Cat behavior modification story
on
Water Guns
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· Score: 4
Neighbor cat used to get on the fence and yowl at our cats something fierce. I kept a super soaker handy but he always ran away when he saw me coming. One day, his luck changed. He had made the mistake of getting too close to our cat on the fence, and when I came out, he didn't dare turn tail or he would have lost face with our cat, so he stood his ground while I got closer and closer. It was a very satisfying march to the fence once I realized this. His yowl got a bit higher in pitch as panic set in. I unloaded on him from about 5 feet away, a good hard super soaking. He never bothered our cats again. A truly satisfying day!
I think; been 35 years since I read them! But if memory serves, it seemed the most believable, in merely requiring heating and expanding the cannon to pull the concrete plug. The others were more fun, in some ways, but seemed to require a bit more suspension of belief.
Aviation Leak reported sometime in the last several years that Lockheed and someone else both had projects using reflections from commercial radio stations to detect stealth aircraft. They were in a cheap demo phase and worked.
You are so euro-centric it's not even laughable. As the article said, those who claim Unicode good enough for the masses are the same foreigners who would scream and howl if someone tried to remove redundacies from the English language such as pork and ham, or argue and dispute, or...
I have read that an English language vocabulary of 300 words is good enough for most ordinary conversation. You are claiming the equivalent is good enough for ordinary use. You are mistaken.
Unicode is a classic case of (western) imperialism, in which the imperialists are completely blinded as to why it is imperialistic, and continue to mutter "it's good enough, and we know what's good for you smelly foreigners."
How about Germans suing Disney for Cinderella? Would Disney then blame it on the brothers Grimm?
Will Americans sue Mark Twain's heirs for not asking permission?
Will Jews sue Christians for Jewish heritage in the Bible?
How about anyone who has ever had a newspaper article written about them? Go sue the newspaper!
And my favorite: my name, my financial records, my address, all that info -- seems to be my IP, eh? Except of course my name, which is part my parents' IP, and grandparents, etc. And the street name, which is the heritage of not only the guy it was named after, but everybody else living on it. And the city name, state, country, etc.
I don't see how any of these are anything more than just the next step in pushing IP ownership. Pretty soon all info will be so tightly controlled, no one will be able to speak or write without violating somebody's IP, and in most cases, the true ownership will be so hard to pin down, there will be a zillion people suing each other as to who actually owns the IP! I imagine we will have to put royalties into escrow accounts until that's settled.
I say let's go for it, get IP rights so twisted they will have to be thrown out altogether.
Semi-seriously, it would be verrrry interesting if some leftie were to sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act as if left-handedness were a disability....
Patrick specified a file size, and Mike generated a file of that specified size. Mike did not include any OS filesystem overhead in his file size. It seems rather hypocritial of Mike to claim OS file system overhead counts for Patrick's files but not Mike's. Mike defined FILE SIZE, not DISK SPACE USED.
Lockheed has already spent $400 million. They estimate it would cost another $400 million to finish it. What they want right now is for NASA to spend $15 million to keep the project going while the air force looks into taking it over.
I say that if Lockheed really thought that would happen, they'd front the $15 million themselves. Since they are spending their energies trying to get NASA to pay it, they must not have much confidence in the air force coming thru.
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Back in the good ole punch card days...
on
Vote in 5K Contest
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· Score: 2
...on an IBM 1620 decimal machine (made in late 1950s), I had 120 digits of instructions on a single 80 column card (which could be run as a boot loader card directly from the card reader). Overlapping instructions, donchaknow. Printed out THIMK over and over on the system console, one sense switch changed the speed, another halted it. The M in THIMK was the halt instruction, which is why it wasn't THINK. Think was of course the IBM (pseudo?) motto of the times.
You may be thinking of the V-22's limitation that it can't land in airplane mode because the rotors are so big they would strike the ground.
No, the articles I have read specifically said autorotate. It was my naive read-between-the-lines guess that maybe they meant the rotor diameter was so small for the weight that the autorotation speed would be so high as to make it effectively incapable of autorotation. Remember, the rotor diameter is artificially small for its weight because it has to be able to land on a carrier. Presumably they compensate for this by making them spin faster.
It's my understanding that the rotor size, dictated by the need to fit on carrier decks, prevents autorotation. I don't know enough aerodynamics to know why that is. But I believe it cannot autorotate.
What state are you in (other than paranoia or confusion)? Perhaps you would prefer to only get YRO info for that particular state. Or to help you even further, maybe just the county or city or block, or, let's face it, what you really want, and need, your very own little room, forget evrything outside it.
Me, last time I checked, I'm a human, not a bigot robot like yourself. I appreciate news from around the world.
I believe the hangup is not the line count of the patches, but how many topics they cover. When one patch touches a lot of different areas, it's hard to tell exactly what it does, it's impossible to back out just part in case something fails, and there's more potential for conflict with other patches.
Linus has mde it pretty clear he wants one patch for one problem, not one patch for many problems.
Grass Valley Group, who manufacture lots of TV equipment, are in Grass Valley. They were bought up by Tektronics, then I think spun off again. Haven't kept track of them for several years; they were doing HDTV work last time I visited a friend who worked there. These could well be some engineers doing their own work, or a spin off, or...
You have to compare (time to thrash thru bad code) with (time to rewrite + glide thru good code). Suppose it will take two months to rewrite cleanly; in two months, you will not move forward at all, but you will have a very clean base. From then on, progress will be twice as fast as using the old ugly code. Here it appears that 3 months is the breakeven time.
You also have to look at time to market. If your competitors will get to market in two months, then maybe it's better to get there at the same time with ugly code, rather than be a month later, even tho the later code could be enhanced and maintained much better than the competition.
Best you can do is work out the estimates, throw in priorities and market considerations, and take your best shot.
Try various degrees of cleanup. Maybe a moderate cleanup will take 2 weeks and double your efficiency. Maybe a thorough cleanuop will take two months but only quadruple your efficiency. Maybe you do the simple cleanup now, the fancy one six months later.
Compare it to freeway vs city streets. For short trips, the extra overhead of getting to and from the freeway doesn't make up for the longer travel time. Sometimes fast city streets are a good compromise between freeway and slow streets.
Let's see.... wholesale electrical prices have gone up by a factor of 15 (FIFTEEN!) times. I can't think of too many causes of that outside of pure supply and demand GREED. Let's see. Suppose your utility jumped on the greed bandwagon and sold X units at only 10 times normal. I would hazard a mathematical guess that if you got paid for only 1/10 of that amount, you would break even. And I betcha did get paid for more than 1/10. In other words, you made out like the bandits you are.
I have no problems with capitalism, supply and demand, the marketplace, etc. But when pure greed gets rewarded by said marketplace driving a utility into bankruptcy...sounds like justice!
For personal projects, I change the first number when the external protocol changes, the third number for piddling around, and the second number when I clean up enough internal stuff to start a new stretch of piddling around.
I've used CVS a lot, but never in big projects. I was told I had to use clearcase once, and the sysadmin botched the install so bad I dumped it and they backed off when I threatened to quit. (I was on a separate project with only a few programmers who were all happy with CVS, so the rest of the dev staff could use punched cards and it wouldn't have bothered us.)
For what it's worth, I understand one big difference is that clearcase automates things like tracking the compiler and lib versions, so you could go back a long long ways to reproduce a really old version byte for byte. Another difference is that it eliminates dup copies of source and object files among the staff, potentially saving space and time. How well this works in practice, I don't know, and I've never felt any need for it.
The other comment about needing more sysadmin work is certainly true. In addition to the loon who clobbered my system with the bad install (Sun OS, early 90s), a different sysadmin, purportedly her boss, twice erased the entire clearcase repository. Apparently it was too tricky for the average bear. I see that as two strikes against clearcase just from the point of not being very maintainable, and hope to never see it again.
CVS is good. Text files you can edit in an emergency or just in readonly mode to see when things happened, as opposed to SCCS, and it is just plain good. Be happy with CVS. Your repository is valuable -- don't give up control.
you can't seriously expect Microsoft to think about what is fair, honest and chivalrous to their competitors
I beg to differ. This anti-trust case has been about precisely that! Microsoft has always run their business with the specific intent of destroying their competitors. Look at their constant incompatible Word upgrades, the way they reported fake errors for DR-DOS, and on and on. I will admit the author is proposing the opposite action from what Microsoft has done historically, but the observations which cause those actions have always been there.
Whether or not the anti-trust case is useful / needed / evil is a different matter altogether.
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Neighbor cat used to get on the fence and yowl at our cats something fierce. I kept a super soaker handy but he always ran away when he saw me coming. One day, his luck changed. He had made the mistake of getting too close to our cat on the fence, and when I came out, he didn't dare turn tail or he would have lost face with our cat, so he stood his ground while I got closer and closer. It was a very satisfying march to the fence once I realized this. His yowl got a bit higher in pitch as panic set in. I unloaded on him from about 5 feet away, a good hard super soaking. He never bothered our cats again. A truly satisfying day!
--
I think; been 35 years since I read them! But if memory serves, it seemed the most believable, in merely requiring heating and expanding the cannon to pull the concrete plug. The others were more fun, in some ways, but seemed to require a bit more suspension of belief.
--
Aviation Leak reported sometime in the last several years that Lockheed and someone else both had projects using reflections from commercial radio stations to detect stealth aircraft. They were in a cheap demo phase and worked.
--
You are so euro-centric it's not even laughable. As the article said, those who claim Unicode good enough for the masses are the same foreigners who would scream and howl if someone tried to remove redundacies from the English language such as pork and ham, or argue and dispute, or ...
I have read that an English language vocabulary of 300 words is good enough for most ordinary conversation. You are claiming the equivalent is good enough for ordinary use. You are mistaken.
Unicode is a classic case of (western) imperialism, in which the imperialists are completely blinded as to why it is imperialistic, and continue to mutter "it's good enough, and we know what's good for you smelly foreigners."
--
So we can have Disney sued by both the Germans and French.
--
How about Germans suing Disney for Cinderella? Would Disney then blame it on the brothers Grimm?
Will Americans sue Mark Twain's heirs for not asking permission?
Will Jews sue Christians for Jewish heritage in the Bible?
How about anyone who has ever had a newspaper article written about them? Go sue the newspaper!
And my favorite: my name, my financial records, my address, all that info -- seems to be my IP, eh? Except of course my name, which is part my parents' IP, and grandparents, etc. And the street name, which is the heritage of not only the guy it was named after, but everybody else living on it. And the city name, state, country, etc.
I don't see how any of these are anything more than just the next step in pushing IP ownership. Pretty soon all info will be so tightly controlled, no one will be able to speak or write without violating somebody's IP, and in most cases, the true ownership will be so hard to pin down, there will be a zillion people suing each other as to who actually owns the IP! I imagine we will have to put royalties into escrow accounts until that's settled.
I say let's go for it, get IP rights so twisted they will have to be thrown out altogether.
--
Semi-seriously, it would be verrrry interesting if some leftie were to sue under the Americans with Disabilities Act as if left-handedness were a disability....
--
Patrick specified a file size, and Mike generated a file of that specified size. Mike did not include any OS filesystem overhead in his file size. It seems rather hypocritial of Mike to claim OS file system overhead counts for Patrick's files but not Mike's. Mike defined FILE SIZE, not DISK SPACE USED.
--
The man-portable generator would power laser-range finders and heads-up displays used by soldiers in the future
...will allow the soldier to be aware of their location, as well as that of fellow soldiers
says the legend on a picture of a soldier with rifle.
The lead sentence says
When 21st century soldiers suit up for the battlefield
More quotes:
The increased power density would allow soldiers to either reduce their load or greatly extend their missions
By then, we expect infantry soldiers to use a variety of electronic gear
Did you read the article?
--
Lockheed has already spent $400 million. They estimate it would cost another $400 million to finish it. What they want right now is for NASA to spend $15 million to keep the project going while the air force looks into taking it over.
I say that if Lockheed really thought that would happen, they'd front the $15 million themselves. Since they are spending their energies trying to get NASA to pay it, they must not have much confidence in the air force coming thru.
--
...on an IBM 1620 decimal machine (made in late 1950s), I had 120 digits of instructions on a single 80 column card (which could be run as a boot loader card directly from the card reader). Overlapping instructions, donchaknow. Printed out THIMK over and over on the system console, one sense switch changed the speed, another halted it. The M in THIMK was the halt instruction, which is why it wasn't THINK. Think was of course the IBM (pseudo?) motto of the times.
--
You may be thinking of the V-22's limitation that it can't land in airplane mode because the rotors are so big they would strike the ground.
No, the articles I have read specifically said autorotate. It was my naive read-between-the-lines guess that maybe they meant the rotor diameter was so small for the weight that the autorotation speed would be so high as to make it effectively incapable of autorotation. Remember, the rotor diameter is artificially small for its weight because it has to be able to land on a carrier. Presumably they compensate for this by making them spin faster.
--
It's my understanding that the rotor size, dictated by the need to fit on carrier decks, prevents autorotation. I don't know enough aerodynamics to know why that is. But I believe it cannot autorotate.
--
I actually believe we have better interoperability today than any other OS out there.
With an answer like this to the very first question, it's hard to take any of his answers seriously.
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What state are you in (other than paranoia or confusion)? Perhaps you would prefer to only get YRO info for that particular state. Or to help you even further, maybe just the county or city or block, or, let's face it, what you really want, and need, your very own little room, forget evrything outside it.
Me, last time I checked, I'm a human, not a bigot robot like yourself. I appreciate news from around the world.
--
Or else they wouldn't be right.
Right?
--
I believe the hangup is not the line count of the patches, but how many topics they cover. When one patch touches a lot of different areas, it's hard to tell exactly what it does, it's impossible to back out just part in case something fails, and there's more potential for conflict with other patches.
Linus has mde it pretty clear he wants one patch for one problem, not one patch for many problems.
--
I couldn't read it either. If I had moderator points I'd give em to you.
--
Grass Valley Group, who manufacture lots of TV equipment, are in Grass Valley. They were bought up by Tektronics, then I think spun off again. Haven't kept track of them for several years; they were doing HDTV work last time I visited a friend who worked there. These could well be some engineers doing their own work, or a spin off, or ...
--
You have to compare (time to thrash thru bad code) with (time to rewrite + glide thru good code). Suppose it will take two months to rewrite cleanly; in two months, you will not move forward at all, but you will have a very clean base. From then on, progress will be twice as fast as using the old ugly code. Here it appears that 3 months is the breakeven time.
You also have to look at time to market. If your competitors will get to market in two months, then maybe it's better to get there at the same time with ugly code, rather than be a month later, even tho the later code could be enhanced and maintained much better than the competition.
Best you can do is work out the estimates, throw in priorities and market considerations, and take your best shot.
Try various degrees of cleanup. Maybe a moderate cleanup will take 2 weeks and double your efficiency. Maybe a thorough cleanuop will take two months but only quadruple your efficiency. Maybe you do the simple cleanup now, the fancy one six months later.
Compare it to freeway vs city streets. For short trips, the extra overhead of getting to and from the freeway doesn't make up for the longer travel time. Sometimes fast city streets are a good compromise between freeway and slow streets.
--
Let's see.... wholesale electrical prices have gone up by a factor of 15 (FIFTEEN!) times. I can't think of too many causes of that outside of pure supply and demand GREED. Let's see. Suppose your utility jumped on the greed bandwagon and sold X units at only 10 times normal. I would hazard a mathematical guess that if you got paid for only 1/10 of that amount, you would break even. And I betcha did get paid for more than 1/10. In other words, you made out like the bandits you are.
I have no problems with capitalism, supply and demand, the marketplace, etc. But when pure greed gets rewarded by said marketplace driving a utility into bankruptcy...sounds like justice!
Gosh my heart bleeds for you scumbags.
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Yah
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For personal projects, I change the first number when the external protocol changes, the third number for piddling around, and the second number when I clean up enough internal stuff to start a new stretch of piddling around.
--
I've used CVS a lot, but never in big projects. I was told I had to use clearcase once, and the sysadmin botched the install so bad I dumped it and they backed off when I threatened to quit. (I was on a separate project with only a few programmers who were all happy with CVS, so the rest of the dev staff could use punched cards and it wouldn't have bothered us.)
For what it's worth, I understand one big difference is that clearcase automates things like tracking the compiler and lib versions, so you could go back a long long ways to reproduce a really old version byte for byte. Another difference is that it eliminates dup copies of source and object files among the staff, potentially saving space and time. How well this works in practice, I don't know, and I've never felt any need for it.
The other comment about needing more sysadmin work is certainly true. In addition to the loon who clobbered my system with the bad install (Sun OS, early 90s), a different sysadmin, purportedly her boss, twice erased the entire clearcase repository. Apparently it was too tricky for the average bear. I see that as two strikes against clearcase just from the point of not being very maintainable, and hope to never see it again.
CVS is good. Text files you can edit in an emergency or just in readonly mode to see when things happened, as opposed to SCCS, and it is just plain good. Be happy with CVS. Your repository is valuable -- don't give up control.
--
Wait just a sec here...
you can't seriously expect Microsoft to think about what is fair, honest and chivalrous to their competitors
I beg to differ. This anti-trust case has been about precisely that! Microsoft has always run their business with the specific intent of destroying their competitors. Look at their constant incompatible Word upgrades, the way they reported fake errors for DR-DOS, and on and on. I will admit the author is proposing the opposite action from what Microsoft has done historically, but the observations which cause those actions have always been there.
Whether or not the anti-trust case is useful / needed / evil is a different matter altogether.
--