Sorry, but yes, there IS AN INFINITE SUPPLY OF PETROLEUM. Yes, I said infinite
Yeah, but you didn't mean it. Proof: the Earth's mass is not infinite, and only a tiny fraction of it is petroleum. Therefor, there is a finite amount of petroleum on or in earth. QED. Next time, learn what those long words mean before you use them so forcefully.
Because as the reserves get lower, it simply gets more expensive to pull out of the ground. WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL. EVER.
Technically true, but pointless. We'll still miss using it when it's to expensive to use.
You are misreading my post. P vs. C is in Northern Ireland, which is part of Great Britain but not part of England.
And irrespective of what the govt. does or doesn't, most people ie the majority of the population on England, couldn't give a rat's arse about the supposed literal truth of the Christian bible.
In fact, if it comes to that, the majority of Nothern Irish don't care for sectarian violence. And even those that do, are renewing tribal rivalries, not debating biblical interpretations.
There was an article earlier today, and one earlier this week, with the word 'evolution' in the title. This brought the creationist cranks out of the woodwork. I really worry about slashdot, do I really want to be here if that this kind of moron is here?
It seems to be a US-only phenomonum. Here in England most people don't care about that Bible crap.
SO the lesson is: don't mention the e-word and the trolls won't bite.
You've read Daniel Dennett's book. Wow. One book. Um no, I've mentioned reading one book. I've read others, trust me on this.
By an armchair philosopher who's probably never seen the inside of a biolab. You don't know much about the author, do you? Have you looked for other books in this field? Hint: slashdot has reviewed 2 this week.
Of course 1 + 1 = 2. Perhaps you could provide similarly simple and intuitive proof of evolution actually occurring in nature?
Naah, other have done that better, if you'd bother to educate yourself. See Dawkins and above references. It hasn't been disproved yet.
BTW, you don't have to believe in evolution: it believes in you. Disease bacteria aquire resistance to antibiotics, and closing your eyes won't make you well.
I've already mentioned what that prevailing theory is in biology: intelligent design. The complexity of life simply cannot be explained any other way.
Really. Would you mind giving me figures of how and by how much this theory prevails? For a start, what % of biological researchers believe it? And where they think the 'intelligent design comes from'?
1) Um, not all creatures leave fossils. Absence of evidence is not proof of evidence.
2,3,4,5) Nothing to do with Evolution of life on Earth.
6) Perfection of scripture: hahahaha. No, *which* scripture?? Bhudist, Shinto, Hindu, Judaic or Moslem scripture? Hoaxes: So how does that dispove anything except the hoax concerned?
6) Like this: You have a *very* long row to hoe here, and you could start with a proof not a charge, and start that be describing just what you think this 'modern Information Theory (IT)' is in your opinion. I've certainly never heared of it.
My face is not red, my feet aint shuffling, but you, old buddy, are a trolling, know-nothing zealot.
I tell him that this -- my situation -- is why people pirate software. It's quicker to get a keygen and generate a phony key than to go through this, waste my time and waste my money.
You have got that right - We have basically entered the era when it is necissary to break the use^H^H^H copy protection before using your software.
I have experienced similar troubles with other products - I won't go into details now - where in the end using a cracked copy instead of the available legit copy was by far the best way to proceeed.
I think I crash about once a week, heavy browsing use.
Is that on XP? The crashes that I had happened all on the same day, when I tried repeatedly to open the same set of sites.
A lot depends upon whether or not you uninstall first, then reinstall.
For the benefit of those of you wondering 'so which is better?' the Mozilla site says 'Installing on top of previously installed builds may cause problems'. So bye-bye bookmarks and downloaded pluggins, hello clean install..
"but ultimately each user should have his own per-word probabilities based on the actual mail he receives... perhaps best of all makes it hard for spammers to tune mails to get through the filters"
I don't think the ability to make sounds has anything to do with culture.
Sound (or some other means of communicaton.. I think of Octopi and thier colour changes here) is necessary but not suficient for culture, and has co-evoilved with the rest of the extraordinary human brain.
If you have a few days to kill, don't mind complexity and are really interested, go read 'The Symbolic Species' by Terrence deacon for more details.
This is oversimplified to the point of being utter rubbish. Everyone learns partly by rote, partly by integrating learned facts into explanatory theories. Sure there is variation, and there are a few extreme individuals on that curve for some selected tasks. But all this metaphor (I won't deign to call it a theory) is, is a geeky way to 'prove' that I am 'better' than you.
That's my map of it, anyway. I don't need to know the details, as I've already evaluated it to being worthless.
The long term (ie 50 years and up) value of diamonds is near to zero. It's just carbon, give or take some manfacturing processes. In the long term, once some basic nanotech (not the way-out stuff, just better molecular assembly processes) is sorted out, there is no reason why a kilo block of diaomond should cost more than say, ten times the cost of a kilo block of plastic.
Yes, you can tell manufactured diaomonds from those made 'naturallly' in volcanos by counting the rings or something. But when people start throwing manufactured diaomond stuff out with thier daily trash, the image of 'natural' diamond is sure to take a knock. There is no real, material difference between the two. As ever with diamonds, it's about marketing.
You get this bot talking to someone over ICQ for a little bit and they will not know the difference.
In the modern version of the turing test, ie IRCbots, most people are very easy to fool when they are not expecting it. However, fooling a discering judge who is trying to tell human thought from canned waffle is still impossibly hard, in the 'We still have very little idea of how to do it' category.
No, not on your life. You can take my primitives from my cold dead body. If you want to suggest that primative should not be used in most production applications that's fine, but their is a time and a place for priatives that are very important. Suggesting that we get rid of primatives severly hurts your credability.
And your reason is? You have of course studied the way that C# does this, keeping both primitive-type-speed and uniform-object-hierarchy uniformity?
As for your comment about 2b + 2b != 4b... No shit you add two SIGNED 32bit values and expect it to work properly despite the buffer overflow!
Um, I think that's his point: Bits & buffers & overflows are right for data, addition working properly without the potential for buffer overflows is for integer math. The two are very differnt things.
like method to read the entire CD in to a 700MB buffer
If my PC has 700mb memory to play with, I hope that it wouldn't be isolated in the CD-rom reader subsystem. Expect to see this only after average PC RAM installed tops several Gb, and allocating that 700Mb of cache to one component isn't a very skewed allocation.
I like the idea mentioned by the other poster: multiple read heads.
As someone who recently moved to the UK (from Africa) and has now found work (after much nerve-wracking searching), I wish you good luck - you'll need it; it's not easy out there. Nope, not at all.
Jobstats (www.jobstats.co.uk) tracks 'the current state of the UK computing job market' by counting techie-wanted-ads placed online per week.
It's not totally accurate, but it's an adequite index of demand for IT people. It's not a pretty picture right now. The 'the U.K. technology job market' is bleak.
My advice to you is that if you have a job, seriously consider holding onto it for 6 months or so, until things pick up (as we assume that they must) by jobstats measures.
http://www.jobserve.co.uk/ is the site to browse and find jobs. It seems to have cornered over 80% of the online jobs market. If you do find a UK IT job online, chances are it will be via this site.
I'm sick of people at MS attempting to form competent sentences
Erm, I take it you have read Don Box's books (Essential COM, Effective COM) Go look them up at Amazon, I could be bothered to link. They may be 100% MS-centric, but as a way to understand those technoloiges thay can't be beat.
He is emphatically no marketroid, and is in fact a brilliant technical explainer, and a coding geek. When will people wake up and realise that MS employes a lot of very clever geeks. Money will do that.
There may be problems with MS, but you are way off mark in that comment.
HTTP has its issues, but referring to it as "the cockroah of the internet" and saying its days are numbered
Read the flipping article! "cockroach of the internet" means that it would survive anything including nuking, and that it's days are emphatically not numbered. See "installed base" and "backward compatibility"
A mutant fly would be a fly that has inherited changed DNA from it's parent. The parent is perhaps best refered to as a "fly with radiation sickness".
Seeing as these parent flies are dosed high enough to render them STERILE, there won't be any mutant offspring. Duh.
And considering that most all mutations caused by radiation are mistakes like cancer and deformity not frickin silly x-fly superpowers, is the African environment at risk from sick and crippled tsetse flies?
Funny you should ask, I wrote this last week:
on
Do You Like Your Job?
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
I hate my boss. Aargh! I used to like him, he was a distant friend. Then I started to work for him. Always a mistake. Now I can deal with him if I must, I just dont want to. Passive-agressive behaviour is a defence mechanism for stress ("What happens when you supress the desire to choke the living shit out of someone").
He may be a good engineer, but he is a manager in the same sense that a woodpecker is carpenter. He is charge of some people, that's about the extent of his managerial abilites.
One week before I am sheduled to leave, a fact that he has known for months, still I have no replacement, but he has asked me to implement a metric ton of changes, most of them off-the-cuff.
Yes, he wants value for his money, but darn it, management is about planning and timing. This is like a paniced seagull.
On an inspiration, he also asked me to move all the strings returned to the user in the program into a resource file or database where he can edit them without messing with the program. This is not a Win32/C program with a resource table, it is a website in PHP and Java. I should have laughed out loud, but all I did was mentally move it to the bottom of the priority list, which is already too long.
I didn't tell him that the new 1.4 version of java is finally out of beta, for fear that I'd be asked to "just quickly" roll it out on Friday before I leave.
What really boggles my mind is the complete lack of any conception of the need for a shakedown period. I finish all these changes on next friday and then walk away, and it all works perfectly. Never mind that it's never done that yet, not on this project, any other that this company has been involved with, or come to think of it, any other software in history.
But being proactive is not one of this office's virtues. Patching the patches is the first order of business.
But he is not a person to whom it is easy to tell things that he doesn't already know. Not easy to disagree with.
I am taking pride in making this program, this site work. Out users like us, and I get off on that. I'd gladly hand it over to someone else, but my boss is determined to mess it up and he doesn't have the faintest clue that he's doing that. If I do tell him he wouldn't understand.
I'll do what he says, it's the path of least resistance but I don't like it. It's unprofessional.
Two other employees are leaving in the near future, one with a personality clash with my boss. This would be OK, except he many years of hard-to-replace operational knowledge. This was supposed to be an easy six-month contract, don't get too involved, don't commit long-term. Sadly, all I can hope for is that I am far away when things do go wrong. Work is like that. You do all you can, and when it's over you never look back.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but you didn't mean it. Proof: the Earth's mass is not infinite, and only a tiny fraction of it is petroleum. Therefor, there is a finite amount of petroleum on or in earth. QED. Next time, learn what those long words mean before you use them so forcefully.
Because as the reserves get lower, it simply gets more expensive to pull out of the ground. WE WILL NEVER RUN OUT OF OIL. EVER.
Technically true, but pointless. We'll still miss using it when it's to expensive to use.
Are you trolling or are you just like that?
And irrespective of what the govt. does or doesn't, most people ie the majority of the population on England, couldn't give a rat's arse about the supposed literal truth of the Christian bible.
In fact, if it comes to that, the majority of Nothern Irish don't care for sectarian violence. And even those that do, are renewing tribal rivalries, not debating biblical interpretations.
Sorry, that should read 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'.
There was an article earlier today, and one earlier this week, with the word 'evolution' in the title. This brought the creationist cranks out of the woodwork. I really worry about slashdot, do I really want to be here if that this kind of moron is here?
It seems to be a US-only phenomonum. Here in England most people don't care about that Bible crap.
SO the lesson is: don't mention the e-word and the trolls won't bite.
By an armchair philosopher who's probably never seen the inside of a biolab. You don't know much about the author, do you? Have you looked for other books in this field? Hint: slashdot has reviewed 2 this week.
Of course 1 + 1 = 2. Perhaps you could provide similarly simple and intuitive proof of evolution actually occurring in nature?
Naah, other have done that better, if you'd bother to educate yourself. See Dawkins and above references. It hasn't been disproved yet.
BTW, you don't have to believe in evolution: it believes in you. Disease bacteria aquire resistance to antibiotics, and closing your eyes won't make you well.
I've already mentioned what that prevailing theory is in biology: intelligent design. The complexity of life simply cannot be explained any other way.
Really. Would you mind giving me figures of how and by how much this theory prevails? For a start, what % of biological researchers believe it? And where they think the 'intelligent design comes from'?
1) Um, not all creatures leave fossils. Absence of evidence is not proof of evidence.
2,3,4,5) Nothing to do with Evolution of life on Earth.
6) Perfection of scripture: hahahaha. No, *which* scripture??
Bhudist, Shinto, Hindu, Judaic or Moslem scripture?
Hoaxes: So how does that dispove anything except the hoax concerned?
6) Like this: You have a *very* long row to hoe here, and you could start with a proof not a charge, and start that be describing just what you think this 'modern Information Theory (IT)' is in your opinion. I've certainly never heared of it.
My face is not red, my feet aint shuffling, but you, old buddy, are a trolling, know-nothing zealot.
Go away, troll. Go read Dennett's book 'Darwin's dangerous idea'. Don't come back until you are done.
Oh, and I suppose that the fact that none questions or discourses on the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 makes it no longer true any more?
And BTW, if 'Nobody seriously believes that stuff anymore', what is the replacement scientific theory that explains the diversity of life better?
You have got that right - We have basically entered the era when it is necissary to break the use^H^H^H copy protection before using your software.
I have experienced similar troubles with other products - I won't go into details now - where in the end using a cracked copy instead of the available legit copy was by far the best way to proceeed.
Is that on XP? The crashes that I had happened all on the same day, when I tried repeatedly to open the same set of sites.
A lot depends upon whether or not you uninstall first, then reinstall.
For the benefit of those of you wondering 'so which is better?' the Mozilla site says 'Installing on top of previously installed builds may cause problems'. So bye-bye bookmarks and downloaded pluggins, hello clean install..
Eeep! this is not good news. I am using Mozilla 1.0 on WinXP. On a couple of occasions it has crashed, so I resorted to IE6, which worked just fine.
I was hoping that the 'Improved stability' (What's New in Mozilla 1.1) would have improved this. Anyone else have a perspective on this?
"but ultimately each user should have his own per-word probabilities based on the actual mail he receives ... perhaps best of all makes it hard for spammers to tune mails to get through the filters"
Sound (or some other means of communicaton.. I think of Octopi and thier colour changes here) is necessary but not suficient for culture, and has co-evoilved with the rest of the extraordinary human brain.
If you have a few days to kill, don't mind complexity and are really interested, go read 'The Symbolic Species' by Terrence deacon for more details.
This is oversimplified to the point of being utter rubbish. Everyone learns partly by rote, partly by integrating learned facts into explanatory theories. Sure there is variation, and there are a few extreme individuals on that curve for some selected tasks. But all this metaphor (I won't deign to call it a theory) is, is a geeky way to 'prove' that I am 'better' than you.
That's my map of it, anyway. I don't need to know the details, as I've already evaluated it to being worthless.
The long term (ie 50 years and up) value of diamonds is near to zero. It's just carbon, give or take some manfacturing processes. In the long term, once some basic nanotech (not the way-out stuff, just better molecular assembly processes) is sorted out, there is no reason why a kilo block of diaomond should cost more than say, ten times the cost of a kilo block of plastic.
Yes, you can tell manufactured diaomonds from those made 'naturallly' in volcanos by counting the rings or something. But when people start throwing manufactured diaomond stuff out with thier daily trash, the image of 'natural' diamond is sure to take a knock. There is no real, material difference between the two. As ever with diamonds, it's about marketing.
In the modern version of the turing test, ie IRCbots, most people are very easy to fool when they are not expecting it. However, fooling a discering judge who is trying to tell human thought from canned waffle is still impossibly hard, in the 'We still have very little idea of how to do it' category.
And your reason is? You have of course studied the way that C# does this, keeping both primitive-type-speed and uniform-object-hierarchy uniformity?
As for your comment about 2b + 2b != 4b... No shit you add two SIGNED 32bit values and expect it to work properly despite the buffer overflow!
Um, I think that's his point: Bits & buffers & overflows are right for data, addition working properly without the potential for buffer overflows is for integer math. The two are very differnt things.
Imagine a Leonid cluster of these!
And that old chinese room malarkey has been debunked many times over. For a good example see Daniel Dennett's 'Consciousness explained'.
If my PC has 700mb memory to play with, I hope that it wouldn't be isolated in the CD-rom reader subsystem. Expect to see this only after average PC RAM installed tops several Gb, and allocating that 700Mb of cache to one component isn't a very skewed allocation.
I like the idea mentioned by the other poster: multiple read heads.
As someone who recently moved to the UK (from Africa) and has now found work (after much nerve-wracking searching), I wish you good luck - you'll need it; it's not easy out there. Nope, not at all.
Jobstats (www.jobstats.co.uk) tracks 'the current state of the UK computing job market' by counting techie-wanted-ads placed online per week.
It's not totally accurate, but it's an adequite index of demand for IT people. It's not a pretty picture right now. The 'the U.K. technology job market' is bleak.
My advice to you is that if you have a job, seriously consider holding onto it for 6 months or so, until things pick up (as we assume that they must) by jobstats measures.
http://www.jobserve.co.uk/ is the site to browse and find jobs. It seems to have cornered over 80% of the online jobs market. If you do find a UK IT job online, chances are it will be via this site.
Er, yes I agree, it was frustratingly short on detail. Now is that Don Box or some ZDNet hack's fault?
The article is vauge, non-technical and vacous, but having read things that Don Box has written, I seriously doubt that the fault lies with him.
As reported here on slashdot
Erm, I take it you have read Don Box's books (Essential COM, Effective COM) Go look them up at Amazon, I could be bothered to link. They may be 100% MS-centric, but as a way to understand those technoloiges thay can't be beat.
He is emphatically no marketroid, and is in fact a brilliant technical explainer, and a coding geek. When will people wake up and realise that MS employes a lot of very clever geeks. Money will do that.
There may be problems with MS, but you are way off mark in that comment.
HTTP has its issues, but referring to it as "the cockroah of the internet" and saying its days are numbered
Read the flipping article! "cockroach of the internet" means that it would survive anything including nuking, and that it's days are emphatically not numbered. See "installed base" and "backward compatibility"
A mutant fly would be a fly that has inherited changed DNA from it's parent. The parent is perhaps best refered to as a "fly with radiation sickness".
Seeing as these parent flies are dosed high enough to render them STERILE, there won't be any mutant offspring. Duh.
And considering that most all mutations caused by radiation are mistakes like cancer and deformity not frickin silly x-fly superpowers, is the African environment at risk from sick and crippled tsetse flies?
I hate my boss. Aargh! I used to like him, he was a distant friend. Then I started to work for him. Always a mistake. Now I can deal with him if I must, I just dont want to. Passive-agressive behaviour is a defence mechanism for stress ("What happens when you supress the desire to choke the living shit out of someone").
He may be a good engineer, but he is a manager in the same sense that a woodpecker is carpenter. He is charge of some people, that's about the extent of his managerial abilites.
One week before I am sheduled to leave, a fact that he has known for months, still I have no replacement, but he has asked me to implement a metric ton of changes, most of them off-the-cuff.
Yes, he wants value for his money, but darn it, management is about planning and timing. This is like a paniced seagull.
On an inspiration, he also asked me to move all the strings returned to the user in the program into a resource file or database where he can edit them without messing with the program. This is not a Win32/C program with a resource table, it is a website in PHP and Java. I should have laughed out loud, but all I did was mentally move it to the bottom of the priority list, which is already too long.
I didn't tell him that the new 1.4 version of java is finally out of beta, for fear that I'd be asked to "just quickly" roll it out on Friday before I leave.
What really boggles my mind is the complete lack of any conception of the need for a shakedown period. I finish all these changes on next friday and then walk away, and it all works perfectly. Never mind that it's never done that yet, not on this project, any other that this company has been involved with, or come to think of it, any other software in history.
But being proactive is not one of this office's virtues. Patching the patches is the first order of business.
But he is not a person to whom it is easy to tell things that he doesn't already know. Not easy to disagree with.
I am taking pride in making this program, this site work. Out users like us, and I get off on that. I'd gladly hand it over to someone else, but my boss is determined to mess it up and he doesn't have the faintest clue that he's doing that. If I do tell him he wouldn't understand.
I'll do what he says, it's the path of least resistance but I don't like it. It's unprofessional.
Two other employees are leaving in the near future, one with a personality clash with my boss. This would be OK, except he many years of hard-to-replace operational knowledge. This was supposed to be an easy six-month contract, don't get too involved, don't commit long-term. Sadly, all I can hope for is that I am far away when things do go wrong. Work is like that. You do all you can, and when it's over you never look back.