfriend / lover / life-partner". My Mom is a woman and "woman" is a word I might use to refer to her, to someone like her, or of her age, or to my landlady, to a customer of mine, or a female I met in the street who I wasn't attracted to. A female I happened to meet whom I am attracted to I would probably call a "girl" or a "lady".
3) If I was writing this from my parent's basement, then that would've made my joke one at my own expense, yes? We do that here.
In particular, posting to the "Ask Slashdot" section is considered to be setting yourself up as a target. I don't believe in flaming someone for posting here, but old and predictable gags are, to me, what makes Slashdot great. With his phrasing - as I explained in (2) above - your hubby was REALLY setting himself up for that - this search will show you a typical example of "the Slashdot humour" and other ways that he can set himself up for similar gags in the future.
I'm really trying not to be confrontational in writing this reply to you. If your reply had made a joke at my expense then I would have laughed about it &/or tried for a witty rejoinder. I mean, the logical answer your question, am I writing from my parents' basement is "duh! yes. where else?". The subtitle of this site is "News for nerds, stuff that matters" and those of us who don't live in our parents' basements pretend to. As it is, I'm reading your reply as having taken offence over comment which is so obviously trivial in the context of Slashdot, and reading you as having gotten snitty at me in response, and I'm struggling not to be catty back at you.
Oh, and BTW my opinion is that your bloke should get himself known to an open-source project and take the opportunity to do some good with his coding skillz. It sounds like he doesn't really need the money from a second job and this would allow fulfil his criteria for deadlines, because many larger OSS projects do set release dates that they try to keep to. OSS projects vary in how formal they are & some would be pleased to see his CV, others would expect him to pick some open bugs in their database and submit patches in order to make himself "known". Becoming an "authoritative" source in an OSS field is very satisfying - although I don't code myself, I have written a couple of long HOWTOs - I'm a little proud to think they're comprehensive (or were when I wrote them - I can't be arsed to maintain them), it's kinda cool to see my own work come up as a top hit when I Google for something and it's satisfying when I get emails from people saying that they've found my work useful. Your partner would surely find a project that interested him if he browsed through Sourceforge, and find many projects that not only really valued his skills, whether that turned out to be working on a database back-end or a Windows port of an instant-messenger, but also helped him to expand them. Be warned, tho', that OSS projects, at least the larger ones that have the formal release schedules that might suit your guy, tend to have ego conflicts occasionally; you can't please all of the people all of the time and he needs to be prepared to shrug it off & say "that guy's an idiot" when someone criticises all the hard work he's done for nothing. It's no big deal - it happens.
Stroller.
The posts from Thagg and Inflex were posted whilst I was writing my comment and give a better technical explanation than mine - I guess being model-fliers their perspective on aerodynamics relates less to dead people than mine does.
After a quick chat with the designer, I'd be pretty much happy to jump on this thing & fly it tomorrow, had it originated from an existing & reputable manufacturer of aircraft (of microlights for instance). I'm not saying that none of the OpenSky designers know anything about aerodynamics - in fact. they must be pretty good to have got this far - just that I'd like to know how it behaves when it's inverted, when you deliberately try to make it stable in an undesirable attitude (accelerating nose towards the ground, for instance), how quickly it recovers from a flat-spin, that sort of thing. Any existing designer or manufacturer of aircraft would be able to tell you about how their wings behave in these situations, and would at least to be able to discuss the design considerations that they'd taken to manage them on a prototype.
All forms of production aircraft, from Boeing 747s to those silly parachutes I used to fly, are designed with stability & self-recovery in mind - they should (lose height, but) tend to end up flying straight & level, whatever you do to them. Even if you try to loop them but foul-up half-way through, for instance. In good Slashdot style I haven't read the fine article enough to know what the aim of this project is - whether it is to make one fight with a wing like this or to enable regular flights for a number of pilots - but in the latter case they should really be designing with a "what if?" mentality, because accidents DO happen.
One thing that springs to mind is that they're towing for these tests - are they using a weak-link? Kiting was a serious cause of fatality in the early days of hang-gliding and of parascending / low-launched-paragliding and these days no qualified pilot would even THINK about being towed without one - it's one of a handful of complete no-nos that every pilot learns at school. They may not be towing under a heavy load at present, but if a towed glider goes the slightest bit off-centre the pressure of the line and the lift of the aircraft's wing will tend to induce further diversion; this can easily be corrected by the pilot in the early stages, but pressure needs to be relaxed by the tow-winch operator. What happens if the wind gusts? What happens if the winch's motor jams on? (actually it should have a clutch) Tow operations are required to have a sharp blade immediately on hand for the winch-operator, or a guillotine blade that can be manually-operated and cut the line from the operator's working position. I hope these guys have spoken to existing gliding operations about things like this before conducting these tests.
Stroller.
Under the FAI definitions paragliders and hang-gliders are both in the same category of foot-launced unpowered aircraft, they both have loosely similar flight-characteristsics, tend to share the same airspace and consequently in many countries they (now) share a regulatory body.
Thus it was I came to be on an instructors' course some years ago when the subject of accident prevention and reporting was being discussed and one thing I remember very distinctly about that was that the same mistakes tend to be made time & time again. I guess this applies to all fields, programming as well, but on this occasion it was pointed out how accident reports of 5 years before looked pretty much like the accident reports currently submitted to the association. I guess the statistics were probably lower than you might think and the majority of incidents involved sprained ankles and broken wrists but the causes were typically pilot error, over-confidence, carelessness &/or neglect - the same reasons hang-glider pilots had been having accidents for 20 years.
Likewise it took a few dead paraglider pilots before the introduction of a certification regimen under which manufacturers of gliders were required to submit new their models for testing - a regimen which 10 years ago had recently matured but which bore remarkable similarities to the certification schemes under which hang-gliders had been regulated since the 1970s. And of course the testing for hang-gliders had been introduced for the same reason - dead pilots, just in the early 1970s they were the result of simple Rogalio hang-gliders entering "luffing-dives" whereas in the early 1990s the cause was paragliders "collapsing" in turbulent air &/or finding themselves stable in flat-spins or spirals.
A previous poster wrote that "the freedom with which Nausicaa sails around the skies on a flying machine light enough to carry yet strong enough to carry out some hairy aerobatics has figured in many a daydream" but wings that achieve this goal, this dream, are already widely available. Just because they don't look quite like the one out of your favorite comic book, I don't think that's a great reason to learn aviation design the hard way.
Aviation design is a really complicated discipline with lots of pitfalls, and mistakes may not show up until a wing has been flown for a number of hours, which is kinda inconvenient if you're flying at a few hundred feet at the time. Tailless aircraft are particularly quirky, and last time I checked (a few years ago, admittedly) there weren't many designs available - a tail is just a really easy way to ensure pitch and yaw stability.
Don't get me wrong - this looks like a really great toy, I'd love to have a play with it and I wish these guys the best, but I hope for their sakes that they've done their homework. The veteran pilots I've known who have lost friends to the sport (and I guess that includes me) haven't really known what they were getting into.
I don't know HOW familiar you are with this business "that gets all its IT services through a one-man contracting operation", but if it's that much public knowledge the boss is probably already aware of it.
So why doesn't he go somewhere else?
The reason is that 5% is FUCK ALL. I'm in a similar situation, but I'd MUCH rather the customer went to "Insight or whomever" but they never do. I tell them what they want, where to get it from, and they still ask me to get the hardware for them. I tell them "I'm not VAT registered, so you can save at least 17.5% is you buy direct" and they still never get around to opening an account with my supplier, even though I'd still collect the hardware for them on my way to to their offices.
I installed AVG trial edition on one customers' PCs and when the trial ran out the boss' son downloadeded the free edition (which is "not licensed for commercial use"). So I have a word with the boss and explain that that's not really appropriate and end up reinstalling the trial edition for him again. Now AVG trial edition nags you each day to upgrade - you just click on a button and it takes you to AVG's website, you enter the number of licenses you want, give them your credit card details and Bob's your auntie's brother. So 28 days later I end up back at the office entering my own credit-card details at AVG's website because apparently no-one in the office is capable of entering those of the company credit card. I invoice my time for this, and quite proudly mark up the price of the licenses by 100%.
With my AVG example I do feel that the customer & I are both taking the piss out of each other, but in the case of a 5% mark-up on hardware the customer probably considers it a better bargain than the IT contractor instructing them what to buy - in that case they'd suffer if one of their staff made a mistake in ordering or the goods arrived faulty (as the contractor would charge them the time taken to test the unit at £50 or £60 an hour). I wouldn't consider a 5% mark-up worth my while to take on this extra hassle for my customers - it's more paperwork, it makes me more interesting to the inland revenue, I have to warranty the goods I sell and then fight it out with my supplier later on my time - but I have to do it because my customers expect it. I consider it a favour to them, and the "one-man contracting operation" with which you are familiar is obviously a much nicer guy than me, because I charge a 8% - 15% mark-up for this service - and I'm still usually cheaper than the local PC World, where many of my customers might otherwise buy their hardware.
Stroller.
Stroller.
Considering how most people are squicked when they see my modifications, tho', I guess this is more a reflection upon me than upon any procedure. :/
Stroller.
It's no big deal, as long as you don't mind your CDs getting all sticky.
Choosing gold as a currncy is a Good Idea (tm) because there will always be a limited amount of the stuff and (as long as girls like jewellery... so at least until the end of time, then ;) a demand for it. The innovation in alchemy required to make a gold-backed currency unstable is unlikely.
Stroller.
Sample questions from the survey are available as a PDF download from the American Institutes for Research website.
This article is shown on the "CBBC Newsround" page of the BBC webpage, For the benefit of anyone not based or raised in the UK, "CBBC" stands for "Childrens' BBC" and as far back as I can remember "Newsround" has been the 5pm news program for kids. No surprise this story makes the front page of Slashdot, huh?
A week should be sufficient time to pop down to see the developers, ask them to look up in the version control system who added this detection rule and why, and to even chat with that particular programmer. This should give Symantec's representative plenty enough detail to provide a competent reply to Spybot, but for some reason they haven't done so.
It really shows you've tried neither, nor read any reviews. Adobe's RAW conversion is far better than Aperture's, and Photoshop creates far less noise when heavy colour-balancing is required. And as for Aperture's performance requirements...it's noticeably slow, and the difference quite obvious, on my dual-processor G5.
It was a difficult feat to get his hands on it last week because the public beta you refer to (also linked in the fine summary) was only released yesterday!
That's because they have to nail together two 15" displays. Enjoy your monitor, sucker!