Well, among everything else in there. It seems that SkyMall has moved on from these favorites. But, they were reliable point-and-laugh items when I was flying regularly a few years ago.
I learned programming in Microsoft BASIC, assembly language and a touch of Pascal, prior to reaching college. I don't use any of those languages now. (Ok, I still program in assembly language, but for different processors.)
As long as it's actual programming, with variables, data structures, and code to manipulate those things, then great! I don't really care if it's VB, Python, TCL, Lua, Perl, C++14, Delphi, Haskell, LISP, Erlang...
The real point is to open up the computer as a programmable device, and to get kids seeing the computer as something they can extend themselves with their own creativity. For that to happen, you want to choose a language that students can pick up quickly enough to see interesting results early on. You don't want their first meaningful program to come in the last weeks of a year-long class.
Interesting. I work in Texas also—and lived here full time since 1997—and I've found the environment at my employer to be very mature and inclusive, with women at all levels of the company. That includes my previous boss. When she retired (after 33 years at the company), she had risen to the rank "Fellow," which is a fairly high title at the company.
However, I don't know that the fact we're in Texas has all that much to do with it. One startup I interviewed with here definitely had a culture that was tilted in more the direction of a frathouse mentality, I think. They offered to take me to lunch at Hooters for an informal interview, and hinted they sometimes do lunch as more interesting places. *wink* *wink* I didn't join that company.
I see your point about my use of the term "rise". Overall, things have gotten more inclusive, not less. The specific moniker brogrammer is a recent one, and is perhaps more indicative of programming / development appealing to a wider range of personality types, including extroverted "bros", as opposed to shy and/or introverted geeks. Just the term itself is inherently gender biased.
"Everybody knows boys will be boys." Bullshit. Treating creepy, gross, harassing behavior as somehow normal, and that "everybody knows" it'll happen just perpetuates it. Not acceptable.
Read some of the horror stories from DEFCON 20. Whether or not you're there to get laid, none of that shit's acceptable, period.
The goal of diversity initiatives is to make the pool of qualified candidates more diverse. But it doesn't say anything about the differing attributes having anything to do with how qualified you are. Yes, diversity includes gender diversity. But, that has absolutely nothing to do with the (correct, but meaningless) assertion that people don't program with their genitals.
My statement was meant to be read as "We need more vaginas in here programming, as if vaginas have some role in the process of programming." They don't. And to suggest "diversity initiatives" imply that they do is a strawman.
It sounds like your workplace is respectful, and that race and gender rightfully don't factor into your opinions of each others' work. It sounds like your workplace happens to be diverse, which helps keep everyone centered on what does matter (technical chops), as opposed to what doesn't (gender, race, age).
But what are your feelings on the rise of brogrammers? Sexual harassment at conferences? Companies with cultures that do fixate on gender / race / what-have-you? Typically these cultures arise when the population is too insular, too homogeneous.
Diversity isn't about saying "we need more vaginas in here programming." What an irrelevant strawman. Rather, it's about preventing the myopic echo chamber that can result when things are too homogeneous.
Right. But DerYeghiayan's testimony is just testimony, not factual evidence. The whole point of this cross examination is to discredit the testimony. Testimony doesn't rise to the same level as fact by default, as humans are unreliable. It's not the same as hard evidence or accepted facts that are undisputed in a case.
I have better memories of Win98 SE than Win95 OSR2. USB was actually stable, at least on my machine.
With WinXP, it finally was reasonable at SP2. Prior to that... glitch-tastic!
I'm currently using Win7 SP1 on my work laptop, configured to use the classic interface. To me, it's like WinXP SP5 or something.;-) For the most part, nice and stable. Although the WiFi network detection is still slow, unreliable and occasionally requires reboots to work.
Haven't touched Win 8.x and don't plan to any sooner than necessary. I hope to skip it entirely, as I did with WinME and Vista.
At the tone the time will be One Fifty Nine and Forty Seconds. *BEEP* At the tone the time will be One Fifty Nine and Fifty Seconds. *BEEP* At the tone the time will be Two O'clock Exactly. *BEEP*
150MB? That's spacious. I have a 10MB MFM drive in the garage with a big ol' stepper motor on it to move the heads. 80ms seek time, baby! Zzzzt...zz..zzzt...zzzt...ztztztztzt....
Well, in this case the road was "clear" as the snow did melt immediately (road was till to warm) nevertheless the risk of "ice" here and there was given. Imagine snow melting and freezing a few yards further again.
I'm all too familiar with that, having grown up in snow. We called that slick ice that results from melting and refreezing "black ice." It was especially bad in areas with wind blowing snow over the road, as that snow would obscure the ice.
Lane detection on a highway is easy as you have a barrier on one side and poles on the other, actually you have poles on both sides.
Ah. Many of our highways here lack barriers and poles, instead just using large grassy areas to divide the highway from the surrounding environment, such as this. Those same highways can be up to 3 lanes wide. I've driven on I-94 (recently the site of a 90-car pileup) in conditions where drivers created 2 lanes out of the 3 that exist, because there wasn't any real reference to go by to find the lanes.
Self driving cars rely on a sensor array (short-range RADAR, long-range RADAR, LIDAR, SONAR, stereo and infrared cameras, temperature and accelerometer feedback) to build their world model. I admit I'm not a sensor expert myself, so I'm not really sure how degraded those sensor inputs would be in fog and snow. Obviously the thermometer and accelerometer would be fine, but each of the others would experience degraded range.
The self-driving car may end up going a bit slower than 80km/h to avoid out-driving its ability to look ahead. Depth computed from stereo vision I imagine would be heavily impacted, as fog isn't completely uniform. I'm not sure how LIDAR would perform. RADAR may be OK, as we're able to track planes through clouds just fine.
I also wonder how lane detection even has a chance in snow, unless the roads have been cleared, or there are clear lane ruts from previous cars. Having grown up in snowy Michigan, I know human drivers often get the lane boundaries wrong after a heavy snow.:-)
Ah, that makes sense. Inclement weather is 2x - 3x as stressful to drive through, and certainly much more dangerous. I doubt an autonomous car would have been great in those conditions either, though.
For some things, I can see waiting to package it up at the post office. Priority / Express Mail envelopes are a big one. Since I do a fair bit of shipping via USPS, I actually go down to the PO ahead of time and pick up boxes for the things I'm going to ship, and do all the packaging at home. That's how I'm acutely aware that they often don't have what I need at a particular location, which further reinforces my desire to pack things up at home.
I also don't trust the tape-strips that are pre-applied to the packaging. I've had some that stuck like glue, and some that started peeling open a minute after packing up my boxes. So, I always end up reinforcing with some shipping tape.
I grant you, I'm probably not the typical postal customer, though. The more casual user of postal services will probably scratch their heads over many of the things you've pointed out on the USPS site. I've been using it for so long, it all feels pretty natural to me.
I imagine the "no first class stamps at USPS.com" thingy is a concession to Pitney Bowes, Stamps.Com and other vendors they've made deals with for various first class postage services. Otherwise, there'd be little reason for those other services to exist.
You could argue that it's the user's responsibility to make sure their package fits into the box they select, but a user could reasonably assume that the whole point of entering the length, width and height is so that the USPS can recommend only those boxes that will hold the item. Remember, the user usually doesn't have these boxes in front of them at the time they're printing the label. They could end up selecting a box option, printing the label, taking it all the way to the post office along with their package, only to find out that the package doesn't fit into the box that they printed the label for, and that they have to wait in line anwyay to pay for an alternate method.
Ah, you're one of those people who clog up the lobby boxing your stuff up at the post office, using the wrong tape (such as the tape meat to mark an Express package on something you're shipping Priority or First Class) and breaking in line to ask someone behind the desk for scissors.
You realize that the post office isn't a full service pack and ship place, right? At least none of the ones I've been to around here are. You're supposed to have everything packed up and ready to go before you walk in the door. You also realize that your local PO probably doesn't stock all the sizes and shapes of shipping box the website describes, and that package weight is supposed to include the box, right?.
That is, you're supposed to have boxed up your parcel by the time you got to this part of the form. The only thing missing should be the label.
Could be worse. You could be like the person I saw who tried to send a package wrapped in normal Christmas wrapping paper.... That was going to be a shredded nightmare on the other side.
On some Linux distros,/tmp is a tmpfs volume, which is effectively a RAM disk. SunOS/Solaris also do that. Many files live in/tmp for very short periods, and have no requirement to persist across a reboot. So, building them in RAM makes sense. The filesystem can still get backed to disk in the swap partition.
The only other case I can think of where a RAM drive might make sense is if you have a set of files you need access to with tight deadlines, and the total corpus fits in RAM. Of course, you could also mmap and mlock those files to hold those files in RAM, if you have control over the application's implementation. For example, in the bad old days of 4x CD burners with almost no buffer, loading the ISO into a RAM disk could help weak burning software keep up with its realtime deadlines. That is, if you had enough RAM to hold the ISO (it needed to be a smallish ISO, not a full 650MB).
Otherwise, RAM disks are usually a bad idea these days.
LIDAR stands for Laser Infrared Detection and Ranging. Why does the summary say "(light, radar)" after LIDAR? RADAR uses radio waves, not infrared laser.
(And yes, Mr. Pedantic, I realize radio waves and infrared light waves are both electromagnetic waves. But, our mechanisms for detecting things in the radar band vs. the infrared light band are quite different, so the distinction is meaningful.)
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I didn't follow his reasoning one bit:
The two details are completely orthogonal to each other!
In any case, 4:2:0 at UHD gives you as much color information as 4:4:4 at HD. You'd have a very hard time noticing the chroma subsampling....
My favorite things to laugh at were:
Well, among everything else in there. It seems that SkyMall has moved on from these favorites. But, they were reliable point-and-laugh items when I was flying regularly a few years ago.
Isn't that a common pattern, though? Spin off the few profit centers that are actually profitable, and then fold the rest of the business?
I learned programming in Microsoft BASIC, assembly language and a touch of Pascal, prior to reaching college. I don't use any of those languages now. (Ok, I still program in assembly language, but for different processors.)
As long as it's actual programming, with variables, data structures, and code to manipulate those things, then great! I don't really care if it's VB, Python, TCL, Lua, Perl, C++14, Delphi, Haskell, LISP, Erlang...
The real point is to open up the computer as a programmable device, and to get kids seeing the computer as something they can extend themselves with their own creativity. For that to happen, you want to choose a language that students can pick up quickly enough to see interesting results early on. You don't want their first meaningful program to come in the last weeks of a year-long class.
Interesting. I work in Texas also—and lived here full time since 1997—and I've found the environment at my employer to be very mature and inclusive, with women at all levels of the company. That includes my previous boss. When she retired (after 33 years at the company), she had risen to the rank "Fellow," which is a fairly high title at the company.
However, I don't know that the fact we're in Texas has all that much to do with it. One startup I interviewed with here definitely had a culture that was tilted in more the direction of a frathouse mentality, I think. They offered to take me to lunch at Hooters for an informal interview, and hinted they sometimes do lunch as more interesting places. *wink* *wink* I didn't join that company.
I see your point about my use of the term "rise". Overall, things have gotten more inclusive, not less. The specific moniker brogrammer is a recent one, and is perhaps more indicative of programming / development appealing to a wider range of personality types, including extroverted "bros", as opposed to shy and/or introverted geeks. Just the term itself is inherently gender biased.
Key word there: CONSENT. Harassment is inherently non-consensual.
"Everybody knows boys will be boys." Bullshit. Treating creepy, gross, harassing behavior as somehow normal, and that "everybody knows" it'll happen just perpetuates it. Not acceptable.
Read some of the horror stories from DEFCON 20. Whether or not you're there to get laid, none of that shit's acceptable, period.
The goal of diversity initiatives is to make the pool of qualified candidates more diverse. But it doesn't say anything about the differing attributes having anything to do with how qualified you are. Yes, diversity includes gender diversity. But, that has absolutely nothing to do with the (correct, but meaningless) assertion that people don't program with their genitals.
My statement was meant to be read as "We need more vaginas in here programming, as if vaginas have some role in the process of programming." They don't. And to suggest "diversity initiatives" imply that they do is a strawman.
And you know what? 30+ years will have been a pretty good run for "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu."
It sounds like your workplace is respectful, and that race and gender rightfully don't factor into your opinions of each others' work. It sounds like your workplace happens to be diverse, which helps keep everyone centered on what does matter (technical chops), as opposed to what doesn't (gender, race, age).
But what are your feelings on the rise of brogrammers? Sexual harassment at conferences? Companies with cultures that do fixate on gender / race / what-have-you? Typically these cultures arise when the population is too insular, too homogeneous.
Diversity isn't about saying "we need more vaginas in here programming." What an irrelevant strawman. Rather, it's about preventing the myopic echo chamber that can result when things are too homogeneous.
Right. But DerYeghiayan's testimony is just testimony, not factual evidence. The whole point of this cross examination is to discredit the testimony. Testimony doesn't rise to the same level as fact by default, as humans are unreliable. It's not the same as hard evidence or accepted facts that are undisputed in a case.
I have better memories of Win98 SE than Win95 OSR2. USB was actually stable, at least on my machine.
With WinXP, it finally was reasonable at SP2. Prior to that... glitch-tastic!
I'm currently using Win7 SP1 on my work laptop, configured to use the classic interface. To me, it's like WinXP SP5 or something. ;-) For the most part, nice and stable. Although the WiFi network detection is still slow, unreliable and occasionally requires reboots to work.
Haven't touched Win 8.x and don't plan to any sooner than necessary. I hope to skip it entirely, as I did with WinME and Vista.
The time lady!
150MB? That's spacious. I have a 10MB MFM drive in the garage with a big ol' stepper motor on it to move the heads. 80ms seek time, baby! Zzzzt...zz..zzzt...zzzt...ztztztztzt....
Hearing the opening music over the tape loading sounds reminded me of this track, involving Pirate Adventure for the TI-99/4A.
I never experienced a mimeograph, but I do remember the sound (and smell!) of the Ditto machines (spirit duplicators).
As for a different sound that's largely died out: Fast forwarding / rewinding / ejecting a cassette tape.
I'm all too familiar with that, having grown up in snow. We called that slick ice that results from melting and refreezing "black ice." It was especially bad in areas with wind blowing snow over the road, as that snow would obscure the ice.
Ah. Many of our highways here lack barriers and poles, instead just using large grassy areas to divide the highway from the surrounding environment, such as this. Those same highways can be up to 3 lanes wide. I've driven on I-94 (recently the site of a 90-car pileup) in conditions where drivers created 2 lanes out of the 3 that exist, because there wasn't any real reference to go by to find the lanes.
Self driving cars rely on a sensor array (short-range RADAR, long-range RADAR, LIDAR, SONAR, stereo and infrared cameras, temperature and accelerometer feedback) to build their world model. I admit I'm not a sensor expert myself, so I'm not really sure how degraded those sensor inputs would be in fog and snow. Obviously the thermometer and accelerometer would be fine, but each of the others would experience degraded range.
The self-driving car may end up going a bit slower than 80km/h to avoid out-driving its ability to look ahead. Depth computed from stereo vision I imagine would be heavily impacted, as fog isn't completely uniform. I'm not sure how LIDAR would perform. RADAR may be OK, as we're able to track planes through clouds just fine.
I also wonder how lane detection even has a chance in snow, unless the roads have been cleared, or there are clear lane ruts from previous cars. Having grown up in snowy Michigan, I know human drivers often get the lane boundaries wrong after a heavy snow. :-)
Ah, that makes sense. Inclement weather is 2x - 3x as stressful to drive through, and certainly much more dangerous. I doubt an autonomous car would have been great in those conditions either, though.
I guess I was being a bit snarky earlier.
For some things, I can see waiting to package it up at the post office. Priority / Express Mail envelopes are a big one. Since I do a fair bit of shipping via USPS, I actually go down to the PO ahead of time and pick up boxes for the things I'm going to ship, and do all the packaging at home. That's how I'm acutely aware that they often don't have what I need at a particular location, which further reinforces my desire to pack things up at home.
I also don't trust the tape-strips that are pre-applied to the packaging. I've had some that stuck like glue, and some that started peeling open a minute after packing up my boxes. So, I always end up reinforcing with some shipping tape.
I grant you, I'm probably not the typical postal customer, though. The more casual user of postal services will probably scratch their heads over many of the things you've pointed out on the USPS site. I've been using it for so long, it all feels pretty natural to me.
I imagine the "no first class stamps at USPS.com" thingy is a concession to Pitney Bowes, Stamps.Com and other vendors they've made deals with for various first class postage services. Otherwise, there'd be little reason for those other services to exist.
Ah, you're one of those people who clog up the lobby boxing your stuff up at the post office, using the wrong tape (such as the tape meat to mark an Express package on something you're shipping Priority or First Class) and breaking in line to ask someone behind the desk for scissors.
You realize that the post office isn't a full service pack and ship place, right? At least none of the ones I've been to around here are. You're supposed to have everything packed up and ready to go before you walk in the door. You also realize that your local PO probably doesn't stock all the sizes and shapes of shipping box the website describes, and that package weight is supposed to include the box, right?.
That is, you're supposed to have boxed up your parcel by the time you got to this part of the form. The only thing missing should be the label.
Could be worse. You could be like the person I saw who tried to send a package wrapped in normal Christmas wrapping paper.... That was going to be a shredded nightmare on the other side.
On some Linux distros, /tmp is a tmpfs volume, which is effectively a RAM disk. SunOS/Solaris also do that. Many files live in /tmp for very short periods, and have no requirement to persist across a reboot. So, building them in RAM makes sense. The filesystem can still get backed to disk in the swap partition.
The only other case I can think of where a RAM drive might make sense is if you have a set of files you need access to with tight deadlines, and the total corpus fits in RAM. Of course, you could also mmap and mlock those files to hold those files in RAM, if you have control over the application's implementation. For example, in the bad old days of 4x CD burners with almost no buffer, loading the ISO into a RAM disk could help weak burning software keep up with its realtime deadlines. That is, if you had enough RAM to hold the ISO (it needed to be a smallish ISO, not a full 650MB).
Otherwise, RAM disks are usually a bad idea these days.
You needed to stay overnight somewhere for a mere 6hr drive? I usually reserve that for drives over twice that long.
LIDAR stands for Laser Infrared Detection and Ranging. Why does the summary say "(light, radar)" after LIDAR? RADAR uses radio waves, not infrared laser.
(And yes, Mr. Pedantic, I realize radio waves and infrared light waves are both electromagnetic waves. But, our mechanisms for detecting things in the radar band vs. the infrared light band are quite different, so the distinction is meaningful.)
Now they just Need a Few of those Long S's.