Yeah. I was quite disappointed with the video. I had seen one before that was as you described - a streak and a fireball. Turns out that it was the same video! I saw it several months ago. I don't know how they got it before it was officially released. You can see it at http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/. Most interesting is the rest of the video. There are quotes from witnesses. These are likely filtered and who's to say these people are trustworthy observers. There's some specualtation too. But, the video brings up some pretty interesting points. I'd be interested if others can debunk what they present.
Name brand USB flash drives should have at least 100,000 writes per block with the "extreme" types being much higher. This plus the fact that they all use "wear leveling" to spread the writes across the card (even if writing to the same logical location) means you should get a pile of writes out of them.
USB drives usually die from being dropped or being banged around. A natural result of their size and portability.
In fact, it would almost certainly cost more if they tried to make a hard drive that had exactly 8 MB of space and no more because the parts for it are no longer mass produced. The easiest way would be to make a 40 GB hard drive and seal off everything after the first 8 MB. Of course who in the hell wants a 8 MB hard drive anyhow?
No, it does not cost more to produce smaller drives. If the capacity is within a generation, head and media makers will usually be able, and happy, to produce these parts - likely with significantly higher yields and lower production costs (decreasing the cost). Even if you use the current generation parts, you still might save money as you will need only one disk and one head - which are by far the most expensive parts of a drive. After that, they destroke the drive so that you only use some percentage of the surface. As long as the capacity is greater than one track, you can get there by destroking.
Destroking is very common. It is frequently done for companies that use hard drives in their products. They'll buy current product yet ask for it to be destroked to a fraction of it's actual capacity because they don't want to modify their firmware or test process.
The parent's example is ridiculous. The Windows
CLI "can't do" the same thing, supposedly.
That's bollocks. Both Unix and Windows CLIs
provide for this. It's the *applications*
availiable from the command line that this example
relies on. There are find, grep and sed
implentations for Windows. I think even the $1
can be handled by the DOS "for" command. It's
not like the find command is the most usable
command around, eh? I've met so many experienced
Unix users that had no idea of all it was capable of. (And that {} syntax is so weird).
It's true that the Unix CLI is more powerful but the Windows CLI with DOSKEY is quite reasonable.
Besides, something as complicated as this command line is typically *much* better done as a simple script, IMO -- which is then invoked from the command line, of course.
I didn't see this in the discussion yet. The
number one reason for me to upgrade to 2.4 is that
it's the first (official?) release to be built
with MSVC 7 (for Windows, of course). As of 2.3,
the distutils package would barf if you tried to
build extensions with MSVC 7 instead of 6.
Apparently MS changes enough stuff between major
compiler releases that lots of little bugs
would pop up for extensions built with a different
version.
As MSVC 6 is so truly horrible for
writing anything advanced (or using Boost...), I
tried rebuilding Python 2.3.4 and various
libraries (numeric, etc) with MSVC 7. This
was a huge pain particularly when I found a
new library. I wanted to use the 2.4 betas but the boss wouldn't go for it. I was forced to live with MSVC 6. Feel my pain, people.
18 months and they hit the release target almost bang on. Way to go!
The social ills of cell phone use comes up on/. pretty regularly. Without fail, a European will post, "What's wrong with you Americans. Here in (my country), everyone has cell phones and we just get along with one another". I lived in Europe for many years. I can certainly believe that in many parts, cell phone users are more considerate of others and that those others are more tolerant of any trangressions. However, stories like this show that problems exist on both sides of the ocean.
Why should I be penalized just because some retard either can't figure out how to turn his phone to vibrate or thinks everyone should hear Mozart's "Ode to the Piezoeletric Buzzer"?
You get penalized for the same reason other decent people do because they do the decent thing: - You pay higher insurance because there are uninsured drivers - You pay higher taxes because you need a police force because there are criminals out there - You pay higher taxes because some people don't pay their share - You die younger because other people smoke - You die younger because of pollution - In Singapore, you can't buy gum because a small number of dickwads used to spit their's on the sidewalk. (I imagine there are similar statutes closer to home but none come to mind) ... and so on...
It sucks. It would be nice if some of these things got rolled back once society got the message but that unfortunately rarelh happens.
Canadian politcs has always been dominated by the right wing Progressive Conservative party (PC) and the usually-left wing Liberals. In 1986, the very conservative Reform Party of Canada came out of nowhere. By 93, they had taken so much support from the PCs that the liberals were completely unchallenged til just this year's elections when the two parties merged - with a Reform Party member as leader.
Now a *5th* party is picking up on the left -- the Greens. In the 2004 elections, they received enough votes to qualify for federal funding. This is huge. Apart from the cash, this will make it harder for them to be denied a place in debates and in news stories et al.
In a few more election cycles, the Greens may even gain official status, particularly given the frequency of elections being won by voting against very unpopular leaders.
It's a shame Reform and the PCs merged. Strong alternatives on both the left and the right would have made for something resembling a true democracy. (The other parties are the "New Democratic Party" just now coming back from the dead and the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec separatist party).
True. Even the type that Slashdot attracts can't read everything posted here. As a community service, here's some more news, should a reader have missed it the first 10**6 times around (:) ):
- holy cr*p. A meteor's going to smash into the Earth
- Bill Gates and anyone who looks like him is evil, evil, evil
- in Soviet Russia, the tin foil hat wears you
- there's a floating point bug in the Pentium processor
- Google's issuing an IPO
- Perl is illegible line-noise
- Python is for weenies
Hope I didn't miss anything.
If this doesn't get me some karma. I don't know what will.
The fact is, we need ***cheap*** oil to power a transition to alternative energy.
If the oil's cheap, efforts to transition away from it will be marginalized. The 2nd biggest field in the world went from control by a west-hating madman to direct control by the US yet prices still shoot up. And those SUVs keep selling.
The quote in the article about the "hard commercial decision" was about Kurdistan. If there ever is a Kurdistan, then they can make a Kurdistan edition.
Imagine the trouble the employees would be in if they tried to sell a Kurdistan version in Turkey (or Syria or Iran - *maybe* it would fly in Iraq now).
There's some huge provinces in China, in area,
population and economics too. Let's start naming them off.
In my travels, I've run into far too many Amreicans that mixed up Sweden and Switzerland or Austria and Australia. This is way, way worse than not knowing where Florida or Wales is. They're not completely alone doing that, but almost.
My favorite quote: 2 fresh USC grads - "Toronto? Where's that? Canada? Is it near Calgary?" (This was just afther the Calgary Olympics).
No, that's not what I meant. But thanks for the
friendly response. I was trying to point out that
there would be a small number of people offended
which is a differing point of view from that implied
by the parent. I didn't say it was okay.
# of Japanese that know what the term "Jap" means *
# of Japanese that will ever hear of "JAP" *
# that are actually offended = a real small number (probably)
After all, that story about Woody the Internet Pecker is true, isn't it?
There are 2 main problems with the V-chip. As you said, the ratings are pretty weird sometimes. PBS documentaries and news get zapped a lot ?!?!
The biggest problem, though, is that commercials aren't rated. It's amazing the stuff that appears in commercials even between 8 am and 5pm. Extremely violent commercials pop up in the middle of some pretty innocent shows.
Either I don't understand something but Python has some of the things
you say it doesn't:
- class methods - you need to morph the method with
classmethod(). Yes, it's terribly awkward. There's
discussion
on ways to improve this.
- class variables - they've been around for quite a while (sorry, can't get the indentation to show)
class MyClass( object ):
aClassVariable = 36
def SomeFunc( self ):
print "The
class variable is " + str(self.__class__.aClassVariable)
- Python's got private members (via leading "__").
Protected is a leading "_" by convention only (although I think
some forms of import respect it). (You
probably knew that one -- just making sure).
- something like strict would be nice. Until then,
pychecker will fix you up (http://pychecker.sourceforge.net/).
It's basically
a lint for Python. Extremely
helpful.
I used to think that checked exceptions were a natural progression but
they can be such a pain in practice.
"computers (at least PCs) aren't a high-tech industry anymore"
Do you mean the PC as a whole or the PC and what goes into it?
CPUs are having great difficulties going to 90 nanometer chips. Hard drive makers are being forced to increase platter count (which significantly increases price) to keep increasing capacity as increasing areal density is getting really tough.
Sounds pretty high tech to me. It's a shame the tremendous engineering effort results in such tiny margins.
I would have hard time hiring someone fresh out of a Japanese university over someone fresh from an American one -- at least a good student. It's true that they spend, or at least spent, more hours studying in high school but University in Japan is widely considered the holiday between the grueling high school and work years. Companies train new employees because they know it's necessary. It's not such a big deal because its amortized over a lifetime career. They also expect little real results in the first several years.
Also, mimicking Asian high school strain is a double-edged sword. When I was in high school, it was completely obvious that we were being taught too slowly. I don't know if that's changed but the amount of homework sure has. A lot of what I see now is homework for homework's sake with no particular value. Stealing the youth from the next generation will not help. Nor will burning them out in their 20s instead of in their 40s like their parents.
As far as clean uniforms etc is concerned, the Japanese respect for the service industry is *way* higher than in the US. This avoids the disenchantment you see in the US. More importantly, IMO, is that *appearance* is all too important in Japan. At McDonalds, that means clean uniforms. At a company, it means staying late even if you don't do anything, rushing between offices even if there's no reason to hurry and coming in on Sunday but just washing your car. (I've witnessed all of these). The McDonalds customers benefit from this. Industry and tech companies suffer.
Almost 15 years ago, a friend urged me to learn Perl saying that "I would be a better programmer for it". So I did and he was absolutely right. I ate the language up. I couldn't get enough of it. I wrote thousands and thousands of lines of code. I knew the language pretty much upside down.
I greeted Perl 5 with great anticipation. Object oriented, powerful data structures, modularity. But something wasn't right. I could still do the Perl 4-style coding but it felt wrong. Before Perl 5, simulating complex data structures with arrays was fine. In Perl 5, these were supported directly so I wanted to use them. And I wanted to love them. My code typically uses data structures heavily to manage the complexity. But I never got it. Simple things were fine but any task that ended up being more than a few pages (not in one giant function, BTW) started getting rougher. If I wrote Perl day in and day out, it would have been different, I'm sure. But that shouldn't be necessary. Normally I would code a few hours a week with the occassional larger task. Given my significant experience with Perl 4, my desire and my talent, that should have been enough.
I languished wondering if Perl had gone wrong or if I just couldn't cut it. Like others have said, I too would hate having to go back to my own Perl code. I write extemely clear code. My coding and commenting style is first rate. (I attribute quite a bit of this, now, to knowing the frustration of reading my own Perl 5 code).
Then I got a new job. They use Python. And it all clicked in almost no time flat. There are things I don't like about Python to be sure but the code just flows. The OOP doesn't feel like it was plopped on top. I can jump into my own code from a year earlier with next to no effort. I can write code for very complicated problems and the language doesn't get in my way. I CAN READ OTHER PEOPLE'S CODE with next to no effort. I can code stuff up with the ease I did in Perl 4 but with the power I know is in Perl 5 but was not able to use. Some of this is just age/experience but it's more than that. I'm not one of those Perl-dissing Python coders. That's not the point.
History will look on Perl as one of the most important computer languages of the first 50 years of coding. But Perl 5, at least, doesn't have what it takes in 2004. I look forward to Perl 6. I truly hope they can do it again.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. I was quite disappointed with the video. I had seen one before that was as you described - a streak and a fireball. Turns out that it was the same video! I saw it several months ago. I don't know how they got it before it was officially released. You can see it at http://www.pentagonstrike.co.uk/. Most interesting is the rest of the video. There are quotes from witnesses. These are likely filtered and who's to say these people are trustworthy observers. There's some specualtation too. But, the video brings up some pretty interesting points. I'd be interested if others can debunk what they present.
Name brand USB flash drives should have at least 100,000 writes per block with the "extreme" types being much higher. This plus the fact that they all use "wear leveling" to spread the writes across the card (even if writing to the same logical location) means you should get a pile of writes out of them.
USB drives usually die from being dropped or being banged around. A natural result of their size and portability.
In fact, it would almost certainly cost more if they tried to make a hard drive that had exactly 8 MB of space and no more because the parts for it are no longer mass produced. The easiest way would be to make a 40 GB hard drive and seal off everything after the first 8 MB. Of course who in the hell wants a 8 MB hard drive anyhow?
No, it does not cost more to produce smaller drives. If the capacity is within a generation, head and media makers will usually be able, and happy, to produce these parts - likely with significantly higher yields and lower production costs (decreasing the cost). Even if you use the current generation parts, you still might save money as you will need only one disk and one head - which are by far the most expensive parts of a drive. After that, they destroke the drive so that you only use some percentage of the surface. As long as the capacity is greater than one track, you can get there by destroking.
Destroking is very common. It is frequently done for companies that use hard drives in their products. They'll buy current product yet ask for it to be destroked to a fraction of it's actual capacity because they don't want to modify their firmware or test process.
The parent's example is ridiculous. The Windows CLI "can't do" the same thing, supposedly. That's bollocks. Both Unix and Windows CLIs provide for this. It's the *applications* availiable from the command line that this example relies on. There are find, grep and sed implentations for Windows. I think even the $1 can be handled by the DOS "for" command. It's not like the find command is the most usable command around, eh? I've met so many experienced Unix users that had no idea of all it was capable of. (And that {} syntax is so weird).
It's true that the Unix CLI is more powerful but the Windows CLI with DOSKEY is quite reasonable.
Besides, something as complicated as this command line is typically *much* better done as a simple script, IMO -- which is then invoked from the command line, of course.
I didn't see this in the discussion yet. The number one reason for me to upgrade to 2.4 is that it's the first (official?) release to be built with MSVC 7 (for Windows, of course). As of 2.3, the distutils package would barf if you tried to build extensions with MSVC 7 instead of 6. Apparently MS changes enough stuff between major compiler releases that lots of little bugs would pop up for extensions built with a different version.
...), I
tried rebuilding Python 2.3.4 and various
libraries (numeric, etc) with MSVC 7. This
was a huge pain particularly when I found a
new library. I wanted to use the 2.4 betas but the boss wouldn't go for it. I was forced to live with MSVC 6. Feel my pain, people.
As MSVC 6 is so truly horrible for writing anything advanced (or using Boost
18 months and they hit the release target almost bang on. Way to go!
I think it's safe to say that the rest of the world is bored with REXX.
The social ills of cell phone use comes up on /. pretty regularly. Without fail, a European will post, "What's wrong with you Americans. Here in (my country), everyone has cell phones and we just get along with one another". I lived in Europe for many years. I can certainly believe that in many parts, cell phone users are more considerate of others and that those others are more tolerant of any trangressions. However, stories like this show that problems exist on both sides of the ocean.
Why should I be penalized just because some retard either can't figure out how to turn his phone to vibrate or thinks everyone should hear Mozart's "Ode to the Piezoeletric Buzzer"?
...
You get penalized for the same reason other decent people do because they do the decent thing:
- You pay higher insurance because there are uninsured drivers
- You pay higher taxes because you need a police force because there are criminals out there
- You pay higher taxes because some people don't pay their share
- You die younger because other people smoke
- You die younger because of pollution
- In Singapore, you can't buy gum because a small number of dickwads used to spit their's on the sidewalk. (I imagine there are similar statutes closer to home but none come to mind)
... and so on
It sucks. It would be nice if some of these things got rolled back once society got the message but that unfortunately rarelh happens.
Canadian politcs has always been dominated by the right wing Progressive Conservative party (PC) and the usually-left wing Liberals. In 1986, the very conservative Reform Party of Canada came out of nowhere. By 93, they had taken so much support from the PCs that the liberals were completely unchallenged til just this year's elections when the two parties merged - with a Reform Party member as leader.
Now a *5th* party is picking up on the left -- the Greens. In the 2004 elections, they received enough votes to qualify for federal funding. This is huge. Apart from the cash, this will make it harder for them to be denied a place in debates and in news stories et al.
In a few more election cycles, the Greens may even gain official status, particularly given the frequency of elections being won by voting against very unpopular leaders.
It's a shame Reform and the PCs merged. Strong alternatives on both the left and the right would have made for something resembling a true democracy. (The other parties are the "New Democratic Party" just now coming back from the dead and the Bloc Quebecois, the Quebec separatist party).
Time to update my resume.
Try this http://www.snpp.com/guides/springfield.list.html
I see you've only got basic cable.
it'll always be new to someone
:) ):
True. Even the type that Slashdot attracts can't read everything posted here. As a community service, here's some more news, should a reader have missed it the first 10**6 times around (
- holy cr*p. A meteor's going to smash into the Earth
- Bill Gates and anyone who looks like him is evil, evil, evil
- in Soviet Russia, the tin foil hat wears you
- there's a floating point bug in the Pentium processor
- Google's issuing an IPO
- Perl is illegible line-noise
- Python is for weenies
Hope I didn't miss anything.
If this doesn't get me some karma. I don't know what will.
Doesn't this get posted here about every 2 months?
Enough already. The web site's been out there for ~ 3 years now.
The fact is, we need ***cheap*** oil to power a transition to alternative energy.
If the oil's cheap, efforts to transition away from it will be marginalized. The 2nd biggest field in the world went from control by a west-hating madman to direct control by the US yet prices still shoot up. And those SUVs keep selling.
The quote in the article about the "hard commercial decision" was about Kurdistan. If there ever is a Kurdistan, then they can make a Kurdistan edition.
Imagine the trouble the employees would be in if they tried to sell a Kurdistan version in Turkey (or Syria or Iran - *maybe* it would fly in Iraq now).
There's some huge provinces in China, in area, population and economics too. Let's start naming them off.
In my travels, I've run into far too many Amreicans that mixed up Sweden and Switzerland or Austria and Australia. This is way, way worse than not knowing where Florida or Wales is. They're not completely alone doing that, but almost.
My favorite quote: 2 fresh USC grads - "Toronto? Where's that? Canada? Is it near Calgary?" (This was just afther the Calgary Olympics).
No, that's not what I meant. But thanks for the friendly response. I was trying to point out that there would be a small number of people offended which is a differing point of view from that implied by the parent. I didn't say it was okay.
# of Japanese that know what the term "Jap" means *
# of Japanese that will ever hear of "JAP" *
# that are actually offended = a real small number (probably)
After all, that story about Woody the Internet Pecker is true, isn't it?
There are 2 main problems with the V-chip. As you said, the ratings are pretty weird sometimes. PBS documentaries and news get zapped a lot ?!?!
The biggest problem, though, is that commercials aren't rated. It's amazing the stuff that appears in commercials even between 8 am and 5pm. Extremely violent commercials pop up in the middle of some pretty innocent shows.
Either I don't understand something but Python has some of the things you say it doesn't:
- class methods - you need to morph the method with classmethod(). Yes, it's terribly awkward. There's discussion
on ways to improve this.
- class variables - they've been around for quite a while (sorry, can't get the indentation to show)
class MyClass( object ):
aClassVariable = 36
def SomeFunc( self ):
print "The class variable is " + str(self.__class__.aClassVariable)
- Python's got private members (via leading "__"). Protected is a leading "_" by convention only (although I think
some forms of import respect it). (You probably knew that one -- just making sure).
- something like strict would be nice. Until then, pychecker will fix you up (http://pychecker.sourceforge.net/). It's basically
a lint for Python. Extremely helpful.
I used to think that checked exceptions were a natural progression but they can be such a pain in practice.
"computers (at least PCs) aren't a high-tech industry anymore"
Do you mean the PC as a whole or the PC and what goes into it?
CPUs are having great difficulties going to 90 nanometer chips. Hard drive makers are being forced to increase platter count (which significantly increases price) to keep increasing capacity as increasing areal density is getting really tough.
Sounds pretty high tech to me. It's a shame the tremendous engineering effort results in such tiny margins.
I would have hard time hiring someone fresh out of a Japanese university over someone fresh from an American one -- at least a good student. It's true that they spend, or at least spent, more hours studying in high school but University in Japan is widely considered the holiday between the grueling high school and work years. Companies train new employees because they know it's necessary. It's not such a big deal because its amortized over a lifetime career. They also expect little real results in the first several years.
Also, mimicking Asian high school strain is a double-edged sword. When I was in high school, it was completely obvious that we were being taught too slowly. I don't know if that's changed but the amount of homework sure has. A lot of what I see now is homework for homework's sake with no particular value. Stealing the youth from the next generation will not help. Nor will burning them out in their 20s instead of in their 40s like their parents.
As far as clean uniforms etc is concerned, the Japanese respect for the service industry is *way* higher than in the US. This avoids the disenchantment you see in the US. More importantly, IMO, is that *appearance* is all too important in Japan. At McDonalds, that means clean uniforms. At a company, it means staying late even if you don't do anything, rushing between offices even if there's no reason to hurry and coming in on Sunday but just washing your car. (I've witnessed all of these). The McDonalds customers benefit from this. Industry and tech companies suffer.
"we will be running headlong into a police state"?
/. has scary stories like this. Yesterday's was "Thirty-Three States Contributed to the MATRIX".
We already are running headlong into a police state.
Almost everyday
Almost 15 years ago, a friend urged me to learn Perl saying that "I would be a better programmer for it". So I did and he was absolutely right. I ate the language up. I couldn't get enough of it. I wrote thousands and thousands of lines of code. I knew the language pretty much upside down.
I greeted Perl 5 with great anticipation. Object oriented, powerful data structures, modularity. But something wasn't right. I could still do the Perl 4-style coding but it felt wrong. Before Perl 5, simulating complex data structures with arrays was fine. In Perl 5, these were supported directly so I wanted to use them. And I wanted to love them. My code typically uses data structures heavily to manage the complexity. But I never got it. Simple things were fine but any task that ended up being more than a few pages (not in one giant function, BTW) started getting rougher. If I wrote Perl day in and day out, it would have been different, I'm sure. But that shouldn't be necessary. Normally I would code a few hours a week with the occassional larger task. Given my significant experience with Perl 4, my desire and my talent, that should have been enough.
I languished wondering if Perl had gone wrong or if I just couldn't cut it. Like others have said, I too would hate having to go back to my own Perl code. I write extemely clear code. My coding and commenting style is first rate. (I attribute quite a bit of this, now, to knowing the frustration of reading my own Perl 5 code).
Then I got a new job. They use Python. And it all clicked in almost no time flat. There are things I don't like about Python to be sure but the code just flows. The OOP doesn't feel like it was plopped on top. I can jump into my own code from a year earlier with next to no effort. I can write code for very complicated problems and the language doesn't get in my way. I CAN READ OTHER PEOPLE'S CODE with next to no effort. I can code stuff up with the ease I did in Perl 4 but with the power I know is in Perl 5 but was not able to use. Some of this is just age/experience but it's more than that. I'm not one of those Perl-dissing Python coders. That's not the point.
History will look on Perl as one of the most important computer languages of the first 50 years of coding. But Perl 5, at least, doesn't have what it takes in 2004. I look forward to Perl 6. I truly hope they can do it again.