Several years ago I tried to port the Windows Blue Screen of Death, but just couldn't get it right... couldn't get that rich marine blue hue just right. Gave up ultimately. I think Windows 7 BSoD is a masterpiece, and would really like to see it on Linux where the primitive black/white just doesn't cut it really - and window's rows of hex values on the BSoD is really aesthetically pleasing. I miss that on Linux.
The license and gov't regulation really is the issue of the "fairness" here. The Taxi industry is highly regulated and licensed, in Europe & the U.S... Taxis & Limos that enter an airport area are highly monitored, and regularly fined if it's found by the monitoring police that the vehicle lacks a current license.
Uber side steps all of this gov't regulation, and, say what you will about that regulation, it is unfair to those drivers who are paying the governments the right to pickup and drop-off passengers at the airport. Of course those licensed taxi and limo drivers would be pissed.
One way to make it fair is to drop all the licensing requirements of the taxi drivers.
In Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech neural networks were the diregeur fashion, a long with lisp. But in the end it was Hidden Markov Models, and even Baysean modelling that ended up solving these AI-ish ventures.
Neural Networks influenced a great deal of collateral and tangential research, the the Neural Networks themselves really went no where. They just weren't usable, not even for machine learning -- at least not in the "pure form".
The merits of the deal aside, this also is another trend of the center of the entertainment business slowly moving north into San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We have apple now a major distributor of tv shows and music, disney's Pixar, and that other animation studio in Redwood City. Not to mention all the very small indie production that goes on there as well.
Pystar was discovered to be the performance art of a Yale art student. She said that she wasn't really going to load it with Mac OS but rather just say she was going to. First she needs to not get pregnant several times and then get pregnant and put some kind of not real blood on the cases.
It's not a Hoax nor a Scam. It's art. And the artist said that if Paypal or the Credit card services takes the site down to say that this is not legitimate she will say that is.
During The Great Bubble the numbers predicting the pop were glaringly obvious. I recall many financial articles predicting the demise of EToys, Pets.com, Webvan, etc. And the believers dismissed the analysis as "old economy" and people who "didn't get it". The new economy was based on "eyeballs", "stickyness", etc. Not profit vs. loss. It was a whacked time. It was The Great Bubble.
Show me the numbers now. What bubble? Sure there's web 2.0 hype. Google, the leader of web2.0 is profitable. Maybe overvalued, who knows. And yahoo too. Also protifable. And amazon. And myspace and linkedin and facebook, all the posterchildren of web 2.0, are all financially sound even if they aren't all profitable.
So show me the numbers that indicate a bubble on the scale of The Great Bubble.
Dvorak really is a wind bag. Too bad Slashdot with its human editors can't at least compete with Digg and prevent this kind of drivel making it to the front page.
"Product Watch" was Tivo's announcement from just the other day. This somewhat dull product, an HME based application, enables a Tivo user with a broadband connection to browse through a collection of infomercials and select videos for download.
Now. Of course. Who would use this? Ads? Etc, etc. However all the Tivo pundints missed the bigger point. That being that this is IP/TV. Tivo now sports a box that integrates the TV (rabit ears, cable, or satalite) with IP content.
Product Watch is actually a smart business move, as that enabled Tivo to build the ground work, the back end, call it the infrastructure, for IP/TV with companies paying to place their content.
Now this deal with brightcove will be a no-brainer. Technically not a challenge at all for Tivo, only the usual of two companies hashing out who will be responsible for what and etc.
I think this Product Watch thing is not properly understood at what a big deal it is, and how Tivo will probably be announcing such IP content partnerships like this one again and again over the coming weeks and months.
Let me extrapolate on Balmer's Microsoft competes the "Good old-fashioned way":
We will own more congressman and senators than Google, and then we will make Google against the law, and then make it illegal for them to index any Class-C address web-site, and then we will buy all Class-B addresses and then patent them, and make it so only Windows machines can reach a Class-B address. After than we will have our congressmen and Senators pass a law making IP-v6 illegal, thereby protecting our hold on addresses. Then we will go to Europe and outlaw X.25.
That's just a good old-fashioned microsoft technology battle.
Re: And the photos are a most see:
on
Lucas's New HQ
·
· Score: 1
Joan Baez, Chris Isaac, Bonnie Rait performed... See George with the cast of Beach Blanket Babylon...
First the IRS says they want to make a free web-based tax preparation system. Intuit says, "No, don't do that. We'll do it." So Intuit completely burries the free version of there tax prep service. Only if you enter their site from the IRS did you get the free version.
But you still had to pay for the State. And now California does this.
So what does Intuit do now to make up for all that lost revenue.
How about this: End-of-life Quicken 2005. Make everyone upgrade to the '06 version in November.
Oh you are so right. And as a corrolary never do if (x == y), because with both sides being variables one day you'll write (x = y), and (y = x) wont save you.
The recommended way for (x == y) is if ( log(x) == log(y)) All the real good programmers that read magazine articles are doing this.
And anyway, real numbers are more precise than integers. So in the case of x and y being integers its more precise using the log of the value.
Never mind that gcc since 2.96 can issue warnings (or error with -Werror) and that languages like Java don't even allow assignments inside if(...), it's still good to practice this sound magazine article advice.
In fact never program. Because one day you'll enter a typo, and you might have a bug, and so you should never program.
Those that advocate the constant first in if boolean comparisons are the feeble minded who believe ever bit of propaganda and PC reporting they read.
It's especially annoying to see it done in programming languages like Java where assignments are not even allowed in if statements. When I see java code like this:
if (0 == x) I'm thinking "loser".
Back to C. And besides gcc since C-99 has issued warnings for assignments in the "if" expression when not embedded in parenthesis. example... if (x = 3)... will result in a warning. if ((x = 3))... no warning.
I concur. I too live and work in Silicon Valley. The job market has defintely improved. I think 2002-2003 was the rock bottom.
I've managed to stay employed all this time, even changing jobs 3 times in the past 4 years.
In SV there has been a lot of start-up activity, especially in VOIP, storage systems, and streaming media. For the startup I'm working with now, I conduct a lot of job interviews and we actually find it hard to fill positions. Similar to other companies we're only interested in advanced skills. Experts in C, Unix Systems programming, the Linux Kernel, and specialists in topics such as computational linguistics or search technology.
The losers in this mini-boom are people with less than say 5 years of experience, or programmers that just can't demonstrate that they have achieved guru status.
Many entry level jobs are going to India right out of the gate. The VC firm I work with on this start-up makes it a requirement of all its ventures that 1/3rd of the labor costs come from "off-shore". Right from the start we were immediately working with Indian contracting firms. And the jobs that go there tend to be for Java, and entry-level engineering work.
And this is also why the new Start Ups are mostly interested in people with 20 years of experience. "Get more Gray Hair" in here one of our board members used to say all the time. The engineers with lots of experience will be more adept (the theory goes) at knowing how to design and architect the system, and thereby be able to manage and mentor 3 or 4 entry level programmers working in Bangalore.
In the new SV, I think to everyone's surprise, age is in your favour. Where have all the young people gone? There are very few programmers under 30 in all of the companies in my VC firms portfolio (and I've seen this firt hand). Who knows how long this trend will last. But in 1999, it was the exact opposite. Walking into a "bullshit.com" office in South Park, or even Mt. View and looking over 30 was a kiss of death.
The world changes so fast here in SV, who knows what it will be like in January.
At the RedHat booth they're passing out chapbooks of a sort titled "the nature of [choice]". This little inoccuous book is actually quite amusing. I think they're trying to show how clever they are or artsy? But it comes across as just idiotic. It's a cross between those old-time religious tract books popular in the 70s (perhaps an hommage to their bible-belt roots) and new-age jibberish. Here's a description:
Page 1: "There is a choice in nature" [image of two red cicles A and B.]
Page 2-3: "Where there is choice there is growth" [image of lots of alphabet shaded circles surrounding the two red A and B cicles
Page 4-5: "What happens when elements are free to connect? And a simple choice becomes a range of interconnected choices?" [image: A and B circles connected with smaller D and C -- like a state graph]
Page 6-7: "Choice is multiplied"... etc
Page 8-9: [In big red letters -- no images] "THIS IS THE NATURE OF CHOICE"
It goes on for another dozen pages. Some kind of mix of Marshall McCluhan's Medium is the Massage, pop poetry, new-age religion, old-time bible belt religious tract books, and a good dose of plain old American Apple Pie B.S.
So just what is Red Hat thinking with this stupid giveaway? I thought I'd at least get a source RPM cd, or maybe a Fedora CD, but no, this thing. Red Hat is going insane.
So two security companies set out to do "research" on WLAN access and the results of their findings conclude that security is needed. These are staggering results. Who woulda guessed.
It's ground breaking research. It ranks up there with Philip Morris' discovery that lung cancer is cuased primarily by cat dander. And McDonald's dietary discovery that low cholesterol leads to depression and suicide.
We Americans have become the New Romans
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Bush sold the war with easy to digest propaganda. The media ate it up for two reasons: War makes for great headlines; and since it costs too much money to do investigative reporting, the NY Times and all the rest behave themselves to stay on the governments good side and keep good access to "sources that wish to stay unnamed".
The Propaganda machine quickly crafted an aesthetic debate: those for the war were beautiful, and loved America. Those against the war were deranged, confused, and supporters of evil.
It got so bad that to say you were opposed to the war you had to quickly qualify yourself by saying "I support our troops, and I love this country, but I think..."
It's ludicrous, stupid, and just assinine to say equate opposition to this war with "support for The Iraqi Regime of Saddaam Housein."
There was never the opportunity to flesh it all out. Explore all the angles. Just talk about what we're doing. No. Bush's dogs of war wanted this bad. Cheney's old company gets the contract over Bechtel to modernize and reconstruct the oil infrastructure... How can you not be cynical?
As we march our armies into Iraq we have become the new Romans. Our will is the voice of Caesar with a few token Senators. We do not listen or talk with allies. There are no allies. There's just the world and our will to act. Imperium Singulare.
For me its not even about this war. This "war" will end soon. It's afterwards that made me oppose all of this. What happens next? Will the US sit in on OPEC meetings now that we'll control Iraqi wells? What unintended consequences await the world now that we know that the UN Security Council is impotent and meaningless?
The consequences of this New Roman Imperialism will play themselves out over the next 20 or 30 years.
Slashdot Mirror
They spun of 2/3 of the company? The enterprise services? They already spun out all manufacturing to HPQ. What's left? Reselling VMWare?
Several years ago I tried to port the Windows Blue Screen of Death, but just couldn't get it right... couldn't get that rich marine blue hue just right. Gave up ultimately. I think Windows 7 BSoD is a masterpiece, and would really like to see it on Linux where the primitive black/white just doesn't cut it really - and window's rows of hex values on the BSoD is really aesthetically pleasing. I miss that on Linux.
Yep, George married Mellody Hobson, and she's a native of Chicago - born there, grew up there. Think she had any influence on this?
The license and gov't regulation really is the issue of the "fairness" here. The Taxi industry is highly regulated and licensed, in Europe & the U.S... Taxis & Limos that enter an airport area are highly monitored, and regularly fined if it's found by the monitoring police that the vehicle lacks a current license.
Uber side steps all of this gov't regulation, and, say what you will about that regulation, it is unfair to those drivers who are paying the governments the right to pickup and drop-off passengers at the airport. Of course those licensed taxi and limo drivers would be pissed.
One way to make it fair is to drop all the licensing requirements of the taxi drivers.
The fib. projection for 34-virginity assumes he's been on a date by 21. If not then date at 34, virginity at 55.
In Speech Recognition and Text-To-Speech neural networks were the diregeur fashion, a long with lisp. But in the end it was Hidden Markov Models, and even Baysean modelling that ended up solving these AI-ish ventures.
Neural Networks influenced a great deal of collateral and tangential research, the the Neural Networks themselves really went no where. They just weren't usable, not even for machine learning -- at least not in the "pure form".
This is /. not the Huffington Post.
To bring this topic back home; much better would be 3 strikes and you're assigned to a write man pages for the opensource X.org projects.
Q: does this pass the 'significant technical content' test?
First the long answer: Nope.
Now the short answer: No.
The merits of the deal aside, this also is another trend of the center of the entertainment business slowly moving north into San Francisco and Silicon Valley. We have apple now a major distributor of tv shows and music, disney's Pixar, and that other animation studio in Redwood City. Not to mention all the very small indie production that goes on there as well.
Pystar was discovered to be the performance art of a Yale art student. She said that she wasn't really going to load it with Mac OS but rather just say she was going to. First she needs to not get pregnant several times and then get pregnant and put some kind of not real blood on the cases.
It's not a Hoax nor a Scam. It's art. And the artist said that if Paypal or the Credit card services takes the site down to say that this is not legitimate she will say that is.
It's all for art.
During The Great Bubble the numbers predicting the pop were glaringly obvious. I recall many financial articles predicting the demise of EToys, Pets.com, Webvan, etc. And the believers dismissed the analysis as "old economy" and people who "didn't get it". The new economy was based on "eyeballs", "stickyness", etc. Not profit vs. loss. It was a whacked time. It was The Great Bubble.
Show me the numbers now. What bubble? Sure there's web 2.0 hype. Google, the leader of web2.0 is profitable. Maybe overvalued, who knows. And yahoo too. Also protifable. And amazon. And myspace and linkedin and facebook, all the posterchildren of web 2.0, are all financially sound even if they aren't all profitable.
So show me the numbers that indicate a bubble on the scale of The Great Bubble.
Dvorak really is a wind bag. Too bad Slashdot with its human editors can't at least compete with Digg and prevent this kind of drivel making it to the front page.
"Product Watch" was Tivo's announcement from just the other day. This somewhat dull product, an HME based application, enables a Tivo user with a broadband connection to browse through a collection of infomercials and select videos for download.
Now. Of course. Who would use this? Ads? Etc, etc. However all the Tivo pundints missed the bigger point. That being that this is IP/TV. Tivo now sports a box that integrates the TV (rabit ears, cable, or satalite) with IP content.
Product Watch is actually a smart business move, as that enabled Tivo to build the ground work, the back end, call it the infrastructure, for IP/TV with companies paying to place their content.
Now this deal with brightcove will be a no-brainer. Technically not a challenge at all for Tivo, only the usual of two companies hashing out who will be responsible for what and etc.
I think this Product Watch thing is not properly understood at what a big deal it is, and how Tivo will probably be announcing such IP content partnerships like this one again and again over the coming weeks and months.
Let me extrapolate on Balmer's Microsoft competes the "Good old-fashioned way":
We will own more congressman and senators than Google, and then we will make Google against the law, and then make it illegal for them to index any Class-C address web-site, and then we will buy all Class-B addresses and then patent them, and make it so only Windows machines can reach a Class-B address. After than we will have our congressmen and Senators pass a law making IP-v6 illegal, thereby protecting our hold on addresses. Then we will go to Europe and outlaw X.25.
That's just a good old-fashioned microsoft technology battle.
Joan Baez, Chris Isaac, Bonnie Rait performed... See George with the cast of Beach Blanket Babylon...
Photo Galery
First the IRS says they want to make a free web-based tax preparation system. Intuit says, "No, don't do that. We'll do it." So Intuit completely burries the free version of there tax prep service. Only if you enter their site from the IRS did you get the free version.
But you still had to pay for the State. And now California does this.
So what does Intuit do now to make up for all that lost revenue.
How about this: End-of-life Quicken 2005. Make everyone upgrade to the '06 version in November.
Dead Languages I was once fluent with:
Pascal
Paradox
DB-III
68000 Assembly
Countless Application specific scripting languages and APIs
Oh you are so right. And as a corrolary never do if (x == y), because with both sides being variables one day you'll write (x = y), and (y = x) wont save you.
The recommended way for (x == y) is
if ( log(x) == log(y)) All the real good programmers that read magazine articles are doing this.
And anyway, real numbers are more precise than integers. So in the case of x and y being integers its more precise using the log of the value.
Never mind that gcc since 2.96 can issue warnings (or error with -Werror) and that languages like Java don't even allow assignments inside if(...), it's still good to practice this sound magazine article advice.
In fact never program. Because one day you'll enter a typo, and you might have a bug, and so you should never program.
Those that advocate the constant first in if boolean comparisons are the feeble minded who believe ever bit of propaganda and PC reporting they read.
It's especially annoying to see it done in programming languages like Java where assignments are not even allowed in if statements. When I see java code like this:
if (0 == x)
I'm thinking "loser".
Back to C. And besides gcc since C-99 has issued warnings for assignments in the "if" expression when not embedded in parenthesis.
example...
if (x = 3)
if ((x = 3))
Here's an example C function that sums a vector of integeers:
// the return value.
int vsum(int *v, int v_len)
{
int rv = 0;
int i;
for (i = 0; i < v_len; i++)
rv += v[i];
return v;
}
The above sample is horribly unreadable and suffers from eXtendibility deficiency.
Watch how the same program written in eXtendible becomes far more clear, precise, and managable.
I tried to format this with more space, but the slashdot posercomment compression filter kept rejecting it.
<function name=vsum>
<param type=integer refernece=pointer>
<param_name>vsum</param_name>
</param>
<param type=integer reference=value>
<param_name>v_len</param_name>
</param>
<body>
<localvar type=integer reference=value>
<local_name>rv</local_name>
<comment>The return value</comment>
<inital_value>0</initial_value>
</localvar>
<localvar type=integer reference=value>
<local_name>i</local_name>
</localvar>
<iterate type=for>
<initialize>
<setvar name="i" value=0/>
</initialize>
<cond>
<expr>
<left type=var name="i"/>
<right type=var name="v_len"/>
<operator type=less-than/>
</expr>
</cond>
<pre_cond>
<setvar name="i">
<expr>
<left type=var name="i"/>
<operator type=auto-incr/>
</expr>
</setvar>
</pre_cond>
<loop>
<setvar name="rv">
<expr>
<left type=var name="rv"/>
<right>
<expr>
<left type=var name="v"/>
<right type=var name="i"/>
<operator type=array-index/>
</expr>
</right>
<operator type=add/>
</expr>
</setvar>
</loop>
</iterate>
<return type=var name="rv"/>
</body>
</function>
If you're entry-level, Q/A is your best angle to get into a programming job right now.
I concur. I too live and work in Silicon Valley. The job market has defintely improved. I think 2002-2003 was the rock bottom.
I've managed to stay employed all this time, even changing jobs 3 times in the past 4 years.
In SV there has been a lot of start-up activity, especially in VOIP, storage systems, and streaming media. For the startup I'm working with now, I conduct a lot of job interviews and we actually find it hard to fill positions. Similar to other companies we're only interested in advanced skills. Experts in C, Unix Systems programming, the Linux Kernel, and specialists in topics such as computational linguistics or search technology.
The losers in this mini-boom are people with less than say 5 years of experience, or programmers that just can't demonstrate that they have achieved guru status.
Many entry level jobs are going to India right out of the gate. The VC firm I work with on this start-up makes it a requirement of all its ventures that 1/3rd of the labor costs come from "off-shore". Right from the start we were immediately working with Indian contracting firms. And the jobs that go there tend to be for Java, and entry-level engineering work.
And this is also why the new Start Ups are mostly interested in people with 20 years of experience. "Get more Gray Hair" in here one of our board members used to say all the time. The engineers with lots of experience will be more adept (the theory goes) at knowing how to design and architect the system, and thereby be able to manage and mentor 3 or 4 entry level programmers working in Bangalore.
In the new SV, I think to everyone's surprise, age is in your favour. Where have all the young people gone? There are very few programmers under 30 in all of the companies in my VC firms portfolio (and I've seen this firt hand). Who knows how long this trend will last. But in 1999, it was the exact opposite. Walking into a "bullshit.com" office in South Park, or even Mt. View and looking over 30 was a kiss of death.
The world changes so fast here in SV, who knows what it will be like in January.
At the RedHat booth they're passing out chapbooks of a sort titled "the nature of [choice]". This little inoccuous book is actually quite amusing. I think they're trying to show how clever they are or artsy? But it comes across as just idiotic. It's a cross between those old-time religious tract books popular in the 70s (perhaps an hommage to their bible-belt roots) and new-age jibberish. Here's a description:
... etc
Page 1: "There is a choice in nature" [image of two red cicles A and B.]
Page 2-3: "Where there is choice there is growth" [image of lots of alphabet shaded circles surrounding the two red A and B cicles
Page 4-5: "What happens when elements are free to connect? And a simple choice becomes a range of interconnected choices?" [image: A and B circles connected with smaller D and C -- like a state graph]
Page 6-7: "Choice is multiplied"
Page 8-9: [In big red letters -- no images] "THIS IS THE NATURE OF CHOICE"
It goes on for another dozen pages. Some kind of mix of Marshall McCluhan's Medium is the Massage, pop poetry, new-age religion, old-time bible belt religious tract books, and a good dose of plain old American Apple Pie B.S.
So just what is Red Hat thinking with this stupid giveaway? I thought I'd at least get a source RPM cd, or maybe a Fedora CD, but no, this thing. Red Hat is going insane.
So two security companies set out to do "research" on WLAN access and the results of their findings conclude that security is needed. These are staggering results. Who woulda guessed.
It's ground breaking research. It ranks up there with Philip Morris' discovery that lung cancer is cuased primarily by cat dander. And McDonald's dietary discovery that low cholesterol leads to depression and suicide.
Bush sold the war with easy to digest propaganda. The media ate it up for two reasons: War makes for great headlines; and since it costs too much money to do investigative reporting, the NY Times and all the rest behave themselves to stay on the governments good side and keep good access to "sources that wish to stay unnamed".
The Propaganda machine quickly crafted an aesthetic debate: those for the war were beautiful, and loved America. Those against the war were deranged, confused, and supporters of evil.
It got so bad that to say you were opposed to the war you had to quickly qualify yourself by saying "I support our troops, and I love this country, but I think..."
It's ludicrous, stupid, and just assinine to say equate opposition to this war with "support for The Iraqi Regime of Saddaam Housein."
There was never the opportunity to flesh it all out. Explore all the angles. Just talk about what we're doing. No. Bush's dogs of war wanted this bad. Cheney's old company gets the contract over Bechtel to modernize and reconstruct the oil infrastructure... How can you not be cynical?
As we march our armies into Iraq we have become the new Romans. Our will is the voice of Caesar with a few token Senators. We do not listen or talk with allies. There are no allies. There's just the world and our will to act. Imperium Singulare.
For me its not even about this war. This "war" will end soon. It's afterwards that made me oppose all of this. What happens next? Will the US sit in on OPEC meetings now that we'll control Iraqi wells? What unintended consequences await the world now that we know that the UN Security Council is impotent and meaningless?
The consequences of this New Roman Imperialism will play themselves out over the next 20 or 30 years.
For second serving:
Add video card. Sift in mouse port and keyboard device (USB recommended when serving more than one). Let blend in x11 conf file. Bind X11. Serve.
Don't forget audio. Can be nice to have multiple
audio out as well.
Hilarity ensues as multiple X desktops compete for such things as CD Drives.