You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers...
Liberals ruined the newspapers, just like they ruin everything else they touch.
You can argue about whether they're too smart, or just too clever by half, but Roblimo's suggestions are so obvious that even a child would think of them.
Yet even if a hypothetical newspaper were to adopt all of Roblimo's suggestions [and I could add a bunch of my own], no-damned-body this side of an insane asylum is gonna wanna waste their lives pouring over mountains of doom, gloom, despair, ennui, filth, muck, and the oppressive, stultifying, lobotomizing influence of the great leviathan of politically correct marxist propaganda and disinformation which masquerades as "journalism" in the Western World - not to mention that poor, lonely [quite frankly, pathetic] spinster, Maureen Dowd, bitching and moaning about the onset of menopause - even assuming any of this nonsense were true in the first place.
Memo to liberals: Cheer up. Enjoy life. Write about fun people doing fun stuff who experience a little success in life. We're not all ecopagan alcoholic/suicidal lesbian/transgendered native american women's studies professors living off of taxpayer-subsidized humanities grants, covering our naked bodies in performance-art chocolate, and pondering the desperate hopelessness and meaninglessness of it all.
This is why you should never rely on one-man-wonder distros like libranet or slackware for anything beyond hobby machines.
You know how the suits always tell you that they purchase IBM/Microsoft/Sun/Oracle because when the shiznat hits the fan, they want someone they can call 24/7/365?
Well what are they gonna do when Herr Kernelmeister Torvalds up and kicks the bucket? Call Alan Cox? I mean good grief - does Richard Stallman even own a telephone?
In defence of pro-life red state skanks...
on
Faster DNA Testing
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Sometimes I envision doomsday scenarios, like getting a call from a pro-life booty-call saying she's having my baby, but my homies done seen her 'round the block... In short, the quicker we can tweak up the ol' Polymerase Chain Reacion, the more red state skanks we can get with safely.
Alternatively, after she gives birth to that child of yours, you just might discover that that whole Miracle of Life thang has been given a undeservedly bum rap by the Culture of Death.
Specialized computing hardware for supercomputers has always seemed like a fiscally bad choice. It'll be good to see what kinds of improvements we can see in research possibilities as supercomputing costs come down from using mass-marketed parts.
Cray likes to build classical vector-driven machines. In that space, you can't rely on some external kludge like Myrinet for your communications; instead, your value-add is in the chipsets that get all those CPUs talking to one another [and to the memory subsystem].
In one of Cray's previous incarnations, they once possessed a chipset/backplane tech for the Sparc processor that Sun purchased off of Silicon Graphics for a song and a dance, and immediately turned into the insanely profitable Sunfire series. The big question here is whether this new agreement requires Cray to share their chipset/backplane tech with AMD [in which case some of it might filter its way back down to the level where mere plebians like us would be able to afford it].
How have other readers experienced the use of autonomic code both good and bad?
I don't know what "autonomic? means, but isn't all code fundamentally automatic in nature? Isn't that why computers were invented in the first place - so that people would no longer have to perform the mind-numbingly boring, repetitive tasks that are perfect for "automation"?
With this service, Google will be able to track where everyone in this service goes, and then sell that data to others... Far more effective than the questionaires of "what computer gaming sites do you visit?". With Google providing the access, they can just tell the marketers directly.
Cmdr Taco needs a new category of karma nirvana; something along the lines of "+6 BINGO! YOU WIN!"
Well, there anonymous coward, at least I put my name on things. Furthermore, if there is a law and I have choice between complying and going to jail guess what's going to happen? We'll comply.
Thank goodness our Founding Fathers had more balls than the average/.-er.
From time to time I click on a comment or story link and the page renders strangely. Only noticed it today...
I don't know what it's like on Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/whatever, but on IE, the pages often appear to have empty content. I discovered the other day that if I hit F11 and go to Full Screen mode, then the contents of the pages suddenly appear as if by magic.
My guess would be that they've got the CSS/DOM stuff all screwed up, and somewhere an ancillary table is overlaying the main content table.
But, again, that's just a guess, 'cause I'm WAAAAYYYYY too lazy to do Taco's homework for him. [Well, certainly not for free.]
Also, is it possible to turn off all third party cookies and third party popups and third party re-direction under Internet Explorer?
From a developer's point of view, Javascript forbids the introduction of third-party code [you can't load a ".js" file from a different DNS domain, even if that domain is "C:\" on your own hard drive], which is absolutely maddening when you are trying to debug something. You'd think the same rule would apply to cookies and pop-ups and re-direction.
Are you saying that it's okay to purposefully take longer on a project so that a customer will have to pay more for it? It's one thing to say that giving a deadline to a customer is a bad idea because you can't assume that the company will only have you work on his project for the next few months. However, if a manager wants you to purposefully attempt to "drag out" a project just to make the customer pay for more hours, I kind of feel like that's crossing a line. If the customer is paying you on a per-hour basis, rather than a per-project basis, and you set out to trick him into paying you for hours you didn't spend working on his project, then I see that as fraud. But maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying (I hope I am).
No, it's a question of sales tactics. Suppose
1) Accounting says you need to bill another 80 hours this month.
2) The client asks for a new feature set on the product - where, say, a quick and dirty fix of embedding the required business logic as stored procedures in the DB would require 40 hours, whereas doing it properly, by placing the business logic where it ought be, in the Java/.NET/Python/Eiffel/Ada/Simula/Smalltalk/whate ver middleware layer, would be more difficult, but would make for a much more elegant solution which would get you to the 80 hours you need to make your quota.
Now is it unethical to push the shinier, spiffier product on the client?
Is it unethical for a car salesman to say, "Yeah, that Chevette is a nice little car, but come over here and get a load of this El Dorado Brougham"?
Is it unethical to make sure that you're sufficiently profitable to pay the rent, and the heating bill, and the food bill, and the prescription drug bill, etc, etc, etc???
Surprise number 1: my manager took me into "the room" and told me never to give an estimate to the client without his approval.
My manager took me to "the room" again. I tried to remain calm, waiting for the accolades, perhaps even a bonus? But, he pointed his finger in my face and said, "Don't you ever deliver more to the client than you say you will!". Stunned silence.
This is just atrocious management.
A good manager would have practiced [over and over again] the interaction before he ever let you meet the client face to face.
For example, he would have stressed things like
RULE #1: We never promise a deadline to a client unless we first clear it with accounting.
REASON FOR RULE #1: Time is money, and if we haven't generated enough billable hours this month, then we're gonna need to generate more [not fewer] billable hours. Welcome to the real world, kiddo.
RULE #2: We never give away free code unless we first clear it with accounting.
REASON FOR RULE #2: Code is money, and if we haven't sold enough code this month, then we're gonna hafta sell more [not less] code. Welcome to the real world, kiddo.
And then he would have gone through practice conversations in which he pretended to be the client, and he coached you as to what to say and what not to say, and how to hem and haw your way out of making any firm commitment [until the "correct" answer could be cleared by accounting].
Your manager not practicing a client site visit like that with you beforehand, and then admonishing you afterwords, would be like a football coach not teaching his playbook to his players during practice [or never even showing them the playbook in the first place], and then yelling at them after the game because they were clueless on the field.
Nuttles1:...I have a programming supervisor that stresses correctness in programming first, amount of time needed second, features third, but I also have upper management stressing features and amount of time needed first and correctness of programming a distant second...
p2sam:You should report to one mananger, and one manager alone... Well, in a perfect world, that's how it should work.:)
Just be completely honest and forthright in all your communications.
Suppose you have
Dick Weed
dickw@uppermanagement.acme.com
Brown Knows
brownk@middlemanagement.acme.com
Then your emails would read like:
TO: dickw@uppermanagement.acme.com;brownk@middlemanage ment.acme.com
SUBJECT: Conflicting priorities
BODY: In re: the new feature set that was promised to the client - I can probably "make" the deadline of Friday the 13th, but I'm gonna hafta break a lotta rules, and write some pretty darned ugly spaghetti code, and I would definitely be cheating on those ISO 9000 standards that we were trying so hard to adhere to.
Comments, by Michael Hoffman:Run the command "at TIME/interactive taskmgr" where TIME is one minute from now. At that time a Task Manager with SYSTEM privileges instead of your privileges will run. Then you can do all sorts of ill-advised things like change the priority of CSRSS.
That's *exactly* the sort of thing that I meant by "marginal".
I Am Not A CAD Developer [IANACD], and, for that matter, I Am Not Even A CAD User [IANEACU].
On the other hand, I know a fair amount about LabVIEW, which shares a great deal in common with CAD environments, and I know that National Instruments has a budding problem on their hands because their graphics package depends on OpenGL/MESA, and Microsoft looks to be deprecating support for it.
But it would be interesting to hear from some CAD developers - do you write low-level stuff in-house, e.g. do you write triangles directly to the GPU, or do you purchase development environments [PIXAR, DirectX, OpenGL/Mesa, VRML, whatever] that perform the low-level translations for you?
MacOS is not going to magically turn into Windows or Linux just because there's Intel Inside. Mac development will be unchanged, with some marginal exceptions.
I dunno, maybe this falls into the "marginal" category, but "scientific" [or "mathematical"] programming is really REALLY REALLY difficult.
For instance, take a gander at the list of FFTs catalogued at BenchFFT:
In many instances, the software and hardware engineers at the companies that build the chips [Intel and AMD] can't write FFTs that are as efficient as third-party vendors [or hobbyists], which should be a pretty good indication that something as ostensibly straightforward as writing an FFT routine is just fantastically complicated in practice.
So if you're a company with a lot of low-level proprietary software that's tuned for the x86/x86-64 instructions sets, or for classical PCI bus communications [apparently PCIe is very backwards compatible], or for the nVidia/ATI/Oxygen instruction sets, then your porting job just got a heckuva lot easier if you don't have to deal with PPC RISC, Altivec, etc etc etc.
Ever wonder why the dialog doesn't sync with the actors' lips when you watch a DVD on your computer? Even if you have [dedicated] hardware-accelerated MP3?
And that's just local to one system. Try pushing an audio stream across two different TCP/IP stacks - heck, "ping" [which lives in ICMP, somewhere down beneath even UDP] is lucky if it can make 1ms or 2ms over CAT5.
Oh, and yes: YOUR EARS ARE VERY, VERY SENSITIVE - THEY CAN AND WILL HEAR THIS STUFF.
BWJones: It has got to be apparent that this business model has nothing to do with innovation and everything to do with piracy and racketeering.
SatanicPuppy: The idea is to protect innovation, not to protect a group of idiots sitting around in a room, patenting anything that flies out of their mouths. The idea of a thing isn't worth crap compared to the massive NRE that goes into making it work in the real world.
mikkom: Corporate world is a lot like ecosystem. If you allow these kind of companies exists, they will exist. If your legistlation allows these kind of companies sue companies and win, they will prevail.
Youse guys' problem is that you are thinking as engineers - as though laws were written by engineers for the benefit of engineers.
But laws aren't written by engineers: Laws are written by lawyers ["legislators"] and interpreted by lawyers ["jurists"] for the benefit of lawyers [e.g. paperwork fictions like "corporations"].
"NTP" is a front for a bunch of lawyers. The Court of Appeals is a front for a bunch of lawyers. You do the math: Lawyers win, engineers lose.
Say, hypothetically, that Volt pays you $50 an hour, but contracts you out to clients at $75 an hour. Then the Volt overhead would be either 33% or 50%, depending on your point of view.
Anyway, when you use someone like Volt, do you know what their overhead is? I.e. do you know whether you're being ripped off, or whether the overhead is something reasonable [like 7%, or 10%]?
Mark Shuttleworth wants a bug-tracking system that will allow people to propagate a bug from the Ubuntu package to the Debian package to the upstream mainainers, all with minimal hassle and a central interface.
While he's at it, maybe he could look into - I dunno - propagating a buffer overflow, or maybe even propagating a full-blown backdoor r00t?
LabView is great for instrumentation in a test lab, but on a factory floor it can kill someone.
Okay, serious question [or questions]:
1) Could you give an example of how LabVIEW can kill someone?
2) Could you give an example of another programming language, with equal or greater third-party support [especially third-party HARDWARE support] that is less likely to kill someone [than is LabVIEW]?
Again, not a troll - I'm seriously curious as to what you might have to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks!
You'd think, with all the smart people working for newspapers...
Liberals ruined the newspapers, just like they ruin everything else they touch.
You can argue about whether they're too smart, or just too clever by half, but Roblimo's suggestions are so obvious that even a child would think of them.
Yet even if a hypothetical newspaper were to adopt all of Roblimo's suggestions [and I could add a bunch of my own], no-damned-body this side of an insane asylum is gonna wanna waste their lives pouring over mountains of doom, gloom, despair, ennui, filth, muck, and the oppressive, stultifying, lobotomizing influence of the great leviathan of politically correct marxist propaganda and disinformation which masquerades as "journalism" in the Western World - not to mention that poor, lonely [quite frankly, pathetic] spinster, Maureen Dowd, bitching and moaning about the onset of menopause - even assuming any of this nonsense were true in the first place.
Memo to liberals: Cheer up. Enjoy life. Write about fun people doing fun stuff who experience a little success in life. We're not all ecopagan alcoholic/suicidal lesbian/transgendered native american women's studies professors living off of taxpayer-subsidized humanities grants, covering our naked bodies in performance-art chocolate, and pondering the desperate hopelessness and meaninglessness of it all.
Believe it or not, some of us actually enjoy our lives every now and then.
Or - what the hell? Hang tough with The Culture of Death®, and experience, well, ah, Death Itself©. At least then you'd be intellectually consistent for the first time in your lives. Or deaths. Or whatever.
This is why you should never rely on one-man-wonder distros like libranet or slackware for anything beyond hobby machines.
You know how the suits always tell you that they purchase IBM/Microsoft/Sun/Oracle because when the shiznat hits the fan, they want someone they can call 24/7/365?
Well what are they gonna do when Herr Kernelmeister Torvalds up and kicks the bucket? Call Alan Cox? I mean good grief - does Richard Stallman even own a telephone?
Sometimes I envision doomsday scenarios, like getting a call from a pro-life booty-call saying she's having my baby, but my homies done seen her 'round the block... In short, the quicker we can tweak up the ol' Polymerase Chain Reacion, the more red state skanks we can get with safely.
Alternatively, after she gives birth to that child of yours, you just might discover that that whole Miracle of Life thang has been given a undeservedly bum rap by the Culture of Death.
Specialized computing hardware for supercomputers has always seemed like a fiscally bad choice. It'll be good to see what kinds of improvements we can see in research possibilities as supercomputing costs come down from using mass-marketed parts.
Cray likes to build classical vector-driven machines. In that space, you can't rely on some external kludge like Myrinet for your communications; instead, your value-add is in the chipsets that get all those CPUs talking to one another [and to the memory subsystem].
In one of Cray's previous incarnations, they once possessed a chipset/backplane tech for the Sparc processor that Sun purchased off of Silicon Graphics for a song and a dance, and immediately turned into the insanely profitable Sunfire series. The big question here is whether this new agreement requires Cray to share their chipset/backplane tech with AMD [in which case some of it might filter its way back down to the level where mere plebians like us would be able to afford it].
How have other readers experienced the use of autonomic code both good and bad?
I don't know what "autonomic? means, but isn't all code fundamentally automatic in nature? Isn't that why computers were invented in the first place - so that people would no longer have to perform the mind-numbingly boring, repetitive tasks that are perfect for "automation"?
With this service, Google will be able to track where everyone in this service goes, and then sell that data to others... Far more effective than the questionaires of "what computer gaming sites do you visit?". With Google providing the access, they can just tell the marketers directly.
Cmdr Taco needs a new category of karma nirvana; something along the lines of "+6 BINGO! YOU WIN!"
Well, there anonymous coward, at least I put my name on things. Furthermore, if there is a law and I have choice between complying and going to jail guess what's going to happen? We'll comply.
Thank goodness our Founding Fathers had more balls than the average /.-er.
From time to time I click on a comment or story link and the page renders strangely. Only noticed it today...
I don't know what it's like on Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/whatever, but on IE, the pages often appear to have empty content. I discovered the other day that if I hit F11 and go to Full Screen mode, then the contents of the pages suddenly appear as if by magic.
My guess would be that they've got the CSS/DOM stuff all screwed up, and somewhere an ancillary table is overlaying the main content table.
But, again, that's just a guess, 'cause I'm WAAAAYYYYY too lazy to do Taco's homework for him. [Well, certainly not for free.]
The Hitachi SH4 that powers the PlayStation2 can perform 128-bit double calculations in hardware [or so I'm told].
By contrast, Sun's SPARC has a "quad" precision [128-bit] double, but it's a software implementation.
I believe the chipset that powers IBM's Z390 mainframe can also do 128-bit doubles in hardware.
forge my referrer and user-agent
Is this possible with Internet Explorer?
Also, is it possible to turn off all third party cookies and third party popups and third party re-direction under Internet Explorer?
From a developer's point of view, Javascript forbids the introduction of third-party code [you can't load a ".js" file from a different DNS domain, even if that domain is "C:\" on your own hard drive], which is absolutely maddening when you are trying to debug something. You'd think the same rule would apply to cookies and pop-ups and re-direction.
You might also check out the Internet Backplane Protocol, or "IBP", which was designed to store massive amounts of data in a generic "cloud".
For instance, more than 18 months ago, it was already moving 1TB per week on Internet2, and this past week was at 1.896TB.
Are you saying that it's okay to purposefully take longer on a project so that a customer will have to pay more for it? It's one thing to say that giving a deadline to a customer is a bad idea because you can't assume that the company will only have you work on his project for the next few months. However, if a manager wants you to purposefully attempt to "drag out" a project just to make the customer pay for more hours, I kind of feel like that's crossing a line. If the customer is paying you on a per-hour basis, rather than a per-project basis, and you set out to trick him into paying you for hours you didn't spend working on his project, then I see that as fraud. But maybe I'm misinterpreting what you're saying (I hope I am).
No, it's a question of sales tactics. Suppose
Now is it unethical to push the shinier, spiffier product on the client?Is it unethical for a car salesman to say, "Yeah, that Chevette is a nice little car, but come over here and get a load of this El Dorado Brougham"?
Is it unethical to make sure that you're sufficiently profitable to pay the rent, and the heating bill, and the food bill, and the prescription drug bill, etc, etc, etc???
Surprise number 1: my manager took me into "the room" and told me never to give an estimate to the client without his approval.
My manager took me to "the room" again. I tried to remain calm, waiting for the accolades, perhaps even a bonus? But, he pointed his finger in my face and said, "Don't you ever deliver more to the client than you say you will!". Stunned silence.
This is just atrocious management.
A good manager would have practiced [over and over again] the interaction before he ever let you meet the client face to face.
For example, he would have stressed things like
And then he would have gone through practice conversations in which he pretended to be the client, and he coached you as to what to say and what not to say, and how to hem and haw your way out of making any firm commitment [until the "correct" answer could be cleared by accounting].Your manager not practicing a client site visit like that with you beforehand, and then admonishing you afterwords, would be like a football coach not teaching his playbook to his players during practice [or never even showing them the playbook in the first place], and then yelling at them after the game because they were clueless on the field.
Nuttles1:
p2sam: You should report to one mananger, and one manager alone... Well, in a perfect world, that's how it should work. :)
Just be completely honest and forthright in all your communications.
Suppose you have
Then your emails would read like:They can be killed by running task manager as SYSTEM.
Okay, I Googled, and the most interesting thing I found was a comment by a reader after this MSDN blog entry:
First I'd ever heard of that.Is there some other method?
Oh, you know... Evil. The usual.
Specifically, he was in Marine Sciences, on the team trying to mount the friggin' lasers on the friggin' sharks' heads.
Unfortunately, their research was hampered by the lawsuit that PETA filed in the Ninth Circuit court...
That's *exactly* the sort of thing that I meant by "marginal".
I Am Not A CAD Developer [IANACD], and, for that matter, I Am Not Even A CAD User [IANEACU].
On the other hand, I know a fair amount about LabVIEW, which shares a great deal in common with CAD environments, and I know that National Instruments has a budding problem on their hands because their graphics package depends on OpenGL/MESA, and Microsoft looks to be deprecating support for it.
But it would be interesting to hear from some CAD developers - do you write low-level stuff in-house, e.g. do you write triangles directly to the GPU, or do you purchase development environments [PIXAR, DirectX, OpenGL/Mesa, VRML, whatever] that perform the low-level translations for you?
MacOS is not going to magically turn into Windows or Linux just because there's Intel Inside. Mac development will be unchanged, with some marginal exceptions.
I dunno, maybe this falls into the "marginal" category, but "scientific" [or "mathematical"] programming is really REALLY REALLY difficult.
For instance, take a gander at the list of FFTs catalogued at BenchFFT:
Then look at their relative performances for speed and accuracy: In many instances, the software and hardware engineers at the companies that build the chips [Intel and AMD] can't write FFTs that are as efficient as third-party vendors [or hobbyists], which should be a pretty good indication that something as ostensibly straightforward as writing an FFT routine is just fantastically complicated in practice.So if you're a company with a lot of low-level proprietary software that's tuned for the x86/x86-64 instructions sets, or for classical PCI bus communications [apparently PCIe is very backwards compatible], or for the nVidia/ATI/Oxygen instruction sets, then your porting job just got a heckuva lot easier if you don't have to deal with PPC RISC, Altivec, etc etc etc.
I haven't seen anyone "of color" in the entire computer science program at any of the three colleges that I've been at...
Don't go holding your breath:
And I had worked so hard to earn all that good Karma.Sigh...
Ever wonder why the dialog doesn't sync with the actors' lips when you watch a DVD on your computer? Even if you have [dedicated] hardware-accelerated MP3?
And that's just local to one system. Try pushing an audio stream across two different TCP/IP stacks - heck, "ping" [which lives in ICMP, somewhere down beneath even UDP] is lucky if it can make 1ms or 2ms over CAT5.
Oh, and yes: YOUR EARS ARE VERY, VERY SENSITIVE - THEY CAN AND WILL HEAR THIS STUFF.
BWJones: It has got to be apparent that this business model has nothing to do with innovation and everything to do with piracy and racketeering.
SatanicPuppy: The idea is to protect innovation, not to protect a group of idiots sitting around in a room, patenting anything that flies out of their mouths. The idea of a thing isn't worth crap compared to the massive NRE that goes into making it work in the real world.
mikkom: Corporate world is a lot like ecosystem. If you allow these kind of companies exists, they will exist. If your legistlation allows these kind of companies sue companies and win, they will prevail.
Youse guys' problem is that you are thinking as engineers - as though laws were written by engineers for the benefit of engineers.
But laws aren't written by engineers: Laws are written by lawyers ["legislators"] and interpreted by lawyers ["jurists"] for the benefit of lawyers [e.g. paperwork fictions like "corporations"].
"NTP" is a front for a bunch of lawyers. The Court of Appeals is a front for a bunch of lawyers. You do the math: Lawyers win, engineers lose.
Say, hypothetically, that Volt pays you $50 an hour, but contracts you out to clients at $75 an hour. Then the Volt overhead would be either 33% or 50%, depending on your point of view.
Anyway, when you use someone like Volt, do you know what their overhead is? I.e. do you know whether you're being ripped off, or whether the overhead is something reasonable [like 7%, or 10%]?
Mark Shuttleworth wants a bug-tracking system that will allow people to propagate a bug from the Ubuntu package to the Debian package to the upstream mainainers, all with minimal hassle and a central interface.
While he's at it, maybe he could look into - I dunno - propagating a buffer overflow, or maybe even propagating a full-blown backdoor r00t?
LabView is great for instrumentation in a test lab, but on a factory floor it can kill someone.
Okay, serious question [or questions]:
Again, not a troll - I'm seriously curious as to what you might have to say.