I wouldn't trust the Face Recognition technology. The fingerprint scanner on my ThinkPad T500 ceased to work after three months. No, my fingerprints didn't change, get burned, etc. It just stopped recognizing any of my digits. The twerp in tech support suggested I re-flash the BIOS. Yeah, right.
Oh, and the hard drive failed after six months. That was fun.
I thought I was paying for the best in order not to have any of these problems.
Really? I wish they would invest some of that fastidiousness in choosing better disk drives. The drive on my ThinkPad T500 crapped out after a mere six months. This after I paid for what I thought was top-of-the-line hardware.
I was backed up, but it took me several days to reload all the software and get running again. Very unpleasant experience.
Now I can't get Acronis True Image to mirror my whole drive. The last time I tried, my system seized up, I had to lean on the power button for ten seconds to shut it down, and when I rebooted I got a nice message saying "Your system may not restart". Wonderful.
Oh - and the fingerprint scanner stops working after three months. The twerp in tech support casually suggested I would have to "reflash my BIOS". Really? I see you don't user your PC to earn a living.
The most common use of "goto" in that circumstance is to enforce "only one return".
Which is every bit the pedantic lunacy that goto-hate is.
Not necessarily: sometimes you need to free memory, resources, etc.
I don't use goto anymore, but back in the days of 16-bit and 12K stack, where we had to malloc() local variables, a 'one return' goto proved useful to branch to free() without excessively nested 'if's.
The volunteer fire brigade is no longer necessary?
Not so. In rural communities, the tax burden of a paid fire department would be unaffordable. The volunteer fire brigade is a vital and respected part of the community.
Sorry, that hasn't been my experience. In the 70's I had a job writing Assembler for a Univac 9200 (32K memory, yes that's 'K'). The Master File Update program was 4,000 cards of source code. I would compile it a few times a day, and I rarely got a jam.
We ran the update once a day on the 40,000-card master file, using the 1,000 card/minute reader. There were a couple of jams each day. Once a wad of cards got caught in the pinch rollers: smoke started billowing out of the car reader. Good times.
OK, that's funny. Well deserving of +5.
Indulge me here in a rant about spelling.
I'm sure we all agree that English spelling is hard and irrational. G.B. Shaw joked that "ghoti" is pronounced "fish": 'gh' as in "cough", 'o' as in "women", and 'ti' as in "nation". Story goes that English spelling was set in stone by the first printer who typeset an English manuscript: a dutchman who didn't speak the language.
Spanish did away with all that nonsense years ago. Words are spelled exactly as they are pronounced: "fotografia", etc.
Correct spelling is important for the following reason: it's a measure of your skill at observation. If you have been looking at the correct spelling of a word all your life, every time you read, how come you can't get it right?
When you get hired for a job, you will be expected to learn lots of things by observation; also you will be expected to pay attention to detail. Whether you can spell or not is a measure of your ability. It's a test of whether you understand the code, have had the proper upbringing.
Bad spelling means you are not able to pay attention to detail, and you're a slow learner. Does that sound like someone an employer would want to hire? Unless it's flipping burgers.
Poor spelling is like showing up at a hip venue, dressed in a 70's leisure suit: you just don't get it.
Caveat: English is not my native language (neither is Spanish), sorry for any typos.
In my days (70's) of supporting a family by getting paid to squeeze code into a 32K "mainframe", everybody called it "Assembler" or "Assembler language".
While I'm not a big fan of the latest versions of Office, I have yet to see a Web-based, on-line program that can handle two or three hundred-page technical documents, with automatic paragraph numbering, indices, cross-referencing, style formats, redlining, robust tables, etc. Heck even WordPerfect buggers up RTF.
Funny... I bought a top-of-the-line Lenovo ThinkPad a few months ago. At first, the fingerprint scan was fun. Then it stopped working reliably. I scan over and over and get that damn red circle. Now it's not worth trying anymore. And no, my fingerprint is not scarred, not wrinkled from being wet, not altered in any way.
I thought of re-scanning, but the Lenovo Support Tech said that, thanks to a quirk in their wonderful Client Security layer, I had to use my _original_ Windows password, not the password I had had the audacity to change recently. Needless to say I didn't remember my original password. Nor do I want to reset the BIOS (as he suggested).
Complexity dooms technology (see "Knob in the Shuttle window").
I read somewhere (long ago) that the ternary system is more efficient because it is the closest to base 'e' (2.71...), the most efficient numbering system for calculations.
I worked with punched cards as a student in the 60's, and at my first job in the 70's. It was kind of neat. Editing source code consisted of shuffling cards. To 'insert' or 'delete' a character, you had to press hard on the card to prevent it from dup'ing in synch with the other card. We invented the 240-column card (three four-bit digits per column).
Compiling a 4,000-line assembler program took 40 minutes. When cards jammed and tore, you had to re-key them manually.
In the late 80's, the Boston Computer Museum had an excellent working display of punched card equipment. They closed, but their exhibits were shipped to a computer museum in Mountain View, CA.
http://www.computerhistory.org/
They sell a DVD of a movie that shows the early days of computing, including scientists manually copying results displayed on a primitive CRT: "See how they ran". ahref=http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/VT%20298rel=url2html-8937http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/VT%20298>, which I seem to recall runs longer than 17 min.
PS: I never dropped, nor saw dropped, a tray of cards. Besides, they were sequence-numbered and could be re-sorted.
In particular, pay attention to the duty cycle and operating life of the generator.
If your furnace is hot-air, you need 220 V. and probably 2,400 watts, which means the generator must deliver 3,600 or better 4,800 watts on a single outlet. The motor sucks a lot of juice at start-up.
Use ion deposition technology. The characters are inscribed and can be read/OCR'ed with any microscope. I believe you can store 20,000 pages on a 5" nickel disk.
The burner is about $250,000. There are firms offering the service.
What a coincidence... I'm reading this on the XO I just received today.
I'm piggybacking on a neighbour's WiFi.
It's a well-built, quality machine. It has a built-in Python interpreter called Pippy, with numerous examples and help to train tomorrow's programmers.
It has a command-line terminal, which also provides a Python interprreter.
20 hrs battery life on one charge, I think I'll bring it with me on business trips.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to use the free Personal Ancestral File, don't forget PAF Companion for neat charts & reports.
Is SVG a practical option yet, or is it still not supported by enough browsers? Without a special plug-in, I mean.
I wouldn't trust the Face Recognition technology. The fingerprint scanner on my ThinkPad T500 ceased to work after three months. No, my fingerprints didn't change, get burned, etc. It just stopped recognizing any of my digits. The twerp in tech support suggested I re-flash the BIOS. Yeah, right.
Oh, and the hard drive failed after six months. That was fun.
I thought I was paying for the best in order not to have any of these problems.
Never again a Lenovo.
"fastidious scientists"
Really? I wish they would invest some of that fastidiousness in choosing better disk drives. The drive on my ThinkPad T500 crapped out after a mere six months. This after I paid for what I thought was top-of-the-line hardware.
I was backed up, but it took me several days to reload all the software and get running again. Very unpleasant experience.
Now I can't get Acronis True Image to mirror my whole drive. The last time I tried, my system seized up, I had to lean on the power button for ten seconds to shut it down, and when I rebooted I got a nice message saying "Your system may not restart". Wonderful.
Oh - and the fingerprint scanner stops working after three months. The twerp in tech support casually suggested I would have to "reflash my BIOS". Really? I see you don't user your PC to earn a living.
I never had such grief with generic black boxes.
Great! Now we're going to infect another dimension with our viruses... Just what they need...
Not necessarily: sometimes you need to free memory, resources, etc.
I don't use goto anymore, but back in the days of 16-bit and 12K stack, where we had to malloc() local variables, a 'one return' goto proved useful to branch to free() without excessively nested 'if's.
Not so. In rural communities, the tax burden of a paid fire department would be unaffordable. The volunteer fire brigade is a vital and respected part of the community.
That's "card reader", not "car".
We ran the update once a day on the 40,000-card master file, using the 1,000 card/minute reader. There were a couple of jams each day. Once a wad of cards got caught in the pinch rollers: smoke started billowing out of the car reader. Good times.
OK, that's funny. Well deserving of +5.
Indulge me here in a rant about spelling.
I'm sure we all agree that English spelling is hard and irrational. G.B. Shaw joked that "ghoti" is pronounced "fish": 'gh' as in "cough", 'o' as in "women", and 'ti' as in "nation". Story goes that English spelling was set in stone by the first printer who typeset an English manuscript: a dutchman who didn't speak the language.
Spanish did away with all that nonsense years ago. Words are spelled exactly as they are pronounced: "fotografia", etc.
Correct spelling is important for the following reason: it's a measure of your skill at observation. If you have been looking at the correct spelling of a word all your life, every time you read, how come you can't get it right?
When you get hired for a job, you will be expected to learn lots of things by observation; also you will be expected to pay attention to detail. Whether you can spell or not is a measure of your ability. It's a test of whether you understand the code, have had the proper upbringing.
Bad spelling means you are not able to pay attention to detail, and you're a slow learner. Does that sound like someone an employer would want to hire? Unless it's flipping burgers.
Poor spelling is like showing up at a hip venue, dressed in a 70's leisure suit: you just don't get it.
Caveat: English is not my native language (neither is Spanish), sorry for any typos.
Sorry about that.
In my days (70's) of supporting a family by getting paid to squeeze code into a 32K "mainframe", everybody called it "Assembler" or "Assembler language".
While I'm not a big fan of the latest versions of Office, I have yet to see a Web-based, on-line program that can handle two or three hundred-page technical documents, with automatic paragraph numbering, indices, cross-referencing, style formats, redlining, robust tables, etc. Heck even WordPerfect buggers up RTF.
"Twats"? "Cunts"? "Pricks"?
Sheesh! Make up your mind... Can't have it both ways.
Funny... I bought a top-of-the-line Lenovo ThinkPad a few months ago. At first, the fingerprint scan was fun. Then it stopped working reliably. I scan over and over and get that damn red circle. Now it's not worth trying anymore. And no, my fingerprint is not scarred, not wrinkled from being wet, not altered in any way.
I thought of re-scanning, but the Lenovo Support Tech said that, thanks to a quirk in their wonderful Client Security layer, I had to use my _original_ Windows password, not the password I had had the audacity to change recently. Needless to say I didn't remember my original password. Nor do I want to reset the BIOS (as he suggested).
Complexity dooms technology (see "Knob in the Shuttle window").
You forgot Amateur ("Ham") Radio, which requires licensing to insure fair use of limited bandwidth resource.
Mange d'la marde!
I read somewhere (long ago) that the ternary system is more efficient because it is the closest to base 'e' (2.71...), the most efficient numbering system for calculations.
Show me another way of deterring spammers?
I worked with punched cards as a student in the 60's, and at my first job in the 70's. It was kind of neat. Editing source code consisted of shuffling cards. To 'insert' or 'delete' a character, you had to press hard on the card to prevent it from dup'ing in synch with the other card. We invented the 240-column card (three four-bit digits per column).
Compiling a 4,000-line assembler program took 40 minutes. When cards jammed and tore, you had to re-key them manually.
In the late 80's, the Boston Computer Museum had an excellent working display of punched card equipment. They closed, but their exhibits were shipped to a computer museum in Mountain View, CA. http://www.computerhistory.org/
They sell a DVD of a movie that shows the early days of computing, including scientists manually copying results displayed on a primitive CRT: "See how they ran". ahref=http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/VT%20298rel=url2html-8937http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/VT%20298>, which I seem to recall runs longer than 17 min.
PS: I never dropped, nor saw dropped, a tray of cards. Besides, they were sequence-numbered and could be re-sorted.
I have a fair amount of experience with home generators & heating. See my observations http://www.kyber.biz/rants/Electric%20generators%20AM-FM%20Dec%202004%20-%20Jan%202005.htm
In particular, pay attention to the duty cycle and operating life of the generator.
If your furnace is hot-air, you need 220 V. and probably 2,400 watts, which means the generator must deliver 3,600 or better 4,800 watts on a single outlet. The motor sucks a lot of juice at start-up.
Use ion deposition technology. The characters are inscribed and can be read/OCR'ed with any microscope. I believe you can store 20,000 pages on a 5" nickel disk. The burner is about $250,000. There are firms offering the service.
What a coincidence... I'm reading this on the XO I just received today. I'm piggybacking on a neighbour's WiFi. It's a well-built, quality machine. It has a built-in Python interpreter called Pippy, with numerous examples and help to train tomorrow's programmers. It has a command-line terminal, which also provides a Python interprreter. 20 hrs battery life on one charge, I think I'll bring it with me on business trips.
I agree with your position.
On a separate note, wouldn't it be easy to manufacture counterfeit dongles?